There is a place I see often in my mind. In the summer heat, the grass is brown, but in the just-after-snow melt the green grass grows until it reaches high enough to wave in the wind. The winter is brutally cold. In this place several hundred people of all ages were killed. Their names are there. I often walk there. Sometimes I take off my shoes to feel the earth; when no one else is there, I lie down and listen for the grace of God.

In another place, I found a river stone shaped like a human foot. Then I found another. On them I painted a pair of moccasins. Two became a hundred, and then two hundred. I turned some stones to pairs of moccasins and some to bare feet. They became icons of footprints left by men, women, children, and even infants. Each set is different, as is each name. On the field of grass, I laid out hundreds of pairs of rocks. Whether painted with moccasins of differing colors or bare feet wrapped in cloth, it is the footprints of the babies that I remember the most.

Having seen the star, having been offered the grace, Herod the Great, the institution, makes a different choice.

Howard Thurman would remind us that all institutions will act in their own best interest, and that as queasy as it may make us, the church is also an institution. We face difficult moments where, when standing in the light of the character of God, we see within ourselves the calcification of our own spirits, spirits which have confused religious certainty with humility.

God leads Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus not through the institutional doors but out the back door in the dark of night, on a dead run, into a place of anonymity—until it is time.