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BRENDAN McCONVERY
UP FRONT
BRENDAN McCONVERY CSsR
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Will there be a Christmas this year?
Christmas has been celebrated in many different ways throughout Christian history. Since the return of the coronavirus, many of us have wondered how we will celebrate it this year. As it draws closer, the element of uncertainty becomes more pronounced. It has set me recalling some testimonies of Christmases past when believers found themselves returning even more deeply to the mystery of these days.
Alla Andreyeva and her husband were arrested in 1938 for publicly criticising the Soviet system. Alla spent nine years in a Moldavian gulag. She remembered that there were Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants among the prisoners. With different dates for Easter, they managed to arrange among themselves how to celebrate it and give their fellow prisoners the opportunity to celebrate it. Christmas was different. They celebrated on the same day, but it was always a workday, even if it were a Sunday. She describes one particular Christmas. “On April 19, 1984 I was convicted as a political prisoner for the third time by the supreme court of Soviet occupied Estonia. They sentenced me to 10 years of incarceration and five years of exile for anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda, as a ‘seriously dangerous criminal’ whose sentence was to be served in high security prison. We were clothed in prisoner kit. My companions were a Ukrainian poet, an Arminian and a Greek Catholic priest. Usually, the prison guards did not hinder the observance of a quiet Christmas, so prisoners always managed to find some pieces of a fir-branch with a few candles. This time, everything was confiscated after several thorough body searches. We still managed to find a finger-length bit of an evergreen branch in our walking compound. Into some tin foil, we put a dab of margarine and into that a wick twisted from some threads. We were allowed matches, and so our Christmas candle was lit! We prayed and our priest sang sacred songs. Suddenly, the door was shoved open and the watch officer with two guards burst in. They swept the small candle to the floor, tramped on it with their jackboots and all this was accompanied with the requisite threats, invective and vulgarities. The priest made the sign of the cross towards the guards. They backed off slightly, stopped yelling their obscenities, brought a broom and shovel, and took away what remained of our candle and piece of fir-tree. The watch officer opened the small shutter to tell us that homemade candles were strictly forbidden, that everything was forbidden, even singing, that we should sit in silence and be with our God in spirit and thought, and that God doesn’t really exist anyway. So, we sat silently, spoke quietly, listened to the priest read religious verse, prayed and held our Christmas.”
In her Auschwitz Chronicle, the museum historian records how, on Christmas Eve 1942, Polish women prisoners in the staff building lighted candles on a fir bough that had been smuggled in. Carols were sung in many places around the camp, which lifted people’s spirits and gave them hope of surviving. In Block 18a, a prisoner who was a Catholic priest obtained some bread and used it as a substitute host. He had also managed to procure some grapes. They were soaked in water and the juice was sufficient to consecrate as the Precious Blood.
Just before Christmas 1943, a young German theologian called Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote his Christmas letter to his parents. The Bonhoeffers were socially well-placed, and Dietrich could expect a university chair but these were not good times. Dietrich was not writing his Christmas letter from his university study where he directed young men preparing for the ministry. In fact this was his second Christmas in prison since it had been noted that he was not standing in line with the official Lutheran Church. A letter from prison was hardly what the Bonhoeffers were expecting as the Christmas letter of their favourite son! “Viewed from a Christian perspective,” he tells them, “Christmas in a prison cell can, of course, hardly be considered particularly problematic. Most likely many of those here in this building will celebrate a more meaningful and authentic Christmas than in places where it is celebrated in name only. That misery, sorrow, poverty, loneliness, helplessness, and guilt 11 mean something quite different in the eyes of God than according to human judgment. That God turns toward the very places from which human eyes turn away! That Christ was born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn — a prisoner grasps this better than others, and for him this is truly good news. And to the extent he believes it, he knows that he has been placed within the Christian community that goes beyond the scope of all spatial and temporal limits, and the prison walls lose their significance.”
All of us at Redemptorist Communications and Reality wish you every blessing this most unusual of Christmases.
IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER
I begin with a poem by Christina Rossetti (1830-94), which will be more familiar to readers as a carol: 'In the Bleak Midwinter'. First published in January 1872, it was further popularised as a carol when set to music in 1911 by the appropriatelynamed Harold Darke. Christmas falls just a few days after the shortest or darkest day of the year, usually December 21 or 22. Remarkably, Darke’s version surpassed in popularity the earlier 1906 setting by the much better-known composer, Gustav Holst (famous for the orchestral suite, The Planets). It became highly popular during the First World War, and has remained so since.
One admirable feature is its honest way of dealing with the potential harshness of the seasonal weather: such climatic realism is far removed from those Christmas cards which feature a coach and horses making their colourful way through a pristine landscape of immaculate snow. It was surely this realism which initially appealed to the soldiers who reportedly sang the carol in the trenches during the Great War. Surrounded as they were by their own bleak landscape, it was doubtless a relief to find some kind of parallel to their own situation in the opening lines of Rossetti’s poem:
In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan; Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow …
How well they would have known both the hardness and the coldness of iron; and it is a hard world indeed where even redemptive, flowing water has turned to solid ice. Rossetti’s fourth line is striking in its bold compressed simile, while lines five and six envisage snow not as a white and beautiful blanket but as a source of deadly monotony.
The central stanzas emphasise the contrast between the Saviour’s previous condition (He “whom Angels/Fall down before”), and this new state of impoverishment where he is sustained only by “a breastful” of his mother’s milk and the protective warmth of “a mangerful of hay”. The final stanza offers a moving climax (wonderfully underlined by Darke’s musical accompaniment) where the speaker expresses his own inadequacy to provide a fitting gift on this remarkable birth-day. Gifts will, as we know, be provided by the Magi; but as the speaker asks, “What shall I give him, poor as I am? ” We begin to see that impoverishment is a central feature of the entire representation; poor surroundings, poor mother and child, poor devotee. But it is of course those who are poor that this Messiah has come to redeem; and the speaker is wise enough to realise that all will be well if he follows his own deepest instinct:
Yet what I can I give Him, — Give my heart.
This, we are bound to reflect, is precisely the kind of commitment that the adult Christ will primarily require from us.
AND IS IT TRUE?
If harsh weather is one of the significant complications of (or threats to) the festive season in northerly climes, there is another factor which may potentially obscure the traditional meaning of Christmas; essentially, the replacement of its core meaning by a process of trivialisation. It is touched on by John Betjeman, in the poem 'Christmas'. First published in a collection of 1954, it has been praised for acknowledging both the sacred and the secular dimensions of the season. Arguably it is in the last three stanzas that the essential significance of the poem emerges: And is it true? And is it true, This most tremendous tale of all, Seen in a stained-glass window's hue, A Baby in an ox's stall ? The Maker of the stars and sea Become a Child on earth for me ?
And is it true ? For if it is, No loving fingers tying strings Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things, Bath salts and inexpensive scent And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells, No carolling in frosty air, Nor all the steeple-shaking bells Can with this single Truth compare –That God was man in Palestine And lives today in Bread and Wine.
One cannot but admire the simple precision of the language, or the finely controlled climax which tries to remind us of Emmanuel (meaning 'God with us'); in this case, still with us under the signs of bread and wine. But the poem also acknowledges the banalities of the secular side of Christmas: the “tissued fripperies”, or the exchange of “sweet and silly” gifts – not forgetting the “hideous tie so kindly meant”. This amounts to a graphic evocation, lightly done, of the consumerist aspects of Christmas. These, along with the more substantial or justifiable rejoicings, can be validated, the argument runs, only with reference to the foundational “tale” of Christmas: that of the “Maker of the stars and sea” becoming incarnate as “a Child on earth”. There is, however, another – and very different – dimension which points to the kind of religious doubt that we might expect to find in such 20th-century writing. The presence of doubt is clearly signalled in the proliferation of question marks over the first seven lines of the excerpt. No less than three times, the speaker feels obliged to ask if the “tremendous tale” of the Nativity is actually “true”. What if the “tale” is simply that, a legend handed down from the past? Such doubts are part and parcel of modern scepticism; but in fact they were inherited from a previous era, that of the Victorians of the second half of the 19th
century. There were many cultural causes for this decline in belief which we need not pause to enumerate. It is enough, perhaps, to note that the word 'agnosticism' first appeared in the English language in 1869, and was coined by the biologist T.H. Huxley (a Darwinian) to describe his own position.
