Articles - From the Vicar

There is a morning;
Time brings it nearer,
Brittle with frost
And starlight. The owls sing
In the parishes. The people rise
And walk to the churches’
Stone lanterns, there to kneel
And eat the new bread
Of love, washing it down
With the sharp taste
Of blood they will shed. 

Regular readers of my letters will know how much I am drawn to the poetry of R.S.Thomas. The poem quoted above, Christmas, beguiles us with its opening lines. Here we have the images of Christmas drawn from a thousand seasonal cards: the frost, the stars, the walk to the ancient church building. Woven into these images is the great Christmas hope of a new beginning – ‘there is a morning; time brings it nearer’ -  that we shall celebrate with joy once again this month. Yet as so often with Thomas there is a sting in the tail. As the poem enters its final lines his allusion to the Eucharist, ‘the new bread of love’, reminds the reader of the direct line that connects Christmas and the Cross. Finally the poet brings us up short with a reminder of our collective responsibility for events that continue to disfigure our world: the blood that is shed because of humans’ hatred for each other is a terrible mirror image of the blood that was shed in love by Jesus, the Christ-child of Bethlehem, God’s Messiah on the Cross. 

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay