‘‘I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,’ says the Lord Almighty.’
Malachi 3:1
He will come! He shall come! This has been the message all along. This baby born King, this righteous branch, this Prince of Peace, this shoot of hope, the messenger of the covenant; He shall come!
And He did.
But this is not fairytale story. He didn’t come into a perfect world. He came into ours.
In the dark.
To be the light.
Here is a poem to end our time of waiting with the prophets. Tomorrow we follow the Christmas story into the gospels…
A Carol To Light The Dark
When all our breath is gone what have we left?
When conflict after conflict drags us down
When deaths are heaped in numbers on our screens
And our ‘leaders’ wrangle each other for the crown.
When a virus born of greed stalks in the night
and Christmas revives the pain of all we’ve lost
When the anguished left behind now have to fight
to keep on breathing midst the aching loss.
When the ugly underbelly of fear and hate
rises to the surface, knee on throat
And deaths dealt heavy-handed by the State
Drag all our humanity through the dirt.
Was there ever a time when angels sang?
Was there a time when joy would brim and spill?
When Peace on Earth was actually a thing?
Whispering life and truth and all is well?
When fires scorch the surface of the earth
lighting a world teetering on the brink
While human greed in endless global reach
primes to outlive the planet on which we spin.
As species disappear and climates writhe
And island homes are sinking in the sea
We pretend its all okay, it’s all alright
Entranced by ‘tweets’ and texts on tinselled screens.
This Christmas we don’t count the Advent days
We don’t count the species dying off
We don’t count the suicide of souls
Instead we count our ‘likes’ on selfie shots.
Was there ever a time when angels sang?
Was there a time when joy would brim and spill?
When Peace on Earth was actually a thing?
Whispering life and truth and all is well?
Come Christmas, crawl with me into my cave
Keep me warm in this winter-life we’ve built
Social distancing from sadness, loss and pain
Clawing for the hope your carols spelled.
How have we missed the meaning in the songs?
The truth behind the merry Christmas tunes?
Distracted by the trimmings and the throngs
Of merry making emptied of the true.
Our carols in the past hid the whole truth
Avoiding the sharp edge and welting blow
Our tinsel and our gifts tiding fake news
Hiding the Christmas truth in golden glow.
The ugly underbelly carols hid
of human domination on the earth
The emptiness of no room at the inn
The poverty of a child born into want.
This was the time when angels sang.
This, the time when joy did brim and spill.
When Peace on Earth was actually a thing.
Whispering life and truth and all is well.
Christmas came into a manger cave
shivering in this winter life we’d built
Arriving in our sadness, loss and pain
bringing the hope our carols still misspell.
God came, wrapped in rags and filth and rot
Receiving the dregs of all the earth He owns
With the refugees He threw His lot
Fleeing the reach of power, forced from home.
Political tremors felt on that dark night
Grasped the throats of infants as they slept
Herod dealing vengeance for the crime
Of God coming to earth, as angels wept.
This was the time when angels sang!
This, the time when joy did brim and spill!
When Peace on Earth was actually a thing!
Whispering life and truth and all is well!
We don’t know Him in the tinselled wreaths
And we won’t hear Him in the jolly songs
He’s in the darkest valleys of our lives
Where we discover He’s been with us all along.
All our darkness is not news to Him
He who bore our burdens to the end
We, so bound and battered in the din
He, still intent on reaching out His hand.
The joy of tinsel wrappings can’t contain
The gift that Christmas was in all the dark
And how in deepening pitch we see the blaze
of the light that came for us, into our night.
In all the shredded threads of our humanity
And all our fruit of emptiness unleashed
In this night of sickness, loneliness and greed
the real Christmas story is still the song we need.
So sing this carol bravely in the night
Until the dawning blaze of rising sun
The Light comes deep into the pitchest dark
And by all our darkness isn’t overcome.
There truly was a time when angels sang.
And there will be a time when joy will brim and spill.
Peace on Earth is actually a thing.
Whispering Life and truth. All will be well.
Thanks Liz, beautiful.
Yes, just beautiful. Thank you . I am really enjoying this journey , the Long Walk.