O Earthly/Holy Night (Christmas Eve)

​It was a time like this,
War & tumult of war,
a horror in the air.
Hungry yawned the abyss–
and yet there came the star
and the child most wonderfully there.
 
It was time like this
of fear & lust for power,
license & greed and blight–
and yet the Prince of bliss
came into the darkest hour
in quiet & silent light.
 
And in a time like this
how celebrate his birth
when all things fall apart?
Ah! wonderful it is
with no room on the earth
the stable is our heart.
 
(Into the Darkest Hour, Madeleine L’Engle)
 
The romance of Christmas can sometimes make the nativity scene feel so otherworldly – a bit like a fairy tale in a fantastical world… but the holy night of Christ’s birth was as earthly as they come.
 
Mary and Joseph were tired and uncomfortable from their long journey – a journey enforced by governmental bureaucracy (honestly, if there’s anything that can help make that night feel a little more real and familiar it’s the frustration of a census). The manger smelt. Mary’s birth was a birth like so many others – hard work, painful, rewarding. The baby Jesus was a baby like so many others – crying with a volume that seems incongruous with lungs that size. And all around this family (who admittedly were swept up and overwhelmed by something rather incredible) the earth kept spinning. People ate together, argued and made up, travellers looked for places to stay, the sick deteriorated or recovered, the poor went to sleep hungrier than they would have wished. As people lay down to bed they pondered and prayed the things many of us ponder and pray about – the worries of the day, or the coming day, changes in their children, their partners, their parents. But they also pondered and prayed about things many of us might have been insulated from: the temperamentality of weather and what that might do to their livelihoods, the violence of their colonisers and what that might mean for their lives. Birds sung as the sun set and as it rose the next morn, and in between night animals scurried hither and thither. This holy night, was an earthly night. So strange and familiar all at once.
 
On a night like this, in a place far from here, but nevertheless here: Christ our saviour was born. Not born in the ethereal world of fairy tales, but born flesh and blood in a time like this – a time of joys and horrors, uncertainty and loss, the mundane and material. Jesus was born in this world for the night’s that feel holy and the many which don’t, born for all who live and toil and rest on this earth. Christ came so that in all times we might say, “yes, God is with us.”