Going to the Stable, “Hoping It Might Be So”

"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Christmas celebrations sometimes resent uncertainty. Which is a pity. Sometimes God isn't so easily found, so readily available, so certainly there. If we're not careful our Christmas certainties divert us from those deeper realities shrouded in mystery, and which have more to do with longing than finding, are interrogative mood rather than indicative, and which give due place to a yearning that just may never be fully assuaged, thank God.

Those first shepherds were "sore afraid", and the idea that they had a theological epiphany and did a fun run to Bethlehem without a backward glance is wishful thinking, not narrative faithfulness. The three Magi followed the star, not because it was an astrological sat-nav, but because such movements in heaven were portentous, and for scientists such as they, you followed the data even into danger. Mary said yes, and sang the Magnificat, but her heart was stabbed through with the anguish of a mother whose child is forever flesh of her flesh, and whose future is beyond her power to guarantee.  

That's why that old doubter Thomas Hardy's poem jerks us back from the brink of mere sentiment, urging us to take our hearts seriously enough to take our minds seriously. Those last two lines of his poem are the true confession of one who never lost that inner hankering after meaning and comfort, but whose courage and honesty became a confession of hope laced with doubt, or doubt lined with hope. Sometimes in our lives we don't walk into a stable bathed in a light that makes it all make sense; and yet, sometimes too, out of the gloom, comes the cry of the Christ child and the soft whispering of His Mother. So we enter, and kneel, hoping it might be so.

Oh yes. I too love and sing till I'm hoarse of those events that speak of the deep reality at the core of existence, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God….and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." My life is lived in the truth of that universe transforming claim. Oh yes, "Light and life to all he brings, / risen with healing in his wings…pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel." This "Outcast and stranger, Lord of all" is indeed God come to us in the vulnerability of newly born humanity. And that is precisely the point; Christmas doesn't make us invulnerable to all that life throws at us. But in the gloom and uncertainty of that stable, under that star, we encounter One who was rich and for our sakes became poor, cradled in the arms of a teenage girl who has just given birth to the Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. But to those who knelt it doesn't look that way; it doesn't feel safe, comforted and complete. No wonder poor old Thomas Hardy, despite his embedded doubts, made his way into the gloom and smell of the nativity, humbly, uncertainly, harried by questions, and "hoping it might be so".

And so do we. Kneeling in hope, trusting despite appearances, embracing our questions and owning the deep yearnings that make us alive with love and compassion for this God-loved world, "O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord…."