Ordinary Saints by Georgia Green Stamper

Editor's note: In 2004, Georgia Green Stamper wrote "Shepherds in Bathrobes", a piece that has been heard on NPR and reprinted many times. This year she returned to the same little church -- and this new reflection felt like the natural continuation of that story. For that reason, Sweet Owen published these two essays back-to-back.

Georgia Green Stamper is a southern writer, speaker, and teacher whom grew up right here in Owen County on a tobacco farm. Her third book of essays, "Small Acreages", is now available.

It’s December again, and my old brain is searching for yet another Christmas story to share. I wrote my first one, “Shepherds in Bathrobes,” about 2004 for my then new column in The Owen County News-Herald. I have written one, sometimes two, every year since, more recently for Sweet Owen magazine. Life, like the December holidays, however, has a way of circling back around.  2025 took me home to the New Columbus United Methodist Church, the setting for my first “Christmas story.” I found myself chatting with ghosts, telling them of the reach their voices have had. But let me begin at the beginning and tell you how this came to be.

Shortly before Christmas last year, our grandson and his fiancé asked if they could have their August wedding and reception at our Owen County farm at Natlee. I haven’t lived there in over a half century, but it’s my homeplace and has been in my fam

ily since the beginning of time. We maintain it as best absentee landowners can. Fortunately, our clan loves it as much as I do.

It had ever been the bride’s dream, she said, to have a simple outdoor wedding and garden-party reception. Our grandson, however, soon admitted that he’d dreamed of having a church wedding and seeing his bride walk down the aisle. I suggested a compromise. “If you have the reception at the farm, would you consider having the wedding ceremony itself at the small Methodist Church a mile or so away?”

“That church holds many memories for me,” I went on to tell them. “It’s where I worshiped with my parents from the beginning of my life until I left home. It’s where I was baptized. It’s where your grandfather and I were married a lifetime ago, and where we held my daddy’s funeral. It’s also where my maternal grandparents met, where several of my great-grandfathers preached, and where my ancestors worshiped long before the Civil War.”

I wanted them to grasp that this old church, like so many others of various denominations in this rural swathe of Kentucky, traces its beginnings back to the early 19^th century. This Methodist congregation, for example, was organized no later than 1830, possibly earlier, and it was a latecomer in that part of Owen County compared to Mountain Island Baptist founded in 1801 and Mussel Shoals Baptist in 1817. Like all old churches, it holds volumes of memories of who we were, and are, for any who would pause to pay attention.

But they are young and more interested in making new memories than in hearing mine. They interrupted me, saying, “Yes, please ask if we could have the wedding there.”

That’s how on a weekday afternoon last January, seeking permission for their summer wedding, I found myself standing in that beautiful old church talking to ghosts.

The church is indeed beautiful in the simple way that only old and lovingly maintained

buildings can be. The current structure dates to 1897, and though it has been updated with modern conveniences like restrooms, central heating and cooling, it looks much as it has always looked. Its high, tongue-and-groove wood ceiling remains unchanged. The original gracefully carved pews still line up in curved rows. The oak Gothic-Victorian style pulpit still stands on a raised platform circled by the handsome, sturdy altar rail. The arched stained-glass windows still tint the sunlight streaming in. The children won’t even have to decorate for their wedding here, I thought. Frou-frou would detract from the sanctuary’s timeworn, elegant bones .  

Although I have been in the church only a few times since my father’s funeral, every nook and cranny remained as familiar to me as the house I live in today. I felt my childhood legs sticking to the varnish on the pews – they took years to dry after the Missionary Society women spiffed them up for a summer revival. I could see Omar Carr’s cornucopia of garden produce spread across the altar at Thanksgiving like a Renaissance painting. I heard the voices and laughter and prayers of people long dead, the community who helped me become  – I even heard my own teenage fingers fumbling at the piano while the congregation sang the old hymns.   

And then I saw them, the shepherds and wise men standing on the raised platform at the front of the church in their bathrobes with towels wrapped around their heads like turbans. The angels were there, too, draped in bed sheets and wearing wings made of baling wire covered with crepe paper feathers.

“I told people about you,” I whispered.  “Of all the Christmas stories I’ve written, yours is the one that has gotten the most attention. It’s been heard on NPR and re-printed in anthologies. I’ve been asked to read it to groups hundreds of times. Why do you think your story has endured so?”

“Why do you think it has endured?” They answered in unison like an ancient Greek chorus as I had remembered their doing at that long-ago play rehearsal. In prior pageants, only a narrator’s voice had recited the familiar Christmas story, but that afternoon the director had surprised the cast by assigning individual lines. When Shepherd Number Two was asked to step forward, it became apparent that the mortified man could not read. That’s when the other men lifted their  conjoined voices immediately in a spontaneous act of mercy, reading his lines, and then, to ease his embarrassment even more, proceeded to read all their own together.

But now, their voices tested me.

“Why?” I stuttered. “Well – not because of my writing.”

No, if it endures, it’s because of the compassion of the men –  the grace and kindness extended without hesitation to Shepherd Number Two by farmers wearing bathrobes. It’s because of the humbleness of rural Kentuckians who could laugh at themselves wearing bathrobes in a play, but still don them, because it mattered.  It’s bec

ause these ordinary saints are the  best of who Christians can be, the best of who people of any faith can be, the best of what “good people” can be.

The grandchildren’s August wedding was beautiful, of course, another memory for the old church to hold close. As I turned to leave after the ceremony, however, only I heard the wise men and shepherds speaking in unison:  May the best of what we are – the true spirit of Christmas – endure generation after generation.