Most of us know the Christmas Carol In the Bleak Mid-winter, by Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830 – 1894).  The words are deceptively simple, and conjure up a vivid picture of a winter landscape, at once beautiful and deadly.  This is not surprising.  She was part of a formidably talented family, and sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and one of the greatest painters of his generation.  We have Pre-Raphaelite connections here in Perth, with Sir John Everett Millais (1829 – 1896), married to Effie Chalmers Gray (1828 – 1897) of Bowerswell, now buried in Kinnoull graveyard.  

The winter landscape is a familiar feature of countless Christmas cards, but not so unbiblical as you might think.  My father saw snow in Jerusalem in the 1940s.  It’s very high (almost 2,500 feet), and can be very cold.  Those of us who live in Scotland (and/or Canada) know all about the lethal beauty of winter, and it is a common feature of 19^th-century literature.  Think of Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Oliver Twist, and almost anything by Tolstoy.  Hypothermia was a normal fact of life, it seems.  Not so surprising if you remember that they were all living at the tail end of what is known as The Little Ice Age.  Even I can remember the winter of 1962 – 3, in a practically unheated house in Southampton. 

Christina was a notable author, deeply religious, and very well informed.  The simple, child-like form of the verses conceals a great deal of thought.  For example ‘Our God, heaven cannot hold him, nor Earth sustain;’ is a meditation on Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the temple (1 Kings 8:27 ), followed by some thoughts on Revelation 20:11.  Christina was in no danger of patronising children.  (Not like Away in a Manger, which I hated as a child.)  The tune we normally use (Cranham, by Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), no less!) works very well, and is rightly well-known.  There is an alternative setting by Harold Darke (1888 – 1976), which is hauntingly beautiful, but fiendishly difficult to sing, with descending semitones and sustained, soft, low notes requiring exquisite breath control.  Give it a try if you like a challenge, and you will see what I mean.  

Christina, like a good children’s evangelist, ends with a practical question:- ‘What can I give Him?’, and proposes the excellent solution, ‘give Him my heart.’  So far so good, but there is something else going on here.  We all know the Christmas problem (harder every year) of what to give someone who seems to have almost everything and really wants nothing.  

There is at least one person who has faced this in its most absolute form, and given it a perfect answer.  The Almighty really does have everything, perhaps by definition.  And yet Mary, the mother of our Lord, was able to give Him something which she certainly had, and He didn’t, as far as I can see:- Humanity.  How else could it have been done?  

According to legend, other gods have sometimes chosen to pay us a flying visit in disguise as humans, sometimes for frivolous purposes, but that doesn’t really count.  Our very own King James V sometimes used to spend an evening in the hostelries of Stirling, under the title of ‘The Gudeman of Ballengeich’, and that doesn’t count either.  The Almighty had decided to be human, not in disguise, not occasionally, but actually, fully and forever.  Short cuts don’t count, it seems, even for God.  He had decided to actually join our species as a fully paid-up member, so He had to do it properly, by being born of a human mother.  

Some other religious traditions find this rather shocking, and of course so it is.  That is the point.  Feats of omnipotence are actually quite easy, if you happen to be God.  Planets, stars and galaxies can be made on an industrial scale once you have set up the machinery, and evidently were.  Stephen Hawking had almost worked out how, when sadly he had to leave us. 

Our salvation was actually quite difficult, even for God.  Can there be something beyond Omnipotence?  Well, yes, actually, and we are part of it.  When the Infinite Who cannot be contained decides to take up residence in a stable in Bethlehem, it is the gift of a rather young Lady from Nazareth which makes this possible.

Article by DPB

Photo by Aditya Vyas on Unsplash