The gaunt man.

Years ago, on a wet easter morning, I fond a fallen sparrow chick on the concrete floor of the garage. It was about a week old. The sparrow was twisted, small, deceased. Sometime during the night it had fallen, or been shoved by its siblings, from a disheveled nest in the eaves. My brothers and I buried the sparrow in a crayon box and prayed over the gaudy coffin. My youngest brother sobbed uncontrollably. The broken chick did not rise from the dead - as we hoped but did not expect. Ever after, says my brother, he looked upon Jesus with a jaundiced eye and questioned the potency of a story that could not stir life in something so small as a shriveled sparrow.

I have wondered at that story, too. It was the epic of my youth: a magic birth on a crystalline night, a precocious boy in a temple, water and blood, a dusty murder on a afternoon, and the final thrilling detail - an empty tomb where the dead man had been, its huge stone door flung aside like a pebble.

It was the first story I knew, the first tale in which I could hear the clash and ring of history and sin. Its hero - gaunt, wrapped in a long white cloak, dusty feet and dusty sandals - fascinated me, and I studied his legend, pored over the disparate accounts of his brief life, strained to hear divine music in his odd stories. I tried fitfully to emulate his patience, generosity, courage. But mostly, as I grew older and more suspicious of magic, I forgot him, although he hovered at the edge of consciousness and memory, sad-faced and haunted, a thin bearded man who died young and was probably God.

Not until I turned 33 did I finally taste the sour evil of his death on my tongue and sense the real horror of his murder. For a Catholic boy, that age is one of power and resonance, of inevitable measurement against that lost life, of stock taken. And over the course of that year I found myself thinking about the carpenter more than I expected to, and more than I wanted to. I found myself staring at his story in the oddest moments: on the train, in the woods, in the cobbled alleys of my ancient city. I couldn't get over the stark fact of his death, which stuck out like the ribs of a malnourished child.

A quiet carpenter is arrested, spiked to a cross, stabbed, and left to die. Dust and a strange darkness swirl at his feet. His mother weeps, his best friend watches in helpless silence. Twilight crawls over the nearby hills. He cries aloud with thirst, despair, terror - and he dies. Three days later he is seen on the road. He walks, he talks, he allows a skeptic to plunge a thumb in the wound that killed him. He disappears again, but this time the fierce story of his life and death remains in the air, outlined by the blood and tears of those who knew him. The story spreads and takes on a life of its own, filling the earth. Two thousand years later the carpenter's story, unaccountably powerful, still haunts the world. And it haunts me.

Stories are powerful, weighty things, they have lives of their own. Woven of memory and desire, they begin with an ungainly parade of facts in the same way that a sparrow chick is made up of downy uncertainty, splayed feet, and hunger. With time they acquire grace beyond their ingredients and meaning beyond the hole they occupy in the freighted air.

I have my own story, in which compassion and mercy and humor salve a little of the evil I find in my city, in my work, in the twisted people and ashen faces that pass me in the street. In my middle years I look for God in the carved faces of my elders and the translucent faces of the young, in joy and sadness, in gain and loss, in the eyes of fish, the boles of oaks, the runes left by the feet of birds. I have fled from the crutch of a faith, the evil of religion too tightly held, the intolerance of the confident, because it was subtlety that seemed holy to me, not assurance, because those men and women most sure of themselves and their gods often seemed furthest removed from godlike peace and mercy.

But always the carpenter's story whispers to me. It is as haunting as love; as persistent as doubt. For years I have dodged in and out of it like a child on the bright thin edge of a forest - immersed in it when it suited me, ignoring it when it did not. Now I face it with awe and fear and pity. In the piping voices of children, in the hollow voices of beggars, in the savage barking of guns in wars and alleys, I hear the ragged voice of the man on the cross, raging at his betrayal, offering his broken soul to the harsh God he called his father.

I don't know if the sad man was the lord of time and space and mercy. No one knows; no one will ever know. You bet your life on him or you don't. You walk into his story, wondering at its astonishing power, leery of its simplicity and enormous demand. Or, you walk away from it because it is impossible to believe or live by. Like a mountain, a cathedral, a sparrow, the story of the gaunt man is a vaulting thing, impossible to ignore.

I am afraid of his story because I suspect that it is true.