After all the preparations, after the slow waiting of Advent, Christmas Day has arrived.
For some, this Christmas will be a time of family, friends, festivity and joy. For others, it may be marked by grief or loneliness, pain or loss.
Whatever this Christmas holds for each one of us, it brings a new opportunity to consider the birth of Christ, the Christ who lived and died and was raised again. The Christ who came to save, and to heal our broken world. This Christmas we are invited again, as Theresa Lola writes in her powerful poem ‘Look at the Revival’, read this Christmas Eve at the King’s College Carol Service, to ‘look deeply /to know this hope deeply.’
So this Christmas Day I’m sharing with you some of my own reflections on this hope, in a new poem, ‘Unspeakable Gift’.
May each one of us know the blessing of Emmanuel, ‘God with us’. Happy Christmas!
Unspeakable Gift
The leaves from the trees
have kissed the earth with gold.
There is singing in the skies.
In the starlight
she holds Him close.
The night is cold.
Can there be hope again?
Blessed among women,
Mary ponders.
With the rising of incense
the prophets’ dreams unfold:
at her breast the Joy of Nations,
in her heart, the shadow
of a sword. Anointed
with myrrh, her little child
lifted up and broken:
flow of love and sorrow
mingled, for the healing
of the world.
Photographs by Mark, Susana and Sophie Jones.
