Nick Jimenez

Sunday, December 24, 2000

A wonderful gift: memories for a lifetime

Irwin Dresch, my old pastor, was a man of the old school. He actually expected a church full of people to memorize the passages for the Christmas service.
   My boyhood church was essentially a one-room affair, with alcoves for Sunday school. Escuela Dominical was a missionary church, the result of donations by folks in Canada who believed that souls were to be saved in the poor neighborhoods on the westside of San Antonio. He was the only pastor we ever had.
   There were two big days in our church year: the annual church picnic and Christmas. The picnic only required that we be prepared to consume enormous numbers of hot dogs, followed by hours of trudging through San Antonio's zoo and then capped by sack races and a softball game. A weary time was had by all.
   But Christmas was always the bigger day. It was special because it was at night; we never had night services, probably something to do with getting the older folks out after dark. And "Mr. Dresch" (I never heard him referred to by any other name other than by his wife) never gave anyone an out. About two weeks before Christmas he would start to hand out the memorization passages.
   There were verses from the Bible and they were doled out in the best socialistic manner. The ones he felt could handle the longer verses got chapter and verse. The little kids got a verse or two. If you could do only Spanish, you got a verse in Spanish. If you were English only (the progress of generations from immigrant to second generation was long underway), you got a verse in English. But everybody got one, neatly typed out on small slips of paper.
   You could escape a lot of things - singing in the chorus, handing out the bags of apples and candy to the little kids - but you couldn't escape the verses.
   Come Christmas Eve night, we gathered, just as many faithful will gather tonight. And we were on.
   The strange thing is that now I have a hard time remembering what I had for lunch. But then we went before our congregation, filled with parents, husbands, wives, long-time friends, people whose family members we had helped bury and folks we had grown up with, and we recited our verses.
   Some stammered through them and we had our fair share of mumblers. Some folks were intent on getting through the thing and recited their verses at machine-gun pace and often with one breath. But the best were the older members who came from the school of declamation.
   Speech classes probably still teach that kind of formal address to an audience. Done in the majestic cadences from the old-school DeValera Spanish translation of the Bible, the readings sounded as if they were coming down from the mountaintop.
   Memory is an amazing thing. Images, words and smells lie dormant, ready to be recalled at the most off-chance trigger. Then all those pictures, those people flood back in waves we can't stop.
   I have gone to a lot of Christmas Eve services over the years. But those Christmas Eve services with Mr. Dresch remain the constant, perhaps because they were in my youth. It is in our youth when our layers of cynicism, caution and skepticism are the thinnest.
   Christmas is about the birth of a child. And it's about having the faith of a child that there really is good will toward men. Seen through our adult eyes, the message of Christmas is a hard one to believe: A baby in a faraway land born amidst squalor who brought love to the world?
   Mr. Dresch knew what he was doing. He was instilling those memories in all of us, giving us a gift to treasure for all our lives.
   (Nick Jimenez can be reached by phone at 886-3787 or by e-mail at jimenezn@caller.com.)
  
  

 
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