Articles - From the Vicar

December 1999

In the bleak midsummer
dusty winds made moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water dirty brown;
dust was blowing,
dust on dust,
dust on dust.....
I n the bleak midsummer
not so long ago.

This re-writing of the first verse of a well-known Christmas hymn comes from Uganda. It retains the metre of Christina Rossetti’s original as well as a good deal of her vocabulary. However the cumulative effect of the altered imagery transports the reader from the cold winter of a first century Palestine (and winters in Palestine can be cold) to the burning heat of a present day East African summer. One might say that the re-writing engenders in the reader, paradoxically, both a sense of connection with and a feeling of distance from the traditional, comfortable idea of Christmas.

At Christmas churches are still full. It is a great blessing that, at this one season, so many people still feel a pull towards a building that they might not enter at any other time of the year. The huge challenge facing the church (and, at St. Edmund’s, that means us) is to lead people on from the traditional and comfortable Christmas of carols and candlelight and to confront them with the brutal reality of Christ’s short life and violent death; to help people see that the daily experience of most Christians, most of humanity, has far more in common with that short life and violent death than with carols or candlelight. Put another way, the warm feelings evoked by a baby in a crib are no substitute for righteous anger that the people of Uganda (for example) still suffer from a lack clean water and from land degradation and that they have a pitifully short life expectancy.

Yet Christians know that Christ’s death was not the real end, any more than his birth was the real beginning. Jesus Christ, the firstborn over all creation, has promised to be with us to the end of time. This is the Good News that the Christ-child calls us to proclaim through prayer and action this Christmas and beyond.

Anne joins me in wishing all of you a very happy Christmas

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