This year’s offering for our candlelit Christmas Soul Space in Tidmington was inspired by Malcolm Guite’s poetry, as is so often the case. And the weather was good and the skies were clear enough that afterwards, as we shared singing and prosecco in the moonlight, we did some star gazing too. A simply magical way to start Christmas.
I have a remarkable ability to get lost. But my phone has a useful feature which means when I trip off the edge of the map, I can press a button and it recentres me. It takes me back from the edge of the map to the centre of things when I get lost.
Christmas does the opposite.
It takes us away from the centre to the edges.
Bethlehem is around 6 miles from the seat of power, Jerusalem. 6 miles from the centre of the religious authorities and 6 miles from the courts of King Herod and the Roman occupying forces.
Rather pleasingly it is almost exactly the distance between SW1 and the Houses of Parliament or Buckingham Palace – and Selhurst Park, the home of Crystal Palace FC. Not the most salubrious of areas and certainly not the most successful of teams. I should know – CPFC were my local team growing up, and it seems as true today as then that the supporters of that team are a supreme example of the triumph of hope over reality. Currently they are 5 from the bottom of the table, which gives them plenty of time sink lower before the end of the season.
Christ being born in Bethlehem rather than Jerusalem is like a royal baby being consigned to a birth in the changing room at Selhurst Park.
Christmas shifts the centre to the edge. On this holy night, the events that changed the world took place not in the palace of Herod, or I the Emperor’s private apartments but in a little known outpost of the Roman Empire. Judea was the sort of place that Roman governors dreaded being sent to. Much like sending a civil servant to the vehicle licensing department in Swansea. And Bethlehem wasn’t even the centre of Judea, but a village on the edge.
At Christmas the centre shifts to the edges of the empire, and to the edges of society. An unknown couple with nowhere to stay becomes the focus of cosmic events that night. Shepherds on the edge of town and the edge of respectability become the privileged first witnesses to the most important event of all time. And later on foreigners of dubious heritage become the next set of visitors to the edge.
Still it happens today. Still Christmas shifts the centre to the edge and Christ is born again among the dispossessed, the ones in an occupied land, the ones fleeing as refugees. If you want to find Christ in 2023 you can see his face on the edge, under the rubble in Gaza, with those who like him, are refugees, with those suffering from addictions, the poor, the victims of abuse.
It is on the edge that you will find the face of Christ. Now as then, Christ makes his home where we least expect it.
On the edge – Malcolm Guite
Christmas sets the centre on the edge;
The edge of town, the outhouse of the inn,
The fringe of empire, far from privilege
And power, on the edge and outer spin
Of turning worlds, a margin of small stars
That edge a galaxy itself light years
From some unguessed at cosmic origin.
Christmas sets the centre at the edge.
And from this day our world is re-aligned
A tiny seed unfolding in the womb
Becomes the source from which we all unfold
And flower into being.
We are healed,
The end begins, the tomb becomes a womb,
For now in him all things are re-aligned.
(You can find the poem here )
Musings of a Maverick Priest 