A Christmas parable from the past

As a former teenage magician, a magic mentor of mine once instructed me on the best way to perform a trick.

"You tell them what you're going to do. You do it. And then you tell them what you just did."

For some reason, that simple coaching has stuck to the deepening crevices of my mind during the decades. It is also good advice in these days of constant electronic distractions: Sometimes you must bang pots and pans to make a point and get peoples' attention.

So, that brings me to a story that I wrote up a couple of years ago here and published on Christmas Eve. You might remember it for its political incorrectness. By today's hypersensitive standards, the story may even be more odious.

The tale stuck with my wife since she heard it while growing up in Downers Grove in the 1970s. She told me about it and I looked it up. If you are in your 50s, I'll bet you recall hearing the Christmastime parable that anchorman Joel Daly told on Channel 7.

If you aren't old enough to remember back then, the narrative is even better read for the first time.

The story was about a man who didn't believe in Christmas.

It's not that the man had a hard heart, it's just that he'd given this a lot of thought, and the whole concept of an "all-mighty, all-powerful" God sending his Son to earth in the form of a man (and wasn't that convenient) just didn't make any sense at all.

If there really was a God, he thought, and he really was all-mighty and all-powerful, why would he do something like that? It just didn't make any sense. If God really did exist, couldn't he have just opened up the heavens himself and told us directly what he wanted us to know.

The whole "Jesus thing" was just too ridiculous and convoluted.

He had long ago decided that Jesus was just a fantasy created by mankind to give ourselves hope when there really wasn't any hope at all.

So, as another Christmas Eve arrived, the man did what he did every year -- he went out to a party. He arrived back home about 11:30 that night and it was snowing heavily when he went to bed.

All of a sudden there was a loud thump! He paused for a moment and then heard it again: Thump! Something was hitting the large plate-glass window facing out to his front yard.

Thinking that there might be some smart-aleck teenagers throwing snowballs at his window, the man rushed outside, intent on giving them a piece of his mind.

But as he made his way out the door and into the front yard, he immediately noticed two things: The first thing he noticed was that the snowfall had gotten much, much heavier; heavier in fact than he had ever seen in his entire life. Huge snowflakes were literally cascading down from above, and the night was alive with intense motion and yet eerily quiet at the same time.

The second thing he noticed was that there were no kids in his front yard throwing snowballs; instead, there was a flock of birds. Even as the man stood there watching, he suddenly saw two of the birds shoot away from the others and slam into the plate-glass window on the front of his house - thump!, thump! - hitting it so hard that their bodies fell dead to the ground below.

The man realized that the little birds were confused and frightened by the heavy, swirling snow. They could see inside his house to a place of light and shelter, and they were trying to get inside. But what they could never know was that no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to get in through the glass.

Thump! Thump! Thump! Three more sparrows slammed into the glass and fell lifeless to the ground.

The man quickly ran back inside and turned off all the lights, thinking that if the birds couldn't see inside they would stop killing themselves trying to get in. But the birds continued to fly into the glass.

Then he started shouting at the flock, but that didn't work either.

Helpless, the man stood there in the snowy cold and darkness, watching the sparrows die, one by one. With tears icing on his face he thought, "If only I could be a bird for just a few minutes ... I could talk to them in their own language. They wouldn't be afraid of me; they would understand me, and I could tell them what they needed to do to save themselves."

At that very moment, it was midnight and church bells throughout the town were ringing to usher in Christmas morning.

The man stood there considering what had happened and the words that he had just said to himself.

Suddenly, he understood.

God's plan to be one of us, for just a little while, didn't seem so far-fetched after all.

• Chuck Goudie, whose column appears Mondays, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by e-mail at chuckgoudie@gmail.com and followed at twitter.com/ChuckGoudie