Last night, behind loose bricks in the far corner of the basement, I found a long, package of  crumbling paper. I unwrapped it on the workbench, underneath the fluorescent fixture hanging by chains from cobwebby rafters.

It was a bone–a leg bone–a tibia…a human tibia.

That's when my dusty basement was first infused with holy light–not from a malfunctioning furnace, as I first supposed, but from the angel Gabriel: "Do not be afraid," he said, with a voice full of weariness, like flint on rock. "It is the shinbone of the Lord."

Life changed after that. I myself returned to church. The media, like maggots on road kill, refused to leave me alone. I was labeled a kook, a saint, a huckster, but the investigation bore me out–DNA testing, carbon-dating, the fracture midway down the bone, the long procession of church reps… It was indeed, according to both the sacred and secular communities, the real deal, the shinbone of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

My house became a shrine. My wife left. My kids went with her. The neighborhood association sent warnings about parking.

The bone, encased now behind heavy acrylic, mounted inside the small, excavated hole in the basement wall, drew hundreds of visitors, coming each day they came to worship and pray.

That's when my now antiseptically clean basement became infused a second time with Gabriel's light: "Do not be afraid," he said again.

"I'm  not," I responded.

"It continues to be the tibia of the Lord, and it's yours to do with as you please."

After he left, I respectfully unscrewed the Plexiglas shield. I ceremoniously flipped the switch on the halogen bulbs. I took the bone from its niche and wrapped it in old (but freshly laundered) rags, now stacked neatly beneath the workbench. I drove across town, past Staples and Papa John's, and pulled into the alley behind the Walmart. I tossed the rag-wrapped bone into a dumpster.

Too many people thought Christ lived in the bone. He lives in us, or he lives nowhere.

By the time I returned home, Gabriel was finishing up; he'd done a great job of matchng the new grout to the old. "Don't be afraid," I joked, as he wiped the trowel on his robe.

"Sometimes I am," he said, without smiling. "People are strange, you know," light fading as he left

"Yes," I said, in my now dark and quiet basement. "Yes, often we are."

Text and image © 2012 by Dirk deVries. All rights reserved.