Bleak Beauty
The power of Advent as Midwinter
In this Edition:
New Writing: Bleak Beauty; The Power of Advent as Midwinter
From the Archive: The Dragon in the Station Buffet
Poem of the Week: Performance for an Audience of One
NEWS: Launching Alpha Jeunes
Bleak Beauty
The power of Advent as Midwinter
To suggest that Christmas is an accident of history is to invite the wrath and retribution of, well, almost everyone. We love Christmas, and we don’t much like to question its origins. There is though a ‘happy accident’ that has bequeathed to us one of the most powerful aspects of this yearly celebration.
It happened when the Christian commemoration of the birth of Jesus came to be centred on Western and Northern Europe, taking the place of a range of pagan midwinter festivals. The traditional English description of the Christmas season as ‘Yuletide’ reflects this cultural source - ‘Yule’ was a midwinter celebration marked in Norse cultures and imported into Britain with the Vikings. Similar observances existed in pre-Christian Slavic and Germanic societies. The Roman empire had a long-established midwinter festival with the celebration of Saturnalia, honouring Saturn, the god of agriculture, in gratitude for the harvest season. Running from around the 17th to the 24th of December this festival, which included rituals of gift-giving, straddled the winter solstice on Dec 22nd, marking the important transition from deepest winter to the long slow climb towards spring. December 25th, for the Romans, was then set aside to commemorate the rebirth of ‘Sol Invictus’, the unconquerable sun. Dionysus, the Greek God of wine (also known as Bacchus), shares the same December 25th birthday, celebrated in a 12-day orgy of drunkenness and revelry. These and other traditions laid the foundations for a midwinter celebration until, in the 4th Century, the Emperor Constantine established what we now know as Christmas Day.
This appropriation of Dec 25 as the birth date of Jesus brings together two quite distinct themes - the coming of the Messiah on the one hand and on the other a deep and intuitive desire to see light overcoming darkness. A late December setting means that the shortest days and darkest nights of the year are associated with the night of the nativity. The season of Advent derives its imaginative power chiefly from this convergence of the marking of midwinter with the birth of the Saviour. It is hard to imagine an early September festival - the most likely, though by no means certain, date for the actual birth of Jesus - having quite the same potency. The harshness of the Northern European winter, especially for those of meagre means, lends force to the hope of Christmas. Like Mary and Elizabeth - a woman old in her childlessness and her cousin too young to even think about motherhood - we receive the news that God is on the move. The silence of the Heavens is broken. Two overlapping pregnancies spark a glimmer of God’s promised coming. Of possibility. Rumours of glory: the first rays of a dawn light.
Into the stasis of our winter, the ground frost-bitten; every seed held in cold-storage, a word is spoken: of hope on the horizon, of good news for the poor. Whether these emotions arise from the Gospel itself or from our intuitive connection to the changing of the season, they speak deeply of our longing for the Messiah. We take the physical experience of cold; of darkness, and overlay it on the Bible’s narrative, so that Isaiah’s words ring out with heightened beauty:
“The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.” (Isaiah 9:2 NIV)
We sing traditional carols that in reality have little or nothing to do with the birth of Jesus -
In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter
Long ago.
- and their stark narrative serves as a metaphor that amplifies, rather than diminishes, the power of the nativity.
I have found the advent season deeply moving since moving to rural France some fifteen years ago. In the fields and orchards of Normandy there is a rugged harshness to winter - a ruddiness like the cheeks of a shepherd just down from the mountain. Here it is easy to enter-in to the waiting of generations past, of those whose lives were exponentially harder than my own. It is not difficult, under a crisp, starlit sky, free of light pollution, to join them on their journey to the stable. To believe, with them, that this one birth can change everything.
To some hard-line believers the pagan origins of Christmas put the trimmings - the trees and mistletoe; the feasting and festivities - off limits. Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic banned Christmas outright for a number of years in the 17th Century. More moderate protestors keep the feast but won’t give house-room to a tree. Their argument is that if aspects of the holidays don’t have their origin in the Bible - worse still, if they do have their origin in pre-Christian pagan rites - then they have no place in a believer’s December. What these dissenters miss, though, is the fruit that can come from commemorating Christ at the same time as marking midwinter. An accident of history this overlap may be, but it has much to offer us in grasping the true meaning of the incarnation. Jesus may not have been born on the darkest night of the year, but he does come to bring healing to the darkest regions of our souls. He may not have arrived at the moment when our longing for light and warmth is at its deepest, but he is good news to those who most long for the dawn.
Midwinter night is not the date on which all our darkness is in an instant dispelled. The actual difference in sunlight between December 22nd and 23rd is unmeasurable to the naked eye: but this is the moment at which the promise of spring becomes real. From this night forward the darkness is retreating. The light is growing stronger. The full flourishing of spring is on its way, and will arrive. Something changes in the winter solstice that, noticed or not, will ultimately affect us all. What better metaphor could there be for the birth of the child who will one day set us free?
Image: https://unsplash.com/@aaronburden
From the Archive: The Dragon in the Station Buffet
So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
It was snowing in Geneva the night I learned how deep the meaning of forgiveness runs.
My father left our family a few weeks before my eleventh birthday. It was a painful leaving for three reasons. The first was that we hadn’t expected it. We’d been living in Canada and had agreed, as a family, to return to Europe. We would spend the summer in Ireland, where we owned a cottage, before re-settling for the new term in England. The deal was that my mother would go on ahead with the four children – I am the youngest – and that my father would settle his affairs in Canada, sell the car, finish off his job at the university and join us in a few weeks. Except he didn’t. We waited, expecting him daily, and he didn’t show. When he eventually turned up, for one evening, it was to tell my mother it was over.
It turned out that while we’d been waiting for him he’d been on a tour of Europe with his girlfriend, a postgrad student twenty years his junior. He showed me photographs of his trip that for some reason he thought I might like. There was a shot of him wearing the most ridiculous swimming trunks I had ever seen – the trunks of a playboy, not a dad. I didn’t know him any more.
The second reason was that, once he went, he went completely. We didn’t know where he was and apart from one cheque the following month he didn’t send my mother a single penny in support. We couldn’t stay in the cottage as there was no work locally for my mother. Schools were ten miles away. She didn’t have a car. Overnight she went from being a senior teacher, the wife of a university lecturer and socially active in Newfoundland’s expat European community, to being homeless, jobless and broke with four children to support. Financially, this never changed. He sent nothing. I saw him briefly for a misjudged holiday visit to Ireland when I was twelve. After that, nothing. I would be thirty-four before I spoke to him again.
The third reason his leaving was so difficult is, for me, the most painful to write about. Until I was ten years old I thought my father was the most amazing human being on the planet. I remember to this day being at school as a six-year-old and feeling sorry for the other kids who had such ordinary dads. Dads who worked all day then came home to fall asleep on the couch with the TV on. Dads who didn’t sketch and draw and design buildings and carve driftwood and make sound sculptures on a reel-to-reel tape recorder. My dad taught me to paint with oils; let me help him rebuild our Irish cottage; recorded my readings of the poems I brought home from school. In Paris, in 1968, when students were rioting in the streets and the government was on the verge of collapse, he took me to parties with his artist friends, where jazz musicians talked drunkenly to ballerinas, and painters showed their work while I fell asleep on the floor. In Ireland he made us a sand yacht for the low-tide beach, then when we tired of it he let us rework the fabric of the sail into superhero capes. He bought a donkey from a passing tinker, then from somewhere got hold of a cart for her to pull. He took us mussel-digging and taught us to soak them in a bucket of fresh water for forty-eight hours, on pain of death, to get the poison out of them. He collected old wine bottles and, with paraffin, string and a bucket of cold water, showed us how to convert them into vases. In the winter of 1963, the coldest in living memory and our first in the unheated cottage, he gerrymandered electric fires out of old biscuit tins and let us fill our rooms with the smell of burning dust.
I had no idea that all this time he was driving my mother up the wall. I didn’t know he hit her. I wasn’t part of the fierce and violent rows my brother and eldest sister had with him. I knew nothing of their frustrations with him, or his with them. I could have known, had I been looking. When I was five, at our first home in Canada, we had an Oldsmobile Super 88 and a caravan to pull with it. My brother, thirteen at the time and assumed to be in some way responsible, let us drink stale water from the caravan’s tank. This constituted in my father’s eyes a dereliction of duty. He took exception and frogmarched my brother back into the caravan for a dressing-down. We could only watch from the house as the fragile vehicle rocked on its axle with the force and terror of their confrontation. In Paris, when I was eight, I overheard a conversation I shouldn’t have and realized there was some kind of disconnect between the date of my brother’s birthday and that of my parents’ marriage. The gap was apparently too short, though I didn’t know what that meant. All this was swirling around me – the secrets; the tensions; the evidence of violence simmering below the surface – but this did not mean that I understood. In my world, he was god. My dad was amazing. His energy, his drive, his love for life defined my universe. His departure was the collapse of a star. A black hole where the sun used to be. I shut down. My mother was preoccupied with holding down full-time employment; begging for housing from friends; gritting her teeth through the teen crisis the two eldest were passing through when break-up day came. She had no time for me; didn’t even know I was being sexually abused. Rarely spoke into my world. I’m a little hazy on what a regular adolescence is supposed to look like because mine was in a kind of lock-down from the start.
I think my father wrote once or twice. I do remember the arrival of one entirely inappropriate birthday gift. For the most part, though, there was nothing. The minimal communication he did attempt was over by the time I turned fourteen. For seventeen years I lived without contact. I counted, almost daily, the debt that he was stacking up. The only property we owned was in Ireland, where at the time divorce was illegal, meaning that my mother got nothing. We lost the cottage, and all its sweet memories. We were rescued in the first year by a communist couple my mother knew in Bath, who believed in sharing their possessions – and their home – with those in need. After this it was council housing; benefits; free school meals. Teachers who took on a wistful look when they spoke to me. In a relatively untroubled city I was that troubled child.
