Tradition gathers around Christmas. Pageants and homecomings and longed-for preparations repeat themselves year after year into beloved lifetime rituals. My family and I used to attend Midnight Mass at the old Sacred Heart. That beautiful ceremony in that old lovely Church, filled with flowers and light and history, will always remain part of our family folk-memory.
So much was lost when a spark caught the manger’s straw one Christmas and the whole ancient building flamed into nothingness.
Christmas is also about the unique drama of a miraculous birth intended to save all mankind. It does not mark some gentle, festive, reassuring and comfortable everyday event. It involves an occurrence that shook the world and should shake it to this day. This is why I have a special liking for Ted Hughes’s Christmas poem “Minstrel’s Song” which gives some feeling and sense of the tremendous drama, strangeness and searing impact of this birth that re-started history.
MINSTREL’S SONG
by Ted Hughes
I’ve just had an astounding dream as I lay in the straw.
I dreamed a star fell on to the straw beside me
And lay blazing. Then when I looked up
I saw a bull come flying through a sky of fire
And on its shoulders a huge silver woman
Holding the moon. And afterwards there came
A donkey flying through that same burning heaven
And on its shoulders a colossal man
Holding the sun. Suddenly I awoke
And saw a bull and a donkey kneeling in the straw,
And the great moving shadows of a man and a woman
–
I say they were a man and a woman but
I dare not say what I think they were. I did not dare to
look.
I ran out here into the freezing world
Because I dared not look. Inside that shed.
A star is coming this way along the road.
If I were not standing upright, this would be a dream.
A star the shape of a sword of fire, point-downward,
Is floating along the road. And now it rises.
It is shaking fire on to the roofs and the gardens.
And now it rises above the animal shed
Where I slept till the dream woke me. And now
The star is standing over the animal shed.
But above all, at the beginning and in the end, Christmas is about love. We are to believe, and it is no bad belief to have, that it is God’s infinite love for mankind which caused Christ’s coming. An overwhelming gift of love came upon mankind and still and forever gives us hope that evil will be withstood. Through the centuries Christmas has come to stand for many things beyond its original meaning – not least, in recent times, a wonderful opportunity to make money. But still Christmas has never lost what is at its heart – God’s gift of love and mankind’s reciprocal love for Christ and his mother. At Christmas all gifts should be gifts renewing love.
It is why I read the great love poems at Christmas time especially – the poems of love of God and the poems also in which love is shown in this world in never-ending images of passion and loyalty and beauty. Every year there are some different poems to add from the year’s harvest but always one is there which I do not forget as the years go by and end and begin again. It is George Mackay Brown’s marvelous song translated from an old troubadour’s sheet:
Song: Rognvald to Ermengarde
by George Mackay Brown
The winds embrace you, my lover
And the quiet stars bless,
Noons touch you with ardour
And dawns with tenderness.
All these are my brothers,
They abide: I fare on.
I shall not see your like again
Beneath the enduring sun.
O mould with me a timeless love:
That we, the time-accursed,
May mock the sad and fleeting hours
And bid death do his worst.
But the hours embrace you, my lover
And the grave seasons bless,
The years touch you with wisdom
And death with gentleness.
Bless this great land of ours. Bless its people. Bless
the children especially. Bless their future.
