I lay my head down on the steering wheel of my car and burst into tears. From the back of the car, my seven-year-old son bleated over his seat, “I’m sorry, Mama! I didn’t mean it!”

Outside the day wasn’t cold, but it was gray nonetheless, and the grungy, not-hardly-big-enough back parking lot of Politics and Prose bookstore was filled with last minute holiday shoppers.

“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I said. I threw the gear shift of my Honda into reverse, then first, and the car took off like a rocket down Fessenden Street.

Just seconds before, we’d been inside the bookstore, buying my husband the final item on our list for him. It was less than twenty minutes, in fact, since I had kneeled beside a Russian Orthodox priest at a cathedral mere blocks away and confessed to Jesus my impatience, my faithlessness, and my anger, at this eleventh hour before the Feast of the Nativity was to begin.

Now we were in the crowded bookstore, and my son was starting to bug me, first about being bored, then about buying him a $40 book about Legos. I took a deep breath. We bought the present for my husband. We selected a book for my son to give his almost three-year-old sister, a volume of First Arabic Words. But just as though he were picking at a hangnail, he wouldn’t let the matter of the $40 Lego book drop.

“You never buy me anything,” he said.

And that did it, as they say.

It was as though a lit match had been dropped into tinder. I wasn’t about to feed into the general public perception about how parents are unwilling to correct their children in public anymore, or how spoiled and disrespectful children these days are, to begin with. I yanked him by the arm through the bookstore, its attached café, and out the door onto the parking lot asphalt.

Then there, in full view of various representatives of Urbane Liberal Washington, I let him have it: “Who are you to tell me that I never get you anything? Do you have any idea how many presents you are going to be receiving tomorrow morning? But no! You can’t even wait just one day!”

It is possible that I called him a “ )_&#$^ little creep,” or some other equally inappropriate phrase for a mother to say. But as I was seeing red froth at the corner of my eyes by this time, I can’t be rightly sure.

After my outburst, I pulled him back to the car, and that was where I put my head down on the steering wheel, in shame, and collapsed into tears.

Looking back on it now, I can cite any number of factors as the “explanation,” for my behavior—the stress and business of preparing for Christmas, the exhaustion of the six-week Advent fast from meat, an improper dosage of SSRIs, a little perimenopausal hormonal shake-up, my own insecurities about being judged as an insufficiently authoritative parent, the piercing fear that I had raised a spoiled child, indeed.

Those are the standard and probably causes for why I might have felt the way I did, and for the record, I do not disavow any of them.

But what really applies here, I think, is Satan.

Funny, you don’t hear too much about Satan these days—or Hell, for that matter, either. Religion blogger Rod Dreher was reporting recently on the results of some Pew study that seemed to indicate that while most Americans did believe in Hell, apparently Hitler was the only person there.

Even some sophisticated evangelicals who still believe that Jesus Is a Personal God are contented believing that Satan, with his red skin and horned tail, is just a logo on a can of ham.

And that is to say nothing about the majority of secular Americans, the people I’m mostly around, for whom the Satanic is merely where angry ex-fundamentalist Christian kids end up channeling their neuroses in death-metal bands.

How is it that we who are believers in Jesus are so comfortable today dismissing the concept of Satan—something Our Lord felt confident enough in to order to “get behind [Him]” when tempted in the desert?

Brain chemicals, narcissistic projection, attachment disorder: We act as though all of these are the “true” forces behind our misdeeds. Thereby we render them objects, discrete, controllable, explainable, and as digestible as a review in last Sunday’s New York Times. “Evil” is a joke told in a faux-Texas accent, with George W. Bush as its butt.

This surprises me, actually. We believers have, in the main, come to see the hand of God in the forces of nature, in the unfolding drama of Evolution, whether we believe in it or not. And the more we Practice that Presence, how gorgeously Personal the universe comes to be.

But if that is so, how can we fail to admit the existence of the Shadow? Can’t the source of our drives and our angst, and yes, our sins—can’t that be Personal, too?

In the Orthodox icon of the Nativity, the figure of the Noble Joseph is presented as being approached by a bent and twisted figure—the representation of Satan insinuating that Mary’s birth may not be blessed, that the Incarnation may not really have happened.

It’s a psychologically acute component of Orthodox tradition that underscores the miracle of Christmas all the more, the Evil that Christ, in the fullness of time, has rendered impotent.

In those moments of my anger, it is the Incarnation and its hope that I disavow.

I have seen that man, that Satan of the Nativity icon. I have seen him, and I have been him.