I remember Christmas like unevenly matched pearls strung on carols and secular music you hear only two weeks a year, while dreaming of a White Christmas, and a Silent Night in frantic malls.
The tree, skipped this year, some red berry branches and the inherited Nativity set out, a few remaining paper cards, unheard phone calls replaced by Facebook, texts and emails. The multiple demands for donations filling up inboxes.
The mass-made stockings with glitter names mostly empty now. Gift cards for those with unknown wishes, And chocolate, and chocolate, and wine. Turkey and cranberries, shortbread.
And family traditions and stories, some joyful and some hard to swallow - the absences and angers, the reluctant visits, the empty dining room chairs. Church choirs carolling. and Christmas albums on YouTube, and “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and a Christmas-themed movie. With eggnog.
Bare black branches twist against the leached-grey sky. My eyes, pulled to the leaping, racing squirrels, see only movement, blinded, in the moment, to the shape of the trees and the message of the sky.
I think I know, as my eyes follow what moves, but my feeling-branches spread, reaching out their complex paths resting within the Holy Whole.
Midwinter is a time of darkness, a time when the light lessens and disappears, a time when we mix hope and fear. The worldly powers shape much, but not every detail, of our lives. We can, as this Christian story suggests, as Mary might have experienced it, face our lives with faith, with belief that out of our struggles, meaning will emerge.
This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” – Matthew 2:15
It was a dark time – Mary had wanted to be glad Joseph had chosen her but that strange dream …
and old Elizabeth, swollen with child, calling her blessed, saying a Child was growing in her too, yet she’d never… except in that strange dream;
and she had swollen and Joseph, angry and sad and puzzled, had planned to hide her disgrace, but he dreamed too, and married her but slept apart and would not look at her.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time – the rulers had decided to count them all where their ancestors had lived so Joseph and Mary must walk
for days, weeks, and her so large and tired, and both so puzzled and hopeful and fearful. Could the Holy One really have chosen them?
Still they must walk, as the rulers demanded, in the cold, in the darkening time, they must walk into Bethlehem, this ancient town, filled with others obeying the rulers who wanted to count them and did not care about walking, or a room for a young woman with her time pressing on her, with the Holy One’s Gift demanding His time on earth, and no room for this family
It was a dark time.
There was light at His birth – light in Mary’s eyes and light in Joseph’s smile and light flowing out, pulsing out around the wondrous Child
light that brought the amazed shepherds, and star light that brought the Wise Ones from afar to worship Him
and light that the eyes in the dark could see, whispering to a man with too much power that he was nothing beside such Light,
and the Holy One sent another dream to guard the Light, to hide it in a foreign land
and Mary and Joseph fled into Egypt, carrying the Light away from the darkness of Herod’s massacre of babies.
It was a dark time.
It was a dark time – waiting in a foreign land, watching Him grow, and learning patience and trust, waiting
The fat full moon thrusts
its hard light
into my room
striping my bed
in fertile mourning darkness.
Against the greying sky,
waving branches warn
the cold is here
and coming,
in winter’s inevitable embrace.
A confusion of branches
with still leaves bright against
the firs pretending to be black:
morning out the bedroom window
while in my warm bed.
Lost - time past and unconsciousness
in the cold rising required
now with eyes opened:
the day with its duties and
small pleasures waits.
Now that it’s winter
the grass is stiff and frosted
and you are not
here to play summer games,
how shall I laugh and
stay warm?
What does winter hold?
Are there gifts
I can accept?
My desk is covered with ‘shoulds’
and some overflow to the floor.
Morning finds me regretting
my weight gain in the dark.
I want to avoid any stretching
and I’ve used up all my ‘feels’.
Now my watch is demanding
I answer all my texts.
The thermostat has left
and the microwave has coughed.
I’m out of toilet paper
and the world keeps spinning on.
I shall go naked into my shroud,
no robes or rings,
just flesh and bones,
go shrouded into the earth
where flesh will leave
bone,
and bone will linger.
Learning Living 