Introit: Of the Father’s Love Begotten
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Anthem: Let the Stable Still Astonish
Christmas Reflections, by Leslie Leyland Fields.
How many Christmases have you survived?
It’s a heavy weight to carry the expectations of tiny snowy villages on mantels, wreaths on every door, anxiety that your chosen gifts will not please, the travail of beginning a family tradition – which then must be kept until yes, we have a special meal & activity for nearly everyday…
It’s astonishing that we do this to ourselves every year. And every year we vow to be simpler next year, to buy one gift, to relish the presence of one another more, to attend every worship service, to create the space we need to find wonder again… and we don’t.
But I believe it’s still out there — ASTONISHMENT. I send this poem out to you in hopes it will revive what may be exhausted. I wrote it many years ago, & it has turned up around the world in the most surprising places. Its words redeemed a particularly difficult Christmas, & I send it to you now hoping it will do the same for you:
Let the stable still astonish; Straw – dirt floor, dull eyes, Dusty flanks of donkeys, oxen; Crumbling, crooked walls; And then, the child, Rag-wrapped, laid to cry In a trough.
Who would have chosen this?
Be born here, in this place?”
Who but the same God
And says, “Yes,
Let the God of Heaven and Earth
In this place.
No bed to carry that pain, Who would have said: “Yes, Let the God of all the heavens and earth Who stands in the darker, fouler rooms Of our hearts Be born here – In this place.
Leslie Leyland Fields
