‘A Babe is born, all of a maid…’

I hope all readers are enjoying a very merry Christmas!

Year after year I find my treasuring of Christmastide undiminished.  In this season we really are breathing different air.  Things quieten down; the music in the shops grows merrier and less aggressive, and the world becomes gentler and quieter.  Once the moment arrives, even the forces of commerce cannot touch us.  Britain returns to the common observance of a festival of light and sweetness.  The mainstream feels a little more like home, the great cultural headwind abates slightly, and, more importantly, there is good will and merriment about, and hearts are softened to peace and goodwill.  The season gives us an excuse to wish each other well, to mend differences, to make amends.

Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh has a good article here (published in the Irish magazine The Burkean), observing that the modern world, at Christmas, when it thinks nobody is looking, ‘indulges in a celebration of everything it usually disdains: family, nostalgia, tradition, sentimentality, innocence, festivity, ceremony, and even (albeit usually indirectly) religion’.  And why not?  These are natural things, and we mere mortals can only pretend to be cynical and individualistic for so long.  There was a time, not so long ago, when this sweet sensation of high day and holiday, that heady feeling of living in time outside time, came round several times a year: now only the one ‘festive period’ is left to us.  But even a single chink of light in the year is better than none.  It is better than nothing even if the world only half-remembers that the Creator of all things has taken flesh, lived in the knowledge of our frailty, brought forth warmth into the cold world, and thereby changed the very fabric of the universe, and changed it utterly.  That is no longer a void between our lonely souls, but Love.

Here is an exuberant setting by the Welsh composer William Mathias (1934-1992) of the fifteenth-century English carol ‘A babe is born all of a maid’, one of several preserved in the famous medieval Sloane manuscript 2593 (catalogue record here).  Eleanor Parker writes more about it on her wonderful ‘Clerk of Oxford’ blog: https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2012/01/babe-is-born-all-of-may.html.  The choir of King’s College, Cambridge, is led by the Director of Music, the late Sir Stephen Cleobury (who died on St Cecilia’s day last year; a great loss to the world of music).

Wishing all readers much continued Christmas merriment, and happiness in the New Year.

Merry Christmas!

Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree for a census of the whole world to be taken.  This census — the first — took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria, and everyone went to his own town to be registered.  So Joseph set out from the town of Nazareth in Galilee and travelled up to Judaea, to the town of David called Bethlehem, in order to be registered together with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.  While they were there the time came for her to have her child, and she gave birth to a son, her first-born.  She wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them at the inn.  In the countryside close by there were shepherds who lived in the fields and took it in turns to watch their flocks during the night.  The angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone round them.  They were terrified, but the angel said, “Do not be afraid.  Listen, I bring you news of great joy, a joy to be shared by the whole people.  Today in the town of David a saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.”

Luke 2:1–11

Wishing all readers of this blog a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.

   

Polling-Eve Ponderings

The eastern outskirts of the city of Worcester, seen from the top of the Cathedral tower, 30th November 2019.

And so an unhappy country braces itself to go to the polls, and I record my thoughts so that I will know how I felt before the result turns out to be whatever the result turns out to be.

In many ways, our present difficulties are simply the result of things working properly.  A government lacking a big majority, such as we have had ever since the European Union referendum, cannot do very much, even if it is not splintered by disagreement within its own ranks, as this one has been.  If it is frustrating for many that Britain’s departure from the European Union is proving less than graceful, not all the reasons for this are bad reasons.  Some are simply the results of the encumbrances we accept as the price of democracy.

This may also be the case with the strange episode of the Supreme Court which, as I understand it and record here for future reference, went like this.  At the end of August, Boris Johnson, faced with the challenge of persuading a pro-Remain Parliament to approve a Brexit Bill by a deadline of 31st October, sought to prorogue or suspend Parliament for a number of weeks.  By all appearances this was done for no reason other than to short-circuit the opposition: to scupper any stratagems of Remainers by simply pulling the plug on them.  A private individual (the pro-Remain businesswoman Gina Miller) then appealed to the courts in the hope that they would declare this tactic unlawful.  In response, the courts first had to work out whether or not they had any say in the matter at all: the Scottish High Court decided not, but the Supreme Court, to which Ms. Miller appealed next, took the opposite view.  The prorogation of Parliament was thus found indeed to be a matter for the courts, and the Government’s actions were indeed found to be unlawful.  Parliament was duly recalled and business resumed.

