THE VISITATION
Jeffrey Ford
FROM sunrise on the day of Christmas Eve to sundown on the day after Christmas, if a stranger comes to your door seeking shelter and assistance, you are compelled to help them. There is a moral prerogative to offer aid all year long, but on the three days mentioned, doing so could very well save your life. As in the biblical story of Sodom, sometimes the strangers aren’t lost souls but angels operating in secret on a mission from heaven, testing your charity, your humanity, your spirituality. These are the Angels of Accord. If you act with generosity toward them in their indigent disguise, they will shower you and your family with grace and wealth.
On the other hand, whatever amount of negativity you feel in relation to helping the stranger, that amount of negativity—no more, nor less—will fall back upon you. Supposedly, there are those who, when tested, died as a result of their lack of charity. At the very least, things can go terribly wrong and a darkness might swallow your life. It is said that the belief and practice of what was called by old timers Heimsuchung, or “Visitation,” originated in those areas of Northern Germany where small groups of Vikings had settled. Before being assimilated by a Christian splinter group, transformed into a story of angels and Christ’s reward and revenge, the holiday practice began back in pre-history, in the age of Odin, a sleek creature of an idea of natural community that leaped out of the forest and mated with human imagination.
A belief in the Visitation, though not very popular even in the old country, somehow smuggled itself among the Amish and Mennonites voyaging to the New World on the Charming Nancy in 1736. There was a handful of the sect known as the Church of the Angels of Accord—bible-centric beliefs with a few appropriated folk beliefs disguised in Christian trappings. The supposed impetus for Christ’s test of the faithful is the fact that his parents were denied any shelter or kindness in the events leading up to his birth. They tried for lodging everywhere, but were turned away, and had to settle for their child, Son of the Living God, being born in a manger, with a bed of straw and animal attendants.
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