After their ordinations to the Roman Catholic priesthood my father and his friend Anthony Bagglio were both assigned to churches in Roxbury, at the time the closest thing to a ghetto in Massachusetts. Father Bill, my father, ran a storefront ministry for junkies, alcoholics, reformed thugs and street people; Father Bagg was given pastoral responsibility of the teaching convent where the woman who would be my mother happened to reside.

This was the mid-'60s. Vatican II had changed American Catholicism to such a degree that priests like Bagg and my father began to see themselves as much as activists and social workers as men of God. Or rather, they were activists and social workers as men of God; suddenly one meant the other. Like their fully human, fully divine model, they would be priests who were fully religious and fully secular. They hoped to rebuild the church from the ground up, to pull it into the modern world by living and acting like modern men.

Modern for the '60s, anyway. Instead of the usual clerical get-up, they wore sideburns and goatees, sweatshirts and leather jackets -- Bagg because these things suited his personality, my father because he thought they'd make him a more effective minister in a troubled, urban congregation. For the same reasons, they looked at women and guy-talked about what they saw -- Bagg because he liked looking and talking, my father as if to say, Look, I'm a priest and a man.

"Jesus, Bill, you've got to see this crazy nun who plays cards with the winos," Bagg told my father one day. "Loses two hands then bets nutso on the third. She's just laughing, shouting. Wins all their cigarettes, doesn't even smoke"

Given his temperament and the risks involved, I don't know why Bagg's description moved Father Bill to seek out the woman who would be my mother, but it did. There are any number of reasons people come together; in my parents' case there were also the infinite, improbable contingencies required to inspire the marriage of a street priest and a teaching sister. There are variables I will never know. But this much I do know: "You've got to see this crazy nun." With one sentence Bagglio made the connection that made me. Less than my parents, but not so much less that I can ignore the fact, I owe Bagg my life.

He's an old priest now, the only kind there seem to be these days. Active again after an extended leave of absence -- after running an inn in Provincetown for three years, after celebrating gay weddings on the beach, Rome be damned, after trying, really trying, to stay away -- Bagg has a new church, in a perpetually recovering mill town north of Boston. His flock now consists not of the daughters of the immigrant Irish (as did my mother's convent), but of new immigrants. Saint Patrick's is a parish made of refugees, of the formerly stateless, the formerly powerless, now doing quite well, thank you, gladly filling a depressed city and a church emptied by white flight to the suburbs.

Nothing a little paint can't fix: Outside the church is still the same drab stones set in place 80 years ago by Quebecoix laborers; inside patches of South East Asian pastels brighten the surrounding gray. Jesus is saffron yellow at the start of the half-relief Stations of the Cross on the wall of a small side-chapel. Moving through the palette with his torment, he is green as jade on the Via Dolorosa. By Golgotha he is Krishna blue.

I went to Saint Patrick's with my parents last Christmas Eve, to Midnight Mass, a candlelit celebration of an unlikely birth. In white cassocks like bathrobes with hoods, Vietnamese and Cambodian deacons, lectors and altar servers led the procession to the altar. Bagg followed, swinging a censer on a silver chain, filling the aisle and then the pews with the chalky smoke of incense. Bald and spotty-headed, pudgy beneath his vestments, he seemed every few paces to step from the clouds. All the while, like a chorus of polyglot angels, he, his servers, his deacons and the whole of Saint Patrick's sang Gloria in Excelsis Deo in Latin, English and Vietnamese to a Far Eastern scale, surprising and dissonant to my parochial ears.

Next to me a teenager pointed a video camera toward the center aisle. His free eye shut tight, his camera arm steady, he seemed to be concentrating on the job at hand. But his mother wouldn't let him be. Talking nonstop, standing on the kneeler to reach the boy's ear, the tiny woman sputtered in Khmer; a rush of sounds with just one discernible word: Bagg, Bagg.

"Make sure you get Father Bagg," I supposed she was saying, as my own mother might. "Can you see him? Is he there? Make sure you get Bagg in the picture."

Her son's answer came in clear, impatient English. "Shhh. I'm trying."

His mother cut him off, with sharpened whispers now -- nagging sounds the same in any language. And of course he back-talked, really asking for it, but within these walls safe from a smack in the head.

"Sorry, but the light sucks," he snapped. "And there's too much smoke!"

