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THERE’S A HOPE WELLING UP in the carol singing I’ve been hearing this year. Young, old and middle-aged. Close your eyes and hear the nightingales, and the shufflers, and the enthusiasts, and the coughers, and the shy guys and those who can’t sing for toffee. And ordinariness resolves into music, cacophany into epiphany, strength into tenderness, despair into hope, hearing into praying, mourning into dancing, indifference into a wider-eyed love. “Shepherds” and “kings” alike are no longer embarrassed to offer their hopes and their gifts in an altogether transformed environment.
And Isaiah rang with a reminder call: for the mountains may depart, the hills be shaken, but my love for you will never leave you and my covenant of peace will never be shaken. And I’m glad of the reminder, albeit that I try, anyway, never to forget that which I most believe about God; that his covenant of peace shall never be shaken. (Isaiah 54.10)
All of which I hang on to as I’m quietened before yesterday’s front-page photo of another host of young fellows jumping down from their miltary transport plane onto the shifting sands of Afghanistan. I’m not much given to being away from home at the best of times. Trained or not, pre-Christmas farewells when you’re stepping out into dusty unknown can hardly be the best of times for any of them … or their loved ones left behind. Let me close my eyes and breathe awhile with Seamus Heaney:
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History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a farther shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.From “The Cure at Troy”
