The Nativity

 

 

     

The Nativity

 
Unfold thy face, unmaske thy ray,
Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day.
Let no malignant misty fume,
Nor foggy vapour, once presume
To interpose thy perfect sight
This day, which makes us love thy light
For ever better, that we could
That blessèd object once behold,
Which is both the circumference,
And center of all excellence:
Or rather neither, but a treasure
Unconfinèd without measure,
Whose center and circumference,
Including all preheminence,
Excluding nothing but defect,
And infinite in each respect,
Is equally both here and there,
And now and then and every where,
And alwaies, one, himselfe, the same,
A beeing farre above a name.
Draw neer then, and freely poure
Forth all thy light into that houre,
Which was crownèd with his birth,
And made heaven envy earth.
Let not his birth-day clouded be,
By whom thou shinest, and we see.

 

Christopher Harvey 

Reading this poem is like opening a treasure chest in a forgotten room and finding the light of the 16th century shining out of it.

Time melts, barriers dissolve, Christopher Harvey speaks.

The brightness of his words! 

I love the lines - "that object at once the center and the circumference of all excellence, Or rather neither, but a treasure unconfined without measure..."  Attempting to describe the superlative nature of God, he then has to retract, realizing his scope is too small.

(And isn't that still the problem? The marvel being too big, and our imaginations not widewild enough, even five centuries later.)

And this - "By whom thou shinest, and we see." A reminder of the mysterious quality of light itself - we see light, and by it we see. Psalm 36:9 says, For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light." Jesus Christ, the sun and subject of this poem, calls himself "the Light of the world". Light as a metaphor for knowledge, for clarity, for joy, for the  manifestation of beauty, for guidance, for the means of growth, for warmth, for comfort. Jesus is the living, breathing, walking embodiment of all these.

As the poet-prophet Isaiah wrote, "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great Light."

Centuries later, Christopher Harvey's words still echo that hope.

"Shine forth, bright Sunne, double the day!"

A Christmas Childhood

Morgan Weistling

A Christmas Childhood

1.

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw –
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood’s. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

2.

My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy’s hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.

And old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk –
The melodion.’ I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade –
There was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

Patrick Kavanagh

"And I was six Christmases of age."

Isn't that the truth of it - for a child to measure life by wonder?

Come Christmas

Verigo Anatoly Konstantinovich

 

Come Christmas

You see this Christmas tree all silver gold?

It stood out many winters in the cold,

with tinsel sometimes made of crystal ice,

say once a winter morning - maybe twice.

More often it was trimmed by fallen snow

so heavy that the branches bent, with no

one anywhere to see how wondrous is

the hand of God in that white world of his.

And if you think it lonely through the night

when Christmas trees in houses take the light,

remember how his hand put up one star

in this same sky so long ago afar.

All stars are hung so every Christmas tree

has one above it. Let's go out to see.

David McCord

 

 

"With no one anywhere to see how wondrous..."  If there ever was a theme I could go on about indefinitely, this is it. How God makes extraordinary things and broadcasts them so generously and seemingly haphazardly that some end up in places where no one sees them.

 No one, that is, but Him. 

The precious, the gorgeous, the intricate - all within His scope and His view - known and treasured. All. None forgotten or overlooked or unnappreciated. All beloved.

Three Kings Came Riding

 

 

Edward Burne-Jones

 

 

Three Kings Came Riding

Three Kings came riding from far away,
  Melchior and Gaspar and Baltasar;
Three Wise Men out of the East were they,
And they travelled by night and they slept by day,
  For their guide was a beautiful, wonderful star.

The star was so beautiful, large, and clear,
  That all the other stars of the sky
Became a white mist in the atmosphere,
And by this they knew that the coming was near
  Of the Prince foretold in the prophecy.

Three caskets they bore on their saddle-bows,
  Three caskets of gold with golden keys;
Their robes were of crimson silk with rows
Of bells and pomegranates and furbelows,
  Their turbans like blossoming almond-trees.

And so the Three Kings rode into the West,
  Through the dusk of night, over hill and dell,
And sometimes they nodded with beard on breast
And sometimes talked, as they paused to rest,
  With the people they met at some wayside well.

"Of the child that is born," said Baltasar,
  "Good people, I pray you, tell us the news;
For we in the East have seen his star,
And have ridden fast, and have ridden far,
  To find and worship the King of the Jews."

And the people answered, "You ask in vain;
  We know of no king but Herod the Great!"
They thought the Wise Men were men insane,
As they spurred their horses across the plain,
  Like riders in haste, and who cannot wait.

And when they came to Jerusalem,
  Herod the Great, who had heard this thing,
Sent for the Wise Men and questioned them;
And said, "Go down unto Bethlehem,
  And bring me tidings of this new king."

So they rode away; and the star stood still,
  The only one in the gray of morn
Yes, it stopped, it stood still of its own free will,
Right over Bethlehem on the hill,
  The city of David, where Christ was born.

And the Three Kings rode through the gate and the guard,
  Through the silent street, till their horses turned
And neighed as they entered the great inn-yard;
But the windows were closed, and the doors were barred,
  And only a light in the stable burned.

And cradled there in the scented hay,
  In the air made sweet by the breath of kine,
The little child in the manger lay,
The child, that would be king one day
  Of a kingdom not human but divine.

His mother Mary of Nazareth
  Sat watching beside his place of rest,
Watching the even flow of his breath,
For the joy of life and the terror of death
  Were mingled together in her breast.

