‘On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me…’

A partridge in a pear tree…
And also:

Robert Southwell’s Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
 And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.

I am drawn to the liturgical austerity of Advent. I try – discreetly – to keep it as a season of fast and abstinence. In the face of increasingly premature Christmas celebrations, I struggle to resist spiritual pride in my sympathetic solidarity with poor baby Jesus.

His birth is overshadowed by naughty elves, trips to Lapland, office parties, and the heretical doctrine that the blessings of Christmas are dependent on whether we are “naughty or nice”. The better part of me thinks that if people are opening their hearts to ever longer celebration of the wondrous feast of the incarnation, however unwittingly, it’s really up to those of us who know there is something greater here, to advance the joys of the sacred instead of retreating from the profane. 

Roy Wood wished it could be Christmas every day, and in some ways it is. The hungry, homeless, helpless, sick, imprisoned, despairing and abandoned are supported every day of the year by the carol concerts and fundraising initiatives of the season. By contrast, Robert Southwell’s Burning Babe shows us a Christ child in a permanent state of salvific anguish. His pain is necessary to expiate the sins of the world. Not an amorphous mass of perdition redeemed by one single, perfect sacrifice on Calvary, but the sin of each of his beloved creatures soul by fallen soul.

Southwell assaults us with the unbearable sight of the sobbing Christ child. I haven’t found such an  image anywhere else. The child speaks not only of the agony of his physical pain but his distress at mankind’s indifference to his self sacrifice. Southwell, who had volunteered for the home mission in the reign of Elizabeth I, would have been only too aware of the ingenious cruelty he himself would endure before he received his inevitable martyrdom. It is shocking that in the ongoing suffering of the baby, his own suffering finds solace.

He finds warmth in the burning babe. The infant Jesus –  separated from the care of Mary and Joseph – and the simple shelter of the stable, is like himself. Alone, friendless, not welcome in the hearts and homes of those to whom he has given his life.

I really struggled with this image. It seemed doctrinally inaccurate and emotionally unacceptable. I often complain about the banal nature of contemporary Christmas carols which try and create emotional heft by asking us to consider how tired the donkey might have been or whether the Shepherd boys self-esteem had been be knocked by the superior gifts of the kings. I love the carols from more pious eras with their references to sin and salvation.

Traditional carols are like suitcases full of Christian doctrine which can be unpacked decades after they were picked up, their treasures fresh and new. But even they try to avoid making eye contact with baby Jesus when they rejoice over Saviours and Redeemers. Now is not the time to go into the fine details, they seem to say. No need to mention pain and suffering. Not today. It’s Christmas.

But like Robert Southwell, for some, Christmas is a time when all the hard and bitter aspects of their lives stand in high contrast to the joy everyone else is feeling. This seasonal chiaroscuro is found in the Christmas Day gospel from St John. It proclaims that Jesus is the eternal light come into the world  shining in the darkness and the darkness has not overpowered it.

Embracing that truth in his extraordinary vision, Robert Southwell also understood viscerally that now the light has come into the world it is staying in the world. It will not, cannot be overpowered by the darkness.

Whatever the cost to the incarnate God, however vulnerable and innocent and tortured He may be, His love will never cease to burn till every vestige of the darkness of sin has been consumed in the flame of His love . 

(Image by Sean Jefferson, courtesy David Messum Fine Art.)

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