From the fields beside Bethlehem, to a rural setting in Ireland and some words of the poet Seamus Heaney:
Had I not been awake, I would have missed it,
a wind that rose and whirled until the roof
pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore
and got me up, the whole of me a-patter,
alive and ticking like an electric fence:
had I not been awake, I would have missed it,
It came and went so unexpectedly
and almost it seemed dangerously,
returning like an animal to the house,
a courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.
Sitting on our kitchen table at the moment is something both quirky and beautiful. It’s a kind of advent calendar, but it’s three dimensional – it’s in the shape of a church. And behind each closed door or shutter there’s a picture, painted on translucent paper, that looks like a stained glass window. And when you place a light inside the church, the opened windows all light up.
And on the back of the doors and the shutters, there are Bible verses for that particular day in Advent. And the verses for last Sunday – the first in Advent – kept harping on one theme, the same theme Heaney picks up in his poem.
“Had I not been awake, I would have missed it” he says.
“Stay awake” say the prophets and the gospel writers on the first Sunday in Advent. “Something is happening, and if you’re sleeping, you’ll miss it”.
For Heaney, it’s the whine of the wind and the sycamore leaves pattering on the roof that are happening. Ordinary enough, you’d guess. But it’s part of the poet’s gift to credit even the ordinary with significance, and though Heaney doesn’t tell us why this experience mattered to him, he leaves us in no doubt that it does. For him, it was…
“a courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.”
Something in that experience lingered with him. Continued to impress itself upon him.
“Had I not been awake, I would have missed it” he says.
“Stay awake” say the prophets and the gospel writers. Stay awake as you hear these familiar stories once more. If you don’t, you might miss something.
Part of what I love about the Christmas story is the way the ordinary and the extraordinary sit side by side apparently without embarrassment.
The sceptics want to rationalise it all and do away with the weirder parts that don’t fit with a modern worldview. The over-zealous idealise it all, as though the folk in the story were some kind of different breed, much more attuned to the workings of the Almighty than mere mortals like you and me.
But they weren’t. They were ordinary people, living ordinary lives until God showed up in ways they’d never expected. And our telling of the stories simplifies what must have been profound experiences for all of them.
Mary sweeps the floor and trips over an angel. An eccentric star lights the way to an insignificant, dirty byre. The cussing shepherds get a glimpse of heaven as they mind their sheep out in the hills. The saddle-sore scholars set kingly gifts at the feet of a peasant child.
Words can’t convey what on earth was going on in each of their lives at that time, but for a few short days, weeks and months, the ordinary and the extraordinary cohabited without shame in the events around the birth of Jesus. And those are the moments locked into our tradition; in our nativity scenes and our Christmas cards.
The glow from the stable; the shepherds shielding their eyes; the wise men bending low in their finery.
But then things return to normal, as much as they ever do.
Mary got on with the business of changing nappies, washing clothes and learning how to breast-feed. Joseph worried about how to feed, clothe and house his family as refugees in Egypt. The shepherds went back to their flocks and their arguments about wages. The wise men travelled back to their homeland and their families. And years went past; years full of ordinariness.
But deep in their souls they could never evade the courier blast of that first Christmas. It would never lapse ordinary. Not ever after. And not now.
They knew who this child was. And they knew what his coming amongst them meant. That the ordinary and the extraordinary – the human and the divine were only ever a hair’s breadth apart. That God is at work in the world, but it’s only those who stay awake who can discern him.
Are you awake this Christmas?
As you plan your menus and negotiate the shops and turn up to the parties in body if not in spirit, is there a part of you that knows that you’re sleepwalking through it all? Is there a part of you that begins to wake up when I tell you that the place God most wants to meet you isn’t in the rarified atmosphere of a church service, but in the ordinariness of your everday life?
Would it set your heart a-patter if I told you that God is already at work in your life in ways that you will only begin to discern when you’re fully awake to him?
Two folk take a walk through the same wood. One sees nothing. The other sees a deer’s tracks, a badgers’ sett, a rare wild flower and fourteen different kinds of tree. What’s the difference? One’s awake, the other’s not.
“Wake up” say the prophets and the gospel writers at the beginning of Advent.
“Wake up” says Seamus Heaney:
Why?
Because, had I not been awake, I would have missed it…
"A courier blast that there and then
lapsed ordinary. But not ever
after. And not now.”