That was a moment at which everything felt too close and too momentous to gain a proper perspective and make up my mind what was going on; I couldn’t really tell how significant these developments were.  But was this, too, simply everything working properly? In some ways the ruling of the Supreme Court looked like a restraint on power, something I would be inclined to favour.  Certainly, there was the sensation of a system being put to the test by the impetuosity and imprudence of a bull in a china shop, and holding firm.  It seemed not unduly alarming that some sort of mechanism should swing into action and restrain the Prime Minister.  Yet I remain unsure of our reasons for having a Supreme Court in the first place, and worry that it is just as likely that such a body might equally have taken power for itself.  Some commentators have been of this opinion.  (But what do I, a mere peasant, know of such constitutional technicalities?!)

But really, our problems are far deeper than can be resolved by any mere general election.  Our crisis is not only political, but also spiritual.  What I hope for in Britain, a renewed culture, is simply not on offer at this election. Indeed, no political party alone could offer it.  Meanwhile,  as things stand, many people find themselves angry and unhappy without really knowing why.  The offerings on the menu at this election will hardly make them less so.  Can a serious churchgoer vote for any of these parties in good conscience?  Do any of them have at the forefront of their concerns the downtrodden, the marginalised, the unborn, the elderly, refugees? The security of families, the happiness of children? Do any of them seriously mean to serve the common good?  I know that there are many good and hard-working candidates sincerely hoping to do the best for their constituencies, but the top links of the parties, the forgers of policies, all seem to be in thrall to the dictatorship of relativism, and unfriendly to the Christian Church.  How can I vote for such parties?  I suppose we were told to expect nothing less.  But, just to take one example, it is disillusioning to see the Liberal Democrats and Labour Party, almost as a footnote but with a kind of forensic spite, pledge to abolish the Marriage Tax Allowance: a petty, partisan thing to do, to single out this particular policy for abolition, trampling on tradition just for the sake of it.  (The other parties are little better.)  And all while millions of people suffer the purposelessness and alienation that some sort of encouragement to marriage might just — who knows? — help to dispel.  A new survey has revealed that British teenagers are among the least likely to believe that their lives have meaning or purpose, marriage rates are collapsing, and so many people suffer from loneliness that a ministerial position has been created to deal with it.  (At least the need has been noticed).  But these problems present too great a portfolio for any minister.

I say that our problems are deeper than any General Election could solve, but not that they cannot be solved at all.  There are great numbers of ordinary people with sensible heads on their shoulders, keeping things going, quietly maintaining the social fabric of the world.  I realised recently that the cleaner of the office where I work, who is unfailingly cheery and good-humoured, never mentions politics or complains about politicians, in spite of the hardships of her job.  Even among my own generation, of which I am sometimes tempted to despair, it would do me good to remember that there are huge numbers of quiet people who think carefully and sensibly and wisely, and act accordingly.  The amazing thing is that many of them are my friends.  Heed not the words of the loud, but the deeds of the quiet.

But the surest answer to our problems, though rather drowned out this year by all this electoral flurry, is quietly hoped for all through Advent.  When tomorrow is all over, we will have perhaps a fortnight left of Advent’s sweet suspense.

No Disgust in Tunbridge Wells

Today it was an honour and a pleasure, after several years of correspondence, finally to meet up with my friend, the Irish writer Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, author of the blog Irish Papist (irishpapist.blogspot.com) and of the book ‘Inspiration from the Saints’.  This historic and auspicious meeting took place in Tunbridge Wells, of all places, in weather that we both declared to be our favourite — cold and crisp, with the far sun throwing slanted light goldenly against façades, deep down the lengths of streets, and delicately through the last leaves of tangled trees, touching even cobwebs on the ground to brilliance.  First in a coffee-shop, over cups of hot chocolate that were things of beauty, then in a pub over a hearty sandwich, and finally out in the clear Wealden air — right up to the moment we began an unwonted dash to the railway station when I found it wasn’t where it was supposed to be and Maolsheachlann’s train was due in five minutes — we discussed the things that matter: poetry, music, railways, archives, libraries, Chesterton, Belloc, the state of Britain, the state of Ireland, the Fifties, the Sixties, the Middle Ages, the way of the world, the times we live in, the strange and unlovely religion of secular progressivism, the strange and wondrous religion of Christianity, and (by way of Kent and Kentish oast-houses) beer.  Yeats was recited on Tunbridge Wells High Street this afternoon, as was R. S. Thomas, in an act of resistance against banality, and of victory for poetry!  And I even managed to get Maolsheachlann onto his train, by a margin of about fifteen seconds…

Maolsheachlann’s blog is essential reading.  You do not have to be Irish, or a Papist, or even to agree with anything he says, to enjoy his writing.