In the Bleak Midwinter

It isn't Christmas anymore-- it's the fifth week of Epiphany, and February, and we're deep into the ironclad days of winter. Very little is festive outside of the Valentine's aisle at Target, and most of us are saving our vacation days for the warmer months ahead.

Slog, slog slog: This is get-through-it time.

But in the face of an absolutely heroic snowstorm (mockingly named "Pax"), I'm thinking about Christmas again. About birthing and new beginnings. Incarnation.

I'm thinking about these things because of the new beginning taking shape in my own life. It twists painfully. My stomach hurts, and I remember this feeling. It feels like labor pains.

Long, long ago, poet Christina Rosetti looked out the gray British landscape and placed the birth of her Savior there. It is, in a way, ridiculous-- Jesus was most certainly born in spring, not in winter, and even had he been born in what we now call December there would hardly have been drifts of snow licking at his mangerside. If anything, Mary shook sand out of his blankets.

And yet, in response to a query from an American magazine, this quiet, fervently religious woman created a picture of birth in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable: an unimaginable springing forth of Heaven itself in the midst of frozen stillness. It is shocking, amazing, and impossible. A baby, in the snow.

The poem was set to music soon after and remains one of the world's most beloved Christmas carols. And I'm humming it, on a day I'm preparing for so much more than snow. A day I'm trusting in God with a fervor and intensity that rivals any other day in my entire life.

"What can I give him?" the poem asks. I have been thinking about that, for weeks now. Months. Years. The answer has been as intense and transforming as any pregnancy, its birthing just as fraught, the worries just as sharp. Some have intensified.

I would rather not be in the metaphorical place I find myself today. There are difficulties ahead, serious ones-- ones I've never encountered. But something about this poem-- about this baby in the snow-- reminds me that joy and wonder really can come in the midst of what seems impossible. And I am incredibly thankful for that. I'm going to hang onto it like the very rope that tethers me to safety and stability.

Because, for me, safety and stability are where God is, and Rosetti knew that too, clever as she was. The "stable place" of which she writes is much more than a crooked, smelly lean-to.

It's Christ himself.

It's hope.

It's what, as the snow begins to fall outside, I hold onto with all my life.

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.



Christina Rosetti, painted by her brother Dante Gabriel Rosetti