Destination Bethlehem. J. Barrie Shepherd
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indulgence when such dates do not correspond with the actual days of the Advent calendar in any particular year.
As I look back, in putting this book to rest, over some fourscore Christmas celebrations of my own, I feel profoundly thankful for all that this warmest and most welcoming season has added to those years, and pray that my words may call forth a similar grateful response from all who read them.
Piper Shores, Scarborough, Maine
Epiphany 2015
Acknowledgments
A debt of gratitude is owed to the faithful readers, colleagues, and friends who have supported and encouraged me in the writing of this, my sixteenth book. Particular thanks to Mhairi, my wife of fifty-one years, for her careful reading of this text, her editorial skills, fact checking, grammatical expertise, and her gently remedial observations whenever the preacher within me attempted to prevail.
The Manger Calls Again
and for all the humdrum daily-ness
of places, things, and persons too,
all the sheer predictability
of politics and power—those same-old,
same-old headlines on the news—
for all the dwindling of these days
so that the memory far outweighs
the flimsy realm of possibility and promise,
still one rummages for candle-stubs and matches,
turns thoughts toward new ways to bring delight,
a fleeting sense, at least, of generosity both given
and received, then folds the hands in prayer
that this season’s secret music might—
before it’s vanished in thin air—
lift all our lives in momentary,
yet still mending melody.
Homeland Security
(Eve of Advent)
Times like these—
what with daily news of terror,
the random ways of cold malevolence,
fanatic dedication to the cause of savage death—
the customary comforts of this season
can seem thin, at best,
and threadbare,
offering scant protection
from December’s chill and dying days.
Times like these
may yet recall a child
whose birth was also framed
by bloodshed, and a bleak indifference,
who found seeming scant protection
in a mother’s arms, a father’s watchful wisdom,
that old, eternal tenderness, whose shield
is nevertheless the only, sure, and best defense
against the savage dark.
At the Brink
There is a mild portending in the air
this last November morning,
a persistent wish
that, with tomorrow’s wreath
and purple candles, at least something will begin,
or should I say, “begin again.”
Almost eighty of these now, after all,
and still—like weary Simeon—
I’m scanning faces for him, seeking, hoping,
perhaps fearing.
If he did come in the end, how would I know him?
Would there be certain words exchanged,
a knowing look, even a fierce embrace?
Might I have already missed whatever is to come,
failing to recognize the fathoms, deep beneath the daily pageant?
Or will this be the year when ancient word and melody,
rich color, and the candled scent of evergreen,
bear light to life and everlasting joy
within these timeworn, aching bones?
Something for Christmas I
Something Worth Hoping For
. . . we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God. More than that we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.
—Romans 5:2–3
If ever there was a season set aside for hoping, surely this is it. From the gleam in the eyes of little children as they survey the glittering cornucopia spread before them in stores, catalogs, and computers, to the blinking lights in the windows, and on the calculators of the merchants, there does seem to be a whole lot of hoping going around in these pre-Christmas days.
And, to be completely fair, it is not all selfish, acquisitive, or materialistic hoping that we see. There is something about this season—be it the music, the lights and decorations, the messages and packages, fond memories evoked—that can bring out in even the most worn-down and worn-out of us the hope for better times, for a more trusting, welcoming way of life. For so many of us these weeks before Christmas become all wrapped up with hope.
It is only when we stop to ask, “but what kind of hope is this, just what manner of hoping are we dealing with here?” that questions, significant questions, begin to arise. This word “hope” finds its origins, so the scholars suggest, in an Anglo-Saxon root, a root that signifies “the opening of the eyes.” But far too much of what is called “hope” nowadays seems to be based on the opposite of this, not the opening, but the deliberate closing of the eyes. “Hope is a tease,” as the Dowager Marchioness of Grantham—Maggie Smith’s character—remarks on Downton Abbey, “ . . . a tease to prevent us from accepting reality.”
It seems true to say that the only way many of us can even hope to hope today is by closing our eyes tight against a sad series of harsh realities—realities of a cruel world one cannot help but glimpse, right before the Christmas TV specials, on the nightly news. Hope, for many folk, in other words, is a rosy-colored-spectacles experience, a therapeutic luxury, to be indulged in only upon certain limited occasions. While in the background, in today’s culture—which is not so much a Culture of Disbelief, as one recent writer described it, as it is a Culture of Disappointment, of Disillusionment—there lingers that twenty-first century, sophisticated cynicism, the realization that, as some wag once put it, “The lion may well lie down with the lamb, but that lamb is not going to get much sleep.” Or as Archy, resident cockroach at the New York Sun, typed to his editor, Don Marquis the poet:
the only way boss
to keep hope in the world
is to keep changing its
population frequently
Persian poet, Omar Khayyam, expressed all of this, in elegant phrases, for an earlier generation:
The Worldly Hope men set their hearts upon
Turns