A Christmas Poem

The older I get the more I love Christmas. The story grips me anew every year. I find in it the beautiful mixing of tragedy and joy. No one in the story is comfortable, no one is finding it easy, Christmas is costly for all involved, it uproots and disrupts their lives, and all joy is hard-won.
Mary’s resilience to “treasure these things in her heart” haunts me! This coming of life feels in the moment more like a death. And indeed illusions of this child’s death are everywhere. When we allow Jesus to be born in our hearts. Our experience is similar, his birth requires a death. And our death will be his birth. It’s a beautiful story. The prince of peace is born. It is good news of great joy for the whole world
Merry Christmas grubnuts
With love
Jonnie

Here’s a little poem I wrote.
with a little help from Luke 2:35 & T.S Elliot.

Christmas
A birth like death,
a bitter painful agony.
Christ is born into the heart
and the old dies unwillingly,
shrivelling like a slug under salt
spewing up its insides,
vomiting its black guts onto the asphalt.
Such warm eyes, still sticky from sleep
amidst the unravelling of the world
and the downfall of many undying hearts.
he comes like a loss, a letting go, a dying.

But a birth it remains. An entering,
a beginning which is itself an end,
an end which shall prove to be the beginning
and prove the beginning was really the end.
Here time no longer flows left to right
but the past is bent over and the future points back.
Here is past, present and future.
There is no birth but this birth,
and no death either.
He is the all in all,
Laying like all others in the dust,
the author of time.
and he authors for himself a mote upon which to dance
to kick the wineskin
and reap the corn
to die the death
that is life itself
the final fatal birth
and begin again and again
the turning of all things to love.

lay down in the death of birth
as the grain of wheat,
and be born in the cross of death

“a sword will pierce your own soul too.”