Come on, ring those bells

Come on, ring those bells

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

The angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid. Take Mary into your home. It is through the Holy Spirit that a child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.”

– From Matthew 1

It’s a week till Christmas. We’re entering, voluntarily, what Evelyn Underhill in “The Light of the World” called the “mingled homeliness and mystery of the Christian revelation and of our own little lives, full of family pictures and ideas.”

Where were you born? Not in a manger, but where? Can you remember yourself as a little person, a single soul in the “small, fugitive, imperfect creation” we call mankind?

God so loved the world to give us the deepest essential thoughts and secrets of his heart … and how does he do this? Through the baby. A baby like we all have been, baby boy, baby girl. Goo-goo.

It is reasonable for us to wonder about all of this, swarmed into surrender by songs from on high and celebrations of donkeys and sheep, led by the ox, dancing around the stable. The bleak mid-winter of our quiet, desperate lives is thoroughly interrupted by this celebration in the stars.

We don’t get to plan any of it. Neither comfort nor reason play into any calculation of the “unmeasured outpouring of divine life into the helplessness of babyhood.” Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given … given … given!

Underhill thinks perhaps “human nature is like a stable inhabited by the ox of passion and the ass or prejudice; animals which take up a lot of room and which I suppose most of us are feeding on the quiet.”

Perhaps we can’t help our passion or our prejudice. But pushing them apart, the baby is born anyway, laid in the manger. And along with those donkeys and oxen, we fall on our knees before him.

*           *           *

Just three weeks before Christmas, 1875, a steamer named Deutschland, full of immigrants, foundered near England. 157 died, mostly from hypothermia, when rescue took far too long. A few weeks after, Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins memorialized five Franciscan German nuns on the ship, headed to work in St. Louis hospitals, all gone.

Hopkins struggled to hear “the unmeasured outpouring of divine life” in all this death. He wrote, as always, in joyous strains that are hard to read unless you almost sing them. Here are parts and portions of his poem:

Thou mastering me

God! giver of breath and bread;

World’s strand, sway of the sea;

Lord of living and dead …

I am soft sift in an hourglass

 

Manger, maiden’s knee;

The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat …

Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing

Not vault them …

 

Into the snows she sweeps,

Hurling the haven behind,

The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps,

For the infinite air is unkind,

And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow,

Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;

Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow

Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

Dame, at our door

Drowned, and among our shoals,

Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward …

 

Now burn, new born to the world,

Doubled-naturèd name,

The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled

Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame,

Mid-numbered he in three of the thunder-throne!

Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came;

Kind, but royally reclaiming his own;

A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fíre hard-hurled.

 Underhill closes her Christmas essay with an understanding of what the wondrous idea of “union with God” might really mean: that “every bit of our human nature be transfigured in Christ, woven up into his creative life and activity, absorbed into his redeeming purpose, heart, soul, mind and strength.”

(In It’s a Wonderful Life, Zuzu Bailey sees a falling star. And she says to the papa so recently restored to her, “O Daddy, teacher says every time a bell rings, an angel gets their wings!”)

Ms. Underhill says about this elusive “union with God,” that “each time it happens it means that one of God’s creatures has achieved its destiny.”

Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east.

 *           *           *

Even in the darkest evenings, Lord, the poet writes and singer sings, “It is well with my soul.” Nowhere, now or then or ever, is there anything to fear. You are the God of us.

 Evelyn Underhill, “The Light of the World,” from Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, December 18. Online at  http://www.liturgies.net/saints/evelynunderhill/light.htm

Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” 1876

It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Frank Capra, 1946

https://www.davesandel.net/category/advent-and-christmas-devotions-2019/

http://www.christiancounselingservice.com/archive.php?year=2019