‘Sing lullaby to Jesus, the Saviour of all’

This has been, I should think, an unsettling year for all of us.  The pandemic has been a tremendous challenge; few of us in Britain will forget that vertiginous feeling that ionised the air in February and March, as the ground under our feet was sucked and drawn away by who knew how great an approaching wave?  And the wave, when it came, broke not so seriously as to overwhelm the health service, as we had feared, but still seriously, and has returned in several successive, sporadic, unpredicted surges.  It has been a hard time for most people, and for some very hard indeed.  There has been sickness, bereavement, ruin, loneliness and fear.

Just as difficult to reckon with, in their own way, have been the strange counsels that are abroad, the contentious political ideas declaring themselves in nearly every corner of public life, insisting with alarming and hyperbolic jargon on a single new diagnosis, a single new solution for our problems.  The intentions may often be good, I know, but in many places a tendency towards intemperate language, an extraordinary willingness to rush to conclusions and sometimes an actual mirthless enthusiasm for outrage has, combined with a lack of level-headed and prudent leadership, brought about a hard, bright, livid atmosphere, one which smothers honest dialogue and, disturbingly, makes Britain feel quite unlike itself.  I think it is no wonder that people are upset and alienated when, for instance, irresponsible use is made of the positions enjoyed by cherished institutions to advocate partisan causes — many seem to have no idea how much damage they risk doing to their own reputations — and the politicisation of whole swathes of ordinary life is so relentless that there seems to be no escape.   There is even the nasty feeling that in some quarters the pandemic is being exploited deliberately for political ends.  Here, too, one feels the ground lurching under one’s feet, the lumbering of great engines of power.

But I think that much of what I mused in March still stands: even amid deepening shadow we have seen where the light is, and how brightly it shines; we have seen the light that darkness cannot overpower.  Many people have been moved to tremendous kindness and generosity, even to heroism, by this pandemic, and even by the unpleasant politics.   And there has been wisdom to glean, too: the long quarantines provided a blank background against which it was unusually easy to see how unexpectedly good days and hard days tend to arrive; how they all dawn alike.  And then there is the Church, which I think has been, in its quiet way, as alive and imaginative under this year’s circumstances as ever, or at the very least has trudged faithfully on.  And I think sometimes of the rededication of England to Our Lady of Walsingham, an event which turned out to coincide so intriguingly with the first, most frightening days of the pandemic.  Perhaps at some point I will write more about this, but it seems to tell us that England is, in the right way, worth loving for its own sake; that, amid this age of anti-patriotism, and a general deep unhappiness and listlessness of a kind that seldom ends well, even such flawed and mortal things as nations can rightly be loved and revered.

And what of ourselves?   What hope is there for us; what fundamental answer is there to the deepest question, the question we cannot even utter?  We who try to follow the Gospel, believing that truth is not merely something we construct or concoct, but is Truth itself, and comes from God, have indeed been given an answer.  It is an answer we could never have designed ourselves, nor ever thought to hope for; it is nothing so straightforward as an explanation; rather, it is a mystery, the same mystery as was given to us two thousand and twenty years ago.  Yet as sure as it is mysterious, it is by the helpless newborn Child in the manger that all the engines of power, and the kings of the earth, sickness, grief, and even death itself are undone.  Every year the wondrous truth is spoken: this is how God chose to enter the world, not by marching en masse against the foe, but by ‘sneaking behind enemy lines’, as C. S. Lewis put it; entering the world exactly like us, in weakness and woe; no less a Lord, but one who is obeyed in love, not fear.

‘Fear not’, the angel had to tell even the hardened, hill-patrolling shepherds; Heaven knows we need telling too.  Power may thrive on fear, but only for a time, and it never expects the one thing that defeats it, Love; it never expects the Baby in the manger.  And so it is by this one Lord’s law of love that the potentates of power are brought low, and, better still, that good triumphs in our very hearts, and in the end shall triumph for ever.

That shabby stable was a fortress, not of worldly might, but of Love, the real thing: it was a little citadel of Love.   I think of all the millions of such fortresses all over the world in which the feast of Christmas, even this muted Christmas of 2020, will be kept faithfully, and merriment made.  That is where hope lies.

Wishing all readers as merry a Christmas as possible after this hard year.

‘Sing Lullaby’: a setting written in 1920 by Herbert Howells (1892–1983) of words by his friend and fellow son of Gloucestershire Frederick William Harvey (1888–1957). There is an interesting article at MusicWeb International about this carol and its simple but piercing words.