A real miracle (not on 34th Street)

Maybe I dreamed about the high school stage because I was preparing to take my grandfather to the staunchly conservative Academy’s latest play, Miracle on 34th Street— or as I’ve called it since someone made me watch the original 1947 movie as a kid, “Miracle on Thirty-Bore-th Street.” (My dad’s feelings are even stronger: “Bore-acle on Stick-a-Fork-in-My-Eye Street,” he calls it.)

For more than 60 years, no Christmas tale has wearied people of all ages more than Miracle on 34th Street (unless it’s that 1954 bore-fest, White Christmas, which at least has songs to break up the tedium).

But I knew I had to see my old high school’s production, and not just because some of my relatives were involved. You see, in an institution where the associated Swedenborgian theological school won’t accept women, where the community newsletter expressly refuses to refer to women ordained elsewhere as “reverend,” and where an obsession with Christian marriage (and its gender roles) reigns supreme, this was a Miracle with a major twist.

The directors cast a girl as Kris Kringle.

Virgins and chocolate bars

When I lived in the dorm on campus, ladies would call the residence director if they spotted one of us walking hand-in-hand with a boyfriend. “I didn’t know she was engaged,” the pointed inquiry went. We girls were subjected to sermons about “used goods,” and the girls’ anatomy class offered nothing in the way of the reproductive system beyond a video of childbirth. My peers in the boys’ school had a home room teacher who liked to tell his students to share a chocolate bar and then compare the half-eaten candy to girls who weren’t virgins.

This regime produced a few unintended outcomes. There was the unfortunate matter of the school’s dance program recitals, which in at least one recent year had a single boy among 40 or so girls. (You can only marvel at the force of the gender role indoctrination at work here: Only one boy in the entire school saw dance not as a threat to his masculinity but as a chance to endear himself to a bevy of girls).

And then there’s the growing “women in ministry” movement on the Academy’s very doorstep, flouting the spiritual and administrative rule of the Bryn Athyn New Church priests themselves, many of whom still claim that women are unfit to lead worship.

Equal opportunity Jesus

A few cracks have appeared in this stained-glass ceiling since I graduated. The role of the sleeping infant Jesus in Bryn Athyn’s annual Christmas pageant is now an equal opportunity one, in terms of both race and gender. Hey, in a church organization with leaders who opposed the inclusion of women on its administrative board into the very late 1980s, you take what you can get.

Among those in the church who resist America’s increasingly progressive culture, the fabled slippery slope is a constant concern. When I wrote a book advocating comprehensive sex education at the Academy, a minister asked me to lunch and grumbled that, next, I’d be advocating female priests.

As ministers everywhere tell us each year, Christmas provides an opportunity for new beginnings as Baby Jesus is born again in our hearts. But I never would have expected anything as radically new as a girl inside that bearded, padded Santa suit, wildly applauded on my alma mater’s stage. Grease the slope, reverends! If a girl can play St. Nick, what else is possible?

Dream come true

“I don’t understand,” my Great-Aunt Helga asked over cheese and crackers after the show. “Why couldn’t they have had a boy play the part? Weren’t any of the boys good enough?”

“Maybe she was just the best person to do it,” I replied.

As I read the program afterward, I noticed that last weekend’s dream may have contained a touch of prophecy. It turns out the Academy of the New Church’s spring 2014 show will be The Sound of Music, at the campus’s Mitchell Performing Arts Center. I’m sure a girl will play the Baroness. And unless the Academy borrows a page out of Curio Theatre Company’s book, it’s still at least a generation away from, say, a lesbian Liesl.

But for now, a tip of the Santa hat to my old school and its inclusive Christmas spirit.