A Star Above the Sink
I walked away from being a Christian minister. I didn’t walk away lightly.
I left abruptly but in my heart, I backed out slowly, over years, like someone leaving a crowded room where the conversation turned mean.
I left because of history and because of harm—because so much blood has been spilled under banners of “truth,” and because, in the end, choosing my own integrity cost me my entire family of origin. I left because I could no longer reconcile the story with what people kept doing in its name. That’s the short version. The long version would take another book.
For decades, the name “Jesus” mostly tasted like loss and control to me. Thanks to Joseph Campbell, I shifted my focus to myth, to metaphor, to the power of stories themselves. I decided: if anything was sacred, it wasn’t doctrine—it was the human capacity to tell stories that lift us, warn us, comfort us, or wake us up.
Then one afternoon, 50 years after my exodus, a handyman changed my mind in a way I didn’t see coming.
I’d called for help with a complex and immediate plumbing problem. A man in his forties showed up, rearranged his schedule to squeeze me in, and made a point of saying he was glad to help an older gentleman because his faith in Jesus asked that of him. I thanked him, he went to work, and way down in the basement of my brain I heard an old familiar phrase rise up:
“Thank you, Jesus.”
At first I heard it like an echo from another life—a reflex from my religious past. But later, sitting with it, I realized a fresh perspective had arisen (maybe like Jesus himself…): whatever I believe or don’t believe about the historical Jesus, the idea of Jesus had just walked into my house in work boots and a tool belt and shown up for me in a very direct, concrete way.
Not as a miracle. As a myth that still moves people to kindness.
That was a strange kind of reckoning. For the first time in fifty years, saying “Thank you, Jesus” didn’t feel like surrendering my mind. It felt like acknowledging a simple fact: this story I stepped away from still sends people out into the world trying to do good. The myth has hands. It fixes pipes. It carries wrenches. It rearranges workdays to help old songwriters.
I still don’t mistake myth for history, and I still carry a deep mistrust of any religion that uses its stories as weapons. But I’m learning to hold a more complicated truth: a story can be both dangerous and beautiful, both misused and meaningful, depending on whose hands it’s in.
I wrote Star of Bethlehem during a season in my life when I was actively studying storytelling. I’d reached the part of the curriculum that talked about biblical narratives—the arcs inside parables and the old familiar stories. Having been a minister in my youth, that lit something up in me. I remembered the fire of my younger devotion: learning how to speak from the platform, immersing myself in parables, prophecy, and the poetry of belief. By eighteen, I was a ministerial servant in the Chickasha, Oklahoma congregation. I took that role seriously. My heart wanted to do right by people, to help, to share something meaningful.
So when I sat down to write what was supposed to be a simple exercise in structure and “arc,” something deeper stirred: a memory of belief and celebration. I began to imagine a story that could echo the sacred without being bound by doctrine. Star of Bethlehem was born of that intersection—an exercise that grew into a quiet little myth of its own. Over the years I’ve revised and reshaped it until it feels almost timeless to me.
Now I hear it as a gentle myth inside the larger myth: a simple tale about an old widow whose small act of kindness becomes a guiding light.
Whether you hear it as history, metaphor, or just a winter story that warms the bones, I offer it in that spirit—a little star hanging over a very human table, shining on ordinary love.
Star of Bethlehem
[Verse 1]
On a cold and winter day
Came a widow old and gray
Giving shelter to a couple passing by
Then she set for them a feast
Fit for king and for priest
Knowing now her larder would be dry

[Verse 2]
Then Joseph lit a fire
While Mary strummed the lyre
The widow spoke of prophecies at hand
She sang for them a song
Of a king that soon would come
With a love so deep we’ve yet to comprehend

[Verse 3]
Tired and with child
Mary forced a frightened smile
A glint of knowing filled the widow’s eye
She packed them food to go
Then they set out on the road
And tenderly she kissed them both goodbye

[Chorus]
She sang for them a song
Of a king that soon would come
With a love so deep we’ve yet to comprehend

[Verse 4]
And I heard the wise men say
That the widow died the day
Of a night the king was born in Bethlehem

[Verse 5]
And they said above the road
Was her bright and shining soul
A star that led them all to worship him

And now on every Christmas night
You can see her shining bright
A star above the hills of Bethlehem

[Chorus]
And she’ll sing for you a song
Of a king that soon would come
With a love so deep we’ve yet to comprehend

[Outro]
A star above the hills of Bethlehem
Yes she’s a star above the hills of Bethlehem