When they reached the altar, the members of the procession turned to face the crowd, then fanned out diagonally to Bagg's left and his right, making the old priest the tip of a human arrow. He stared out a moment at his congregation, then called to them, simply, nasal-voiced:

"Hello!"

"Hello Father Bagg!" the church answered.

He raised a hand in front of his face as if to sign a cross, then waved it comically instead, coughing and pushing the smoke from his face.

"If they had smog like this in Bethlehem," he said, "no one would've seen the star!"

"Ah!" I heard from all sides. You could feel the place smile.

"It's Christmas!" Bagg laughed. "Let's pray!"

And we did. The smoke of incense has a way of transforming the world. Changing the smell, the texture, the substance of the very air, it can inspire piety even in the godless. Breathe it in deep; it's sweet and bitter at the same time, thick as exhaust. Nearly like the clouds of pot smoke I remember walking through in my dormitory days, and nearly as narcotic. There's a technology at work here, a stagecraft of the soul. Is ritual a kind manipulation? Sure it is. Does it work? Around me 400 heads bowed as one, 400 heads as synchronized as two eyes falling shut.

The Mass's first reading was given in Vietnamese, the second in Khmer, the gospel in English, and then came Bagg's turn, rising from his throne, walking out into the center aisle to preach.

"I'm always thankful this time of year," he said, "that the gospels tell us we must love everyone, but don't say a word about liking everyone." His first words tonight had brought a collective grin, now 800 eyes grew wide. Where you going with this, Bagg?

"Everywhere people just rushing, rushing, buying, buying." His arms flew out, grabbing air; his voice rose and fell in an exasperated sing-song. "Everybody talking and complaining about rushing and rushing and buying and buying. I don't get it! This is Christmas? We're Christians so we try to love these people, even when they elbow by us in the check-out lines. In fact, sometimes we are these people… Now Jesus would've loved these people, sure. But would he have liked them? Would he have liked… you?"

A long pause now as Bagg let the novelty set in, as defenses built up and brows furrowed.

He repeated the thought ponderously. "Would he have liked us? Or would he have thrown us from the Temple? Would he overturn the sales tables in the shopping malls?" He paused again, locking eyes with as many who dared.

"Makes me wonder," he said. "Would he gather our Christmas trees and our Christmas stockings and our Christmas presents and say, I died for this?"

The whole church nodded. Yes, you're right, we're awful. Moved unexpectedly to guilt and dread, we were sinners in the hands of an angry Bagg.

"Tell me," he said. "Really. Honestly. I want to know what you think on this." He took a deep breath. "If Jesus showed up at your door tomorrow, would he gather up your Pokemon and your Tickle Me Shlomo, your power tools and pocket computers and throw them out in the street?"

From somewhere far back in the church a child's voice called out, "No!" In the instant that followed you could hear her parents groan.

"Yes!" Bagg insisted, then cracked a smile, relenting to the laughter that was rising from the pews.

"No," he admitted, shaking his head. "Maybe he wouldn't. Jesus isn't such a bad guy. He didn't come to break our kneecaps. If he did I don't think we'd be here today. Maybe he'd like Christmas trees. Maybe he'd even like us. But he wouldn't always like the things we do in his name"

Bagg had us now, hitting his stride. The grace of the innocent interruption, the grace with which he handled it, it could have been scripted. Maybe it was.

No matter. All eyes were on him. All ears too. Simultaneous translations began all around me; the camera boy whispered to his mother as he filmed.

When the sermon ended, Bagg turned and walked silently to the front of the church. He sat for a moment in the oversized chair behind the altar, slumped like prize-fighter, victorious but spent. Soon he was up and once more had his censer, swinging it forward and back, left to right, consecrating the air for communion. Smoke and mirrors time again; a spell of transformation. Of bread, of churches, of men. Does it work?

Next to me my father's eyes closed slowly. His right index finger slid up under the rim of his glasses and traced a line across the top of his cheek. Maybe just an itch, maybe smoke in his eye, but the finger moved lightly, more a wipe than a scratch. His chest rose with a long inhale then dropped lower than it had been, breath released like air from a tire. When his eyes opened again, they settled on Bagglio, now standing in a fog at the focal point of the church. Priest and former priest seemed to nod to each other through the haze, across the rows of pews that separated them, across the altar that had come to mark the boundary between the choices each had made.