Time and Christmastide

Yes, indeed, Happy Christmas to one and all!  I hope both readers are keeping a merry Feast.  

What is it, I wonder, that Christmastide does to our sense of time?   For time in these twelve days does not seem only linear and horizontal, as it does usually.  There is a strange sensation that, as we pass through this diamond in the ring of the year, time is distorted and refracted so that ancient things feel much closer than normal.  And there is that slanted sunlight, T.S. Eliot’s ‘midwinter spring’ and the ‘glare that is blindness in the early afternoon’, that shines as if out of the past.  Peter Hitchens has written simply and beautifully here of ‘the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present’, whose effect he describes as being weaker now than in the ‘austere Protestant Britain’ of his youth.

To some extent this has to do, of course, with ringing the old year out and the new in.  I think, however, that the mystery of time is bound up with the very heart of Christmas, rather than the New Year.  Every year we churchgoers mark a chronological conundrum.  The central and fathomless mystery is, of course, that God, who is timeless, made a direct intervention in human history, clambering through the narrow doors of time to live on earth beside us.  Even as we consider this moment, though, we must look at once backwards and forwards.  We cannot understand it fully without knowing that it had already been foretold by prophets; neither can we understand it without the Cross in the backs of our minds, as the gift of myrrh (for embalming) and several carols remind us.  Nor can we contemplate Christmas without turning to the mystery of the future, towards which the whole faith points.  So we look backwards to a past event, then we look both further backwards, then slightly forwards again, and finally turn right around in order to look forwards properly.  Christmas is perfect, pluperfect, future in the past (if that is the right term) and future.

This sensation is so strong that it has survived, even if weakened as Peter Hitchens says, into the secular world.  Is this not the only time of year when we leave our twenty-first century cynicism aside to take up old customs again without critiquing or scoffing, when we exchange cards depicting scenes of choristers and snowed-on English spires, when supermarkets play old-fashioned music in earnest, when, as Betjeman observed in a moment of dryness, ‘girls in slacks remember Dad / And oafish louts remember Mum’, or when we decorate our houses and wear party-hats without knowing why, except that an invisible but benevolent force obliges us to?  

The more I look for evidence of this overlapping and mingling of time past and time to come with the present moment, the more I find.  There is the famous example of Dickens’ three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future in A Christmas Carol.  It is in T.S. Eliot’s poem The Cultivation of Christmas Trees.  His portrait of Christmas as seen by a child — a child

For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel 
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree 
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.

and who

wonders at the Christmas Tree: 
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder 
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext […]

— turns seamlessly to a contemplation of the eve of life, still hanging upon that line ‘Let him continue in the spirit of wonder,’

So that the reverence and the gaiety 
May not be forgotten in later experience, 
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium, 
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure […]

So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas 
(By “eightieth” meaning whichever is last) 
The accumulated memories of annual emotion 
May be concentrated into a great joy 
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion 
When fear came upon every soul: 
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end 
And the first coming of the second coming.

And here it is in these words of the Queen during her Christmas address:

At this time of year, few sights evoke more feelings of cheer and goodwill than the twinkling lights of a Christmas tree.  The popularity of a tree at Christmas is due in part to my great-great grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. After this touching picture was published, many families wanted a Christmas tree of their own, and the custom soon spread.

Thus Her Majesty draws our attention to two heirlooms which continue, almost miraculously it might seem, to bind us in 2015 to the Victorian age: the Christmas tree and her own British crown.  Her words, which we are invited to bear in mind for the coming year, make the past feels much nearer and more familiar.  (By the way, what presidential address could say anything like this?).

I can hear it too in this carol, the ‘other’ setting by Harold Darke of Rosetti’s carol In the Bleak Midwinter, which seems to be being sung longer ago than 2000, and further away than Cambridge…

Perhaps we might expect to be frightened by this confusion of time.  I feel only wonder and enchantment, and so I willingly answer the Queen’s invitation to be ‘grateful for all that brings light to our lives’, and echo her quotation from St John’s Gospel: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’

‘Easter, 2015.’

