Diocesan News
Christmas Message from the Right Rev Ken Good, Bishop of Derry and Raphoe
Christmas Message 2008
A bleak mid winter?
‘In the bleak mid winter’, which was recently voted the Best Christmas Carol, strikes a chord with how many people might be feeling this Christmas. Christina Rosetti's poem, which has always been one of my favourites, was written 136 years ago but it has a particularly topical feel to it right now.
Mid-winter 2008 is undoubtedly a bleak one for many people. The depth of the once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis through which we are living has replaced confidence with anxiety and self-assurance with uncertainty. Each day’s news reveals yet another layer of worrying prospects – the harsh weather conditions which the carol describes have an emotional resonance with our current experience: a frosty wind is blowing, earth standing hard as iron, water like a stone, snow has fallen, snow on snow…
For Rosetti, the bleakness of this human condition is transformed by the intervention of God’s love through the birth of the Christ child in a stable. Part of the marvel she so ably describes is the simplicity, the ordinariness and even the poverty in which this Christ Child was content to appear. No luxury or special conditions, but simply a breast full of milk and a manger full of hay. Yet the wonder is in the extent to which his poverty contrasts with the heavenly splendour which was rightfully his but which he was willing to turn his back on, for our sake.
In its final verse, the poem poses a potent question, What can I give him, poor as I am? In our relative poverty this Christmas, expensive gifts to one another may not be possible or even advisable, but nor are they necessary. Gifts which demonstrate thoughtfulness, care or real interest in the person we are giving to can be valued just as much as extravagant ones. Agreeing with one another a realistic upper financial limit on the price of the gifts we give and receive may be a good idea this year.
The carol answers its own question with a disarming answer: Yet what I can, I give him, give my heart. One of the key gifts which we will offer this Christmas is our response to God himself and his loving initiative towards us. What he wants from us above all else is a heart-response, a willingness to give of ourselves to him, and to trust him as we face whatever bleakness this mid-winter may bring our way.
+Ken, Derry & Raphoe