19

Simple Nativity              

Lesley Warren

Read: BC:AD by U A Fanthorpe

This is a favourite Christmas poem of mine and I’ve always rather envied Ursula Fanthorpe’s friends who received a new poem with every Christmas card she and her partner wrote!

Short and deceptively simple there is always a challenge in the closing lines of her Christmas poems:

I am Joseph, who wanted
To teach my own boy how to live.
My lesson for my foster son:
Endure. Love. Give.

from I am Joseph

 I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.

from What the Donkey Saw

In BC:AD the reader identifies details of the Christmas story and the ‘insignificant’ people whose actions define our timeline. We are struck by ‘incongruous’ choices of words: ‘uninvented timekeepers’; ‘dull peace sprawled boringly’.

Nativity plays are ‘simple’: all teatowel-toting shepherds; Kings sporting shiny foil home-made crowns and a froth of angels. Yet there isn’t a dry eye in the house and we all feel we are ‘there’. 

It’s reminiscent of Betjeman’s Christmas:

 And is it true? And is it true…
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

 And yet more of his Advent 1955:

 Yet if God had not given so
He still would be a distant stranger
And not the Baby in the manger.

We need the ‘simple’ visual of a Nativity scene to help us to grasp the enormity of the abstract:

‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’