My childhood home was an idyllic house in suburbia with a mantel above the fireplace. It was the kind of home the young woman in “Old City Bar” is trying to get to and the kind of home the bartender and his patrons don’t have.
“Old City Bar” by Trans-Siberian Orchestra tells the story of a bartender helping a girl “by a broken pay phone” make it home on Christmas Eve. The broken phone draws our attention to everything else that’s broken throughout the song: dreams, hearts and relationships. The story is told from the perspective of one of the bar’s patrons, a self-described “bum” with nowhere else to go. We don’t know if the narrator and their fellow patrons have houses or families of their own. All we know is, for them, the bar is home.
We think of dive bars as places where people go to nurse their own wounds, not heal others’. But that’s exactly what happens in this song: The bartender pays for the young woman’s cab so she can make her flight home. He thinks he’s done this secretly, but the narrator and the rest of the patrons notice his small act of kindness.
As a child in my cozy suburban home, “Old City Bar” moved me, but my sympathy was filled with condescension: I was amazed that Christ’s love could touch even those poor souls.
As an adult, I understand there is nothing surprising about Christ’s love showing up in this old city bar. Even more than that, I recognize the bar as a model of God’s radically inclusive love, a place where strangers with nowhere else to go can experience warmth, generosity and peace. It’s the type of place I want to be a part of creating in my own home, my own church or maybe my neighborhood bar.
When things are whole, we put them up on the mantel, above the clutter. But broken things get shoved into leftover spaces. They get thrown into boxes or swept into dustbins. They get sent out back to the manger.
There they sit, close enough to talk. Close enough to share a drink and a story. Close enough to feel each other’s jagged edges and do the slow work of softening them. This Christmas, “Old City Bar” reminds me that I’d rather be with the broken things. I am one of them, after all. And so was Christ.
