Standing Room only

Nine Lessons and Carols tonight so I was lucky to get a seat, never mind this one right at the back of the church!  I'd been helping out at a come for tea and cake session for the neighbours of the church which include some refugee ladies so I was late going in and no-one had saved me a seat!  Some folks had to stand all the way through.  There were some lovely carols and I got to read a poem called "Epiphany" which I found very moving.  This isn't a very good shot as it was with my phone, trying to be subtle looking at one of the images being projected onto the chancel wall.

May the Peace and Joy of Christmas be yours...


THE EPIPHANY by Godfrey Rust


A stable's a good place for revelations.
Some of the most profound discoveries
are made in back rooms, half by accident,
by people half-exhausted, looking for something else. 
Just as we felt like giving up,
when the whole thing had become ridiculous
and had gone on much too long, and we were blaming everybody else for our mistakes,
we came upon the unexpected answer
in the most unlikely place:
a speechless, thoughtless, helpless child
who just lay there, needing to be loved.

In this defiance of all natural things
was born the enabling power of sacrifice—
a being whose ambition was to seek
its own destruction and then call upon
his followers to do nothing else.
What kind of way was this to rule a world?
He just lay there, needing to be loved.


It would be stopped. 
Each Herod would conspire for its destruction, when they cannot tempt it with possessions nor subdue it with pain
nor lull it to sleep with alcohol or television. 
Here was something we could not buy or cure, 
digitise, transplant, promote, update, i
nvest in, analyse or write a business plan for.
He had no army, text-book, voters' mandate 
or computer markup language
with which to implement this great design: 
he just lay there, needing to be loved.



It was the most implausible demand.
Anything else we might negotiate
but not this secret life secured through death: 
grace, born out of deprivation,
grace born of the endurance of the oppressed, 
grace born of the hardships of the poor,
grace born of the forgiveness of the intolerable, 
grace borne in the dignity of silence,
grace born from incomprehensible submission to the absolute abuse of power.
In the strength of his weakness
he just lay there, needing to be loved.


Aeons after energy exploded into matter 
here in this stable was let loose
a yet more potent power:
shedding the fabric of his former life
like an old coat, reckless that the truth 
would prove for all he knew fatal
to everything to which he had thus far clung. 
Our gifts were tokens.
There was nothing more to do
but leave the child to his own terrible story, 
and return by different routesto our own countries,
strangers to us now,
yet seeing them as if for the first time,
how they just lie there, needing to be loved.