The shadow of the Great War seems to have lain particularly heavy across these last few months.  Perhaps it will not clear until 2018, and probably we would be sadder and wiser if it did not.  Several things have led me to brood on it: listening to a great deal of English music from that era (Grainger, Quilter and early Howells), my ever-deepening interest in Edwardian poetry, including those who were in fact lumped together as the ‘Georgians’ (Masefield, W.W. Gibson, Edward Thomas, Bridges, Drinkwater, etc.) and also an awareness of my own age, which a hundred years ago would surely have destined me for the trenches.  All of these — music, poetry and youth — that war wounded, even where it did not stamp them quite out.

Even Easter is darkened, and though I feel reluctant to post the following poem of Edward Thomas, I think there is a duty to read it this year, and indeed to learn it by heart [1]:

IN MEMORIAM (EASTER, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

These lines need to be read twice at least, because there are at least two phases to the blows with which, one by one, they smite the reader.  The writer and journalist Peter Hitchens has on several occasions written powerfully about this poem, and about how ‘it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep' [2].  Indeed it does, and in several ways.  For one thing, it seems to rest upon three wholesome English words, ‘left', ‘should' and ‘never', whose plainness seems to rarefy into gleaming rock under the poem's immense weight.  Nevertheless, the poem's full sense is hidden until ruthlessly unveiled by those very last words 'never again'.  

Then even these words let fall a second blow, as modern readers realise with Hitchens that ‘No Englishman gathers flowers for his sweethearts in the woods any more. That world is dead. Everyone who lived in it is dead, having had no time to pass on its customs to his sons and daughters’ [3].  This poem measures and records the extent of the war’s pernicious reach: into the very earth of an English woodland floor and, almost unseen, into the present day.  Most men these days, no doubt along with their girlfriends, would squirm and scoff at the idea of gathering flowers — and at the old music and old verse — and we know they would — and that war is why.

Flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood, Easter, 2015.

Everything in this poem’s vision is upside-down and back-to-front, so the unexpected presence of those flowers becomes the proof of the unnatural, indeed inhuman, absence of young men, and an encounter with a clump of flowers begets thoughts of distance, dissipation and death.  It is also worth remembering that the poem was written in Eastertide.  Thomas has not only the ordinary life of ordinary folk in mind; he surely sees a hideous inversion of Easter itself.  Where Mary Magdalene came upon an empty tomb that proclaimed the nearness of the resurrected Christ, Thomas finds a flourishing flower-bed declaring the end of England.  Where Easter was the day of Christianity’s birth, was the war the death of Christendom?  

This is Peter Hitchens’ view: he gives the Great War as the first point at which Britain, and indeed Europe, ceased as a whole to believe Christianity seriously.  He thinks it ‘safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to my own country than any other single force.  The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three-quarters empty after 1945.  And I would add that, by all but destroying British Christianity, these wars may come to destroy the spirit of the country’ [4].  I suppose there is little surprise that the British people as a whole lost their faith afterwards.  I may not praise them for it, but neither do I feel willing to blame them.

And yet, and yet… there is still a faith to uphold; the churches await us still; there is a crucifix in them all; the empty tomb remains; the old question is still asked of us.  It may be that the Great War has so changed the course of history that it will in time bring this country, even Europe, to an end.  This seems likely, for in many ways ours is a dying civilisation, and there is much sorrow in store for those of us who are fond of Britain.  Believers in God, however, must take themselves in hand.  There is plenty of hope in this country still, if sought in the right places, and the Church as a whole is alive and healthy, and forbids us to despair.  And even if all civilisations rise and fall, Easter remains undiminished.  All the sins of men were paid for on the Cross; even the Great War was paid for on the Cross, and Easter triumphs over even the Great War and even all the sins of men.  That is not said glibly by me, but plainly by Christ.  The vision of Easter remains clear, if we can manage, and have the courage, to behold it.  

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[1] Thomas, Edward.  Collected Poems. (London, Faber, 2004).  p. 63.  See also ‘The Cherry Trees’, p. 112.

[2] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/how-shall-we-mark-the-centenary-of-the-great-war.html

[3] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/how-do-you-make-grown-men-weep.html

[4] Hitchens, Peter. The Rage Against God (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). p. 57.