Fast-forward to 1993. I was married with children of my own. I had become a Christian; was growing in my faith. We had moved as missionaries to Normandy. At some stage I became convinced of the power and priority of forgiveness. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life with this anger; this sense of disappointment and debt. My father had married Martine, the postgrad student he had met in Canada. The affair that had finally broken the spine of my parents’ marriage. They were living in Switzerland. I can’t remember how I tracked down his address – my mother had previously tried and failed – but somehow I did. I wrote to express a clumsy forgiveness; to let him know that I would not hold against him all that had happened in the past. I told him that he had grandchildren he might one day want to meet. We exchanged a few letters. And then he phoned me unexpectedly, and we set up a rendezvous.
We borrowed a flat from friends in Geneva and drove our three excited children down into the snow for the Christmas holidays. I knew my father wanted to meet them, but I insisted that the two of us meet alone first. By the time this could be arranged it was the evening of Christmas Eve. We met in the restaurant of Geneva’s Cornavin railway station. As thick flakes of snow piled up in the streets outside and the waiters wiped tables and prepared to head home to their families and festivities, we talked. We caught up. We filled in the years.
But here’s the thing, and this is what I’ve spent this long back-story getting to. For the whole length of our conversation I was acutely aware of a burden, a weight sitting on the table between us. There had been few other customers in the place. The staff were ready to shut up shop. Just us, at our table, talking for the first time in two decades. The weight that squatted invisibly in front of me salivating like a barely tamed dragon was the debt. Everything he owed me. The money. The support. The companionship. All the times he wasn’t there in my need. All the pains I had suffered in his absence; because of his absence. I had even added it all up, once or twice – worked out how much the debt would come to if you monetized it; how much I could buy for my family with that money. All of this was there, snorting and steaming on the table, and it was my choice. To claim it, or to let it steam. Even as I walked into the restaurant I still didn’t know if I would make the claim. Was that why I had come – to collect?
A few minutes into our conversation I understood. There are times when a debt gets so big that it cannot be repaid. Yes, he could have done something about it, years earlier, if he’d wanted to. But now it was too much for him. If I made the claim, the claim would crush him; this frail old man living with the turbulence of his regrets. I withdrew my claim. Cancelled it. Declared it void. Because there was no other basis on which we could move forward. I had every right to make the claim, but I had to make a free choice not to. I had to forgive, with or without an apology to work from. I chose a conversation that made no reference to the compensation I was owed.
Even though I had understood years earlier that my journey of faith was important to me, it was that day – 24th December 1993 – that it went so deep in me that I’ve been unable since to dislodge it. Unless there is in our world a fulcrum of forgiveness, a place at which unpayable debt can be dealt with, we are lost. It was a good job, in the end, that I had seventeen years to rehearse for this forgiveness, because it took me that long to understand it. Forgiveness is not the gentle balancing of our small discrepancies. It is the cancelling of unpayable debt: the reducing to nothing of a burden too heavy to bear. It is the pressing on in relationship even though there is a steaming pile of manure right there on the table. In my experience – which I do not claim as normative, but do claim as authentic – the model of such radical forgiveness is uniquely present in the life and death of Jesus. It is this that has made me a Christian, and this that has persuaded me to keep the faith, despite the many incitements to abandon it: incitements that have surfaced cyclically through my journey of faith, which in recent years have taken on the potency and power of a snowstorm.
Kelly, Gerard. The Prodigal Evangelical: Why, despite everything, I still belong to the tribe, SPCK, 2015
Poem: Performance for an Audience of One
If you had been the only one:
Yours the only ticket sold;
Your solitary body
Spoilt for choice
In an ocean of empty seats.
If you had been
The only one:
He still would have staged
The whole show.The brooding, hovering chords
Of the overture
Unfolding
For your ears only:
Stars spinning out like Catherine wheels
Across a dark but lightening set,
Until dawn was uncorked
On green home.Act 1: the building of a nation:
A people wooed and won
And lost
And won again.
For you alone the whole cast
Weaving and turning through dances
To fill a joyous expanse of stage.Act 2: the cry of a child
In a vastly empty universe;
The adventure of hope and betrayal;
The seat-gripping climate:
Triumph diving, death defying,
Through the fiery hoop of tragedy.
The clamour of the crowd scenes
Building
Toward an unimagined finale –
A cosmos, purged of guilt
Restored,
Dressed for dancing.If you had been the only one,
Your grimy pounds
The total take:
He still would have staged
The whole show
And wept for joy
At the warmth
of your applause.
From Gerard Kelly, Spoken Worship: Living Words for Personal and Public Prayer, Zondervan, 2007
NEWS: Launching Alpha Jeunes
In January 2025, we’ll launch our first Alpha course for the church in Caen. We’ll be using the Youth Alpha (‘Alpha Jeunes’) material and encouraging whole families to attend together - plus we get to share brunch! Here’s Chrissie announcing the new course:
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