They laid their offerings at his feet:
  The gold was their tribute to a King,
The frankincense, with its odor sweet,
Was for the Priest, the Paraclete,
  The myrrh for the body's burying.

And the mother wondered and bowed her head,
  And sat as still as a statue of stone;
Her heart was troubled yet comforted,
Remembering what the Angel had said
  Of an endless reign and of David's throne.

Then the Kings rode out of the city gate,
  With a clatter of hoofs in proud array;
But they went not back to Herod the Great,
For they knew his malice and feared his hate,
  And returned to their homes by another way.

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow 

 

 

Conches on Christmas

Antonio Cazorla

Conches on Christmas



Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this
barnacled pod so pales
next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales
that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss



except that there
was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells
silently, sans the heraldry of bells,
neatly, sans an astrological affair,



and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived—
an encrusted school of twenty-four
Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door
and barely half-alive.



Oh, you can bet
I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in
there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din
of all things oceanwise and wet,



but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite,
salt-water-logged spirals,
every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial
mollusks shut tight—



no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps,
no coral corpus,
no porpoise purpose
except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps.



A fine Christmas gift indeed, this
obscure migration,
this half-dead conch confederation
which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish—



a fine set of unwrappable presents
and no receipt by which I could redeem them.
I lifted one up by its stem
and thought of how, by increments,



all twenty-four
must have lugged those preassembled bodies here
sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer,
to my drasty stretch of shore.



And, no other explanation being offered for the situation,
I thought that I might understand
how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land
was a sort of evolutionary one—



misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late,
a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy
demonstration of how history,
even in the world of the invertebrate,



repeats itself—breaker
crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War
coming after Gulf War.
O Maker,



there is so much slug inside these shells,
here, at the end of December,
at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember.
Miracles sell well,



but Lord, it can be numbing
to a people who cannot
tell between a second nature and a second thought,
a second chance, or a second coming.



Mike Chasar

A Meditation for Christmas

Unknown

 

 

 

 

 

A Meditation for Christmas

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

   Whereon the eternal Lord of all things made,

For us poor mortals, and our endless bliss,

       Came down from heaven, and, in a manger laid

       The first, rich, offerings of our ransom paid:

Consider, O my soul, what morn is this!

Consider what estate of fearful woe

     Had then been ours, had he refused this birth;

From sin to sin tossed vainly to and fro,

       Hell's playthings, o'er a doomed and helpless earth!

       Had he from us witheld his priceless worth.

Consider man's estate of fearful woe!

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise,

     Who comes, himself, life's bitter cup to drain!

Ah! look on this sweet Child, whose innocent eyes

       Ere all be done, shall close in mortal pain,

       That thou at last Love's Kingdom may'st attain:

Consider to what joys he bids thee rise!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul:

     And in thin inmost shrine make music sweet!

Yea, let this world, from furthest pole to pole,

       Join in thy praises this dread birth to greet;

       Kneeling to kiss thy Saviour's infant feet!

Consider all this wonder, O my soul.

Selwyn Image

“Consider all this wonder.” That has been the theme of this year.

O Emmanuel

J. Kirk Richards

O Emmanuel

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us

O long-sought With-ness for a world without,

O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.

Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name

Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,

O quickened little wick so tightly curled,

Be folded with us into time and place,

Unfold for us the mystery of grace

And make a womb of all this wounded world.

O heart of heaven beating in the earth,

O tiny hope within our hopelessness

Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,

To touch a dying world with new-made hands

And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

Malcolm Guite

“O tiny hope within our hopelessness”. I love how the life of Jesus curls both inward and outward in this poem. Mysteries within mysteries, but at the same time, revelations opening into wider and yet wider horizons. Foldings and unfoldings. So beautiful. Like the whorls of shells or the swirling stars, all these seem to speak of the same pattern, the same name. Unspoken, but singing out through everything.

 

Signs of Christmas

Angelo Inganni

Signs of Christmas

When on the barn's thatch'd roof is seen
The moss in tufts of liveliest green;
When Roger to the wood pile goes,
And, as he turns, his fingers blows;
When all around is cold and drear,
Be sure that Christmas-tide is near.

When up the garden walk in vain
We seek for Flora's lovely train;
When the sweet hawthorn bower is bare,
And bleak and cheerless is the air;
When all seems desolate around,
Christmas advances o'er the ground.

When Tom at eve comes home from plough,
And brings the mistletoe's green bough,
With milk-white berries spotted o'er,
And shakes it the sly maids before,
Then hangs the trophy up on high,
Be sure that Christmas-tide is nigh.

When Hal, the woodman, in his clogs,
Bears home the huge unwieldly logs,
That, hissing on the smould'ring fire,
Flame out at last a quiv'ring spire;
When in his hat the holly stands,
Old Christmas musters up his bands.

When cluster'd round the fire at night,
Old William talks of ghost and sprite,
And, as a distant out-house gate
Slams by the wind, they fearful wait,
While some each shadowy nook explore,
Then Christmas pauses at the door.

When Dick comes shiv'ring from the yard,
And says the pond is frozen hard,
While from his hat, all white with snow,
The moisture, trickling, drops below,
While carols sound, the night to cheer,
Then Christmas and his train are here.

Edwin Lees

Roger, Tom, Hal, Old William,and Dick - they sound like such interesting country folk. I like how this poem shows how time was measured more by weather and plants and things like the pond being frozen solid, than by calendar and clock. Time was different. It wasn't a number in the same way it is for us now. It was cycles and seasons, subtle changes in nature and in people. Something in me misses that. I say "misses" because I think we all have a connection to that way of being, however weak.