‘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.

‘Grant them his blessing that now maken cheer’

Christmas is now the only time of the year when nostalgia is allowed, so we take full advantage of it.  Once a year we modern folk admit, exhausted, that we cannot stand the headlong pursuit of an abstract future any longer.  And we return to sanity: out come the tinsel and the traditions, and the carols and the crackers and the cards.  For once the scoffers win nobody over.  Supermarkets realise that words like ‘magic’ and ‘wonderland’ will swell their sales.  In my London suburb, lights hang from eaves and the innocence of candles is alight in windows: brave beacons of peace and goodwill against the traffic and the darkness.  We think of homely things and home — rightly enough, since that is the meaning of the Greek nostos, from which we derive ‘nostalgia’.  We gather our families for meals and bake Christmas cakes and dig out board games. We remember childhood Christmasses; we mark old customs; we put the radio on for the carols.  ‘And girls in slacks remember Dad, and oafish louts remember Mum’.  We turn homewards.

But in many ways the feast we celebrate today is not really very nostalgic.  The idea that Almighty God in his limitlessness should take on the limits of man, even to the point of knowing a newborn baby’s helplessness, is an unfailingly disconcerting thought, far stranger and wilder than any pagan winter festival; beyond the rationalisation of the secular mind.  And apart from the light and warmth of the manger, and the Lady’s miraculous motherliness, there is nothing particularly homely about the Nativity scene.  The census could not have had worse timing; Joseph had come all this way to his home town only to find the dreadful accommodation of a stable, as we all know, and now his wife was actually having to give birth in it; the town was unfamiliar to her at least, the temperature had plummeted in the clear Middle Eastern night, an infanticidal tyrant was abroad, hopping mad with jealousy and with a plan of pre-emptive retribution to match; safety lay only as far away as Egypt.  And there are the other things foreshadowed, not least in the gifts that were already on the road with three kings: the Passion and the Crucifixion and the seeming finality of the entombment.  ‘He came unto his own, and his own received him not’.

Yet, deeper still, perhaps this mood of Christmas wistfulness is entirely meet and right after all.  The child came at Christmas in order to show us the way home.  And home is what we are all looking for. We are prone to forgetting that we are not at home here on earth; that we do not really belong here.  We may daydream vainly in search of a lost past, an unattainable future or a distant land where we think we could belong, but really we try to suppress our homesickness and have accustomed ourselves to exile.  So our real home, though longed-for, is bound to seem unfamiliar to us.  Strange and disconcerting though the facts of the Incarnation and the Nativity are, our instinctive reaction is sound: this is the way home.  Let us allow the strange homely spirit of Christmas, which is true nostalgia, to break through the cramping walls of our age, and resonate with our inward longing.

We are not the first to feel it.  It is there, hauntingly, in the carols of medieval England, for instance; in the wide-eyed-ness there is about them, and the great depth behind their deceptive simplicity:

 Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting.
 Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling.

 I saw a fair maiden siten and sing.
 She lulled a little child, a swete Lording.

 That eternal Lord is He that made alle thing:
 Of alle lordes He is Lord, of alle kinges King.

 There was mickle melody at that childes birth:
 Alle that were in Hev’ne bliss they made mickle mirth.

 Angels bright they sang that night, and saiden to that child:
 Blessed be thou, and so be she that is both meek and mild.

 Pray we now to that child, and to his mother dere,
 Grant them blessing, that now maken cheer.

 Lullay, my liking, my dere son, my sweting.
 Lullay my dere herte, my own dere darling.

May God indeed grant us His blessing who now make cheer.  Merry Christmas!

Philip Lawson’s setting of the carol Lullay, myn liking, from the fifteenth-century Sloane Manuscript 2593 (British Library).