Hallelujah
by Philip Hassey
Second grade Sunday school was good. I really enjoyed it then. At the First
Congregational Church in Hopkinton, all things were done to make Sunday school something that
the kids would enjoy. I looked forward to Sunday each week because of it, because each week we
got to do a neat art project. Our teacher, Mrs. Eagen was a retired art teacher, so she had lots of
time to come up with fascinating art projects.
On this particular Sunday, several weeks before Christmas, we made baby-Jesus-in-a-
manger projects. Looking back, I can see that Mrs. Eagen must have spent hours preparing for
this project. Each of the eight of us in the class got a hard-boiled egg, a chunk of cotton, and a
manger. Each manger was a work of art alone, and she had carefully crafted them all herself. The
mangers looked like the mangers you'd see in a story book, only better: the finest cedar, stained,
polished and assembled to look just like the birthplace of Jesus. All we had to do was put the
cotton in the manger, and put the egg in the cotton. For the rest of the time, she had us draw faces
on the eggs with markers and crayons. We sang Away in a Manger, and a few other Christmas
classics of the time, and then the class was over.
After class, a few of the other guys and I headed up the stairs to the balcony for the church
service. We walked in just as the praise band was beginning their set of songs, so we all walked to
the front of the balcony and looked down. A rather large woman whose arms were bigger and
fatter than my whole body was really getting into the music. Waving her hands in the air, she was
belting out the praise songs with all her might, and considering her size, she definitely had a lot of
might to back it all up. Sitting down, we all put our baby-Jesus-egg projects down on the shelf-like
balcony railing.
My best friend Dan was sitting to the right of me, fidgeting around in his pockets looking
for his offering.
"How much offering you got this week?" I asked.
"Two nickels," he said proudly as he showed me his offering,
Justin looked over at Dan's offering, bumping him in the process.
"Ow!" squealed Dan, dropping his two nickels down on the floor.
"Don't worry, I got them," I bent over and picked up the nickels, and quickly brought my
head into sharp contact with the communion cup holders. "Ow!" I squealed rather loudly, and shut
my eyes, and waved my arms around for a few seconds as I stood up, and smacked right into
Justin's baby Jesus egg. Down it fell.
Realizing I had just hit one of them over the edge, the rest of the guys all jumped up to see
where it went. We all peered over, to see the egg shoot straight down the fat woman's dress. She
sort of jumped, and I think she shouted out Hallelujah, but then she went right on praising away.
I think she probably figured it was the spirit or something, but who knows?