HARDY’S OXEN
One poet above all others articulated, with a curious mixture of assertion and reluctance, the painful reality of what came to be known as the death or disappearance of God. His name was Thomas Hardy, whose dates (1840-1928) reveal how he straddled both the Victorian and modern periods. Abandoning the novel-form after 1896, Hardy, who had in any case been writing poems throughout his career, prioritised the writing of poetry. There are in the poems, as in the novels, numerous instances of the folly of believing in a merciful God; but there are other poetic utterances which reveal the pain of his exclusion from belief. In 'The Oxen', Hardy provides a Christmas poem (first published Christmas Eve, 1915, when Hardy was 75 years of age) which tempers that pain with a nostalgia for a time when things were different. It begins:
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees”, An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.
The elder is referring to a rural tradition according to which the oxen in the fields kneel down to welcome the Saviour on Christmas Eve. This fireside exchange, it transpires, is an incident recalled from the past (evoked as an era “Our childhood used to know”); and in that period, it occurred to no one to “doubt” that the oxen were indeed kneeling. But the arrival of modernity has changed all that:
So fair a fancy few would weave In these years!
There follows, however, a sudden reorientation of feeling in the poem’s speaker: he feels that if someone in this second decade of the 20th century were to invite him on Christmas Eve to come “see the oxen kneel”,
I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.
We should emphasise the word “hoping”; a word all the more remarkable if the reader is familiar with the general lack of hope in much of Hardy’s work. 'Nobody Comes' and 'A Broken Appointment' are, as the titles suggest, poems about hope unfulfilled; another poem carries the title 'He [the author] Never Expected Much'. And in one of his best-known works, 'In Tenebris' [In the Darkness], he coins a new word to emphasise how he is beyond all hope: he is
One who, past doubtings all, Waits in unhope.
If, in 'The Oxen', the aging poet can allow his nostalgia to awaken even a remembrance of hope, then we might see that as a tribute to the evocative power of Christmas.
SCARLET RIBBONS
I conclude with a well-known song which in a different way testifies to the recurrence of hope. I refer to 'Scarlet Ribbons', which, even if it does not refer explicitly to Christmas, has featured on Christmas albums by such artists as Jim Reeves, Tom Jones and Cliff Richard. It is not difficult to see why that should be the case: because the story in the song is the archetypal Christmas one of Santa Claus. A child hopes to receive a longed-for gift; she falls asleep; and when she wakes up she will find the gift on her bed. In this particular version, a father, having overheard his daughter pray for “scarlet ribbons”, realises, to his dismay, that it is too late: “all the stores were closed …”. He spends a painfully sleepless night, until, just before dawn, he looks into her bedroom and bears witness to a minor miracle:
I peeked in and on her bed In gay profusion lying there Lovely ribbons, scarlet ribbons Scarlet ribbons for her hair
If I live to be a hundred I will never know from where Came those lovely scarlet ribbons Scarlet ribbons for her hair …
The song was first recorded in 1949, and subsequently by Harry Belafonte (1952) and many others. What is most remarkable is not just the song’s longevity – still going strong after over 70 years – but the galaxy of gifted popular singers who have been attracted to it. There are early versions by Perry Como, Doris Day, Joan Baez; later versions by Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard, Tommy Makem – and so on into the second decade of the 21st century. It is estimated that there have been over a hundred different artists who have recorded it. If the song, which raises the possibility of a miraculous event, has proved to be enduringly popular in this way, then it suggests that it speaks to or satisfies a particular need in its listeners. That need is a need, if not to believe, then at least to find some basis for hope, by holding onto the possibility of a positive dimension to human affairs – or at least indulging that possibility on the horizon of our expectations. Perhaps that was what further enhanced the Rossetti carol for the soldiers in the First World War trenches.
Brian Cosgrave was professor of English at Maynooth University
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