Destination Bethlehem. J. Barrie Shepherd
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the ever-greening of our wintered race.
Watch For It
We need to be reminded
to look forward at least once a year.
So much we spend in peering back
across an urgent shoulder in these fearful times,
leery in case old you-know-who is gaining on us.
Therefore, just when calendars are growing
weary of themselves—the tattered, dog-eared,
tail-end of the year—we name it, Advent,
dig out five candles and the holly wreath,
and kindle hope again, with orisons, chants, hymns,
ringing words of ancient expectation.
In the midst of which, from time to time,
eternity—in ordinary flesh, and blood, and bone—
takes shape, dons time, draws near.
How Many Miles to Bethlehem? I
The Departure
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light;those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,on them has light shined
—Isaiah 9:2
And Mary said, “Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
—Luke 1:38
It all brought back so many memories of departure. We were in Fenchurch Street Station, catching a train to take us out of London to stay with old friends in nearby Essex. We raced along the platform with our bags, clambered through the first available carriage door, stowed the luggage overhead, settled down, and opened the window just a crack. A few moments later, with the urgent slamming of the few doors remaining open and the shriek of the whistle from the guard, the train began to move, and we sank back into our seats with a sigh of relief and contentment. We were on our way—setting out.
It’s still a magical moment, even after the passing of many years, a moment calling forth memories of those enormous steam locomotives with their puffing, gasping, and hissing, their chugging, clashing and clanking, as they labored to get under way, memories of childhood journeys that were always, no matter the circumstances—and in wartime Britain there were some difficult and unusual ones—always brimming with anticipation and hope. Setting out! As we set out for Bethlehem today, as we get under way once again after all the activity, the turmoil and testing of another year’s passing, I want to pose one simple, vital question. Are we ready for departure?
One of the more fascinating sections of the daily newspaper for me these days, one of the sections I hardly ever skip over, is the obituary page. A favorite New Yorker cartoon shows a senior citizen, probably about my age, seated in an armchair scanning the obituary columns. In the thought balloons floating above his head one reads these words: “Five years older than I am.” “Two years younger than I am.” “Same age as I am . . .”
It’s most likely all to do with getting older, and I realize I’m not alone in this, but there’s something about those lives set out in newsprint columns there, their tragedies and triumphs, that helps me take a deeper look at my own life, at the way I spend my days and hours. And I wonder sometimes whether they were ready—how it must have been for them to be one moment in the midst of an active, productive, basically satisfying life, and the next to be at the departure point, to be thrust out into a journey about which we know so little and fear so much. Were they ready for departure? Are we ready to move on?
Some months ago I read a miraculous little book called, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly. In its one hundred or so pages Jean-Dominique Bauby describes what it was like for him to get ready. Struck down at age forty-three by a devastating stroke that left him a victim of what the medical world calls Locked-In Syndrome, Bauby was unable to move or to communicate in any way. The only controllable movement left to him was that of blinking his left eye—the other eye had to be sewn shut. Yet, by means of this, Bauby devised an entire alphabet of blinking, and was able to compose, with the help of a scribe, a most eloquent and elegant memoir: a reflection on his life, his love, his daily round in the hospital, his hope and his fear, his getting ready. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
The Diving Bell is Bauby’s name for the machinery, all the apparatus of high-tech modern medicine that keeps him breathing, thinking, blinking. The Butterfly, on the other hand, is his mind and spirit, a spirit that floats free as the air, and explores both the wonder and the terror of creation. At the very end, reviewing the pages he has composed with his amanuensis, his translator, he looks back across what has been, and what will be, and closes with these words, “We must keep looking. I’ll be off now.”
Two days after the book was published Jean-Dominique Bauby’s locked-in body finally gave up on him, and he died. But for all the tragedy, for all his relative youth and unfulfilled potential, he was ready. He had learned, through some severe, yet ultimately splendid mercy, what we all must learn—if not, pray God, in such a harsh and challenging way—and that is to look hard at life and death, all its grim reality, and then seek out the depth, the dimension of the sacred that lies in every instant of existence. Bauby had learned to so live in the present moment that, whatever the future, his life had known truth, had claimed integrity, had received and given love.
I stood in the shadows of Hexham Abbey. It has long been favorite spot of mine, up in the northern English borderlands. My cousin and aunt both lived close by, so I could usually manage to fit in a visit. Saint Wilfrid’s chair there dates back to the year 674 or thereabouts. But this time, as I slipped through the old oak doors—the organist practicing a great Bach prelude for next morning’s service—I was taken by the gaudy, painted panels all around the fourteenth-century pulpit. They dated from the time of the bubonic plague, the Black Death, and each one showed an individual human figure, a prince, a magistrate, a merchant, a soldier, a young maiden, accompanied by the ghastly, dancing shape of Death itself, its rag-wrapped skeleton reaching out to seize them for its own. The intriguing thing was, the more I tried to catch that dark, macabre figure, first with my eyes, then with the camera lens, the less I could see of it. The light, the radiant morning light, streaming into that darkened church through the towering east window, was striking those smooth, varnished panels in such a way, at just such an angle, that the figure of death was almost totally obscured, obscured by the light.
I was somewhat irritated by this—to tell the truth—and left the abbey frustrated by my inability to get a decent photograph. It was not until much later that I realized that, instead of a photograph, I had been granted a vision. I had glimpsed something of what the Word is trying to say to us this morning through Isaiah’s words:
The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined.
The darkness is real, very real. Mortality, loneliness, futility, they are there, all about us, and in the lengthened vision of these early winter days we seem to see them more clearly than before. The darkness is real, but the light, that radiance that blocked and then transformed my vision, is even more real. And rather than fleeing the dark, rather than trying to create our own artificial glare of amusement, diversion, distraction, we must look into the shadows, face up to the reality, and discover there, right in the heart of darkness, the heart of God, that comes among us in Christ our Lord.
The astronomers tell us an intriguing thing about light: they maintain that if we would catch the brightest stars of winter, we must be prepared to rise well before the dawn and search them out against the almost perfect black of the December sky. So it is that, in this darkest season of the year, when all around seems gloomy, grim, and grey, our faith begins the Advent season, the church begins, even before the dawn, to turn toward the light, to prepare herself—lighting candles, hanging greens, singing songs, saying prayers, and cultivating charity and kindness—for the One who comes to dazzle our death-filled eyes with his own eternal brilliance,