Thompson Memorial Chapel
On the Boundary
Meditation for Christmas Lessons
and Carols
A Child of the Snows
There is heard a
hymn when the panes are dim,
And never before or again,
When the nights
are strong with a darkness long,
And the dark is alive with rain.
Never we know but
in sleet and in snow
The place where the great fires are.
That the midst of
the earth is a raging mirth
And the heart of the earth is a star.
And at night we
win to the ancient inn
Where the child in the frost is furled,
We follow the feet
where all souls meet
At the inn at the end of the world.
The gods lie dead
where the leaves lie red,
For the flame of the sun is flown,
The gods lie cold
where the leaves lie gold,
And a Child comes forth alone.
G.K. Chesterton
+
At first, as you pick your way across the winter fields
toward Christmas, it seems as though the destination of the journey is the Center
– the center of your life, or of your history perhaps, or the center of the
world or the center of time itself.
Part of the way takes you head-on into the winds with their newly sharpened edges, and over the fields recently hardened and now carpeted with crisp stubble – and through the maze of responsibilities and tests and tasks – and over the river of flowing time… The way toward Christmas seems to lead toward a gathering place – the place you came from, the place you know – where the faces reflect your own face, where you know the words of the songs and can taste the flavors of the delicacies even before they touch your tongue. Each lighted window of the other houses across the fields, as you pass, makes you think about the warm circle of light waiting for you, on ahead.
Another
part of the way over the terrain between here and Christmas is lit by the red
and gold glitter of store windows. Their
light punctuates the lengthening darkness too – but what they say is something
colder. They’re trying to tell you what
you want, to measure the distance between here and your unrequited wants. As you pass these lights they pull at your
sleeve, and leave images sticking to your mind like burrs.
As the way to Christmas draws near to the Center, the pull of warmth and memory grows unmistakably stronger. By now you’re smelling certain smells you know by heart even before they’re in the air, and hearing the indelible sounds of certain people’s voices. Something like spiritual gravity pulls you toward your terra firma, and you come to rest in the greeting of this Center place: familiar – and in its familiarity perhaps comfortable – and in its comfort perhaps reassuring.
Maybe
it will happen late at night on the day of your arrival at Christmas – or a few
days later – or in the middle of some deeply familiar event or gesture or
taste… or maybe it won’t happen at all.
But it might happen that you notice, after you have arrived at the
Center you were traveling to on the way to Christmas, that you aren’t actually
there yet after all. If you had a certain
kind of compass with you, you might think to take it out and be surprised to
find it telling you that you aren’t yet at the pole, though you thought you
were. You may have arrived at the Center
– but it may be that the Center isn’t where the way toward Christmas was taking
you after all.
If this should happen – if you should find that you haven’t arrived even after you’ve gotten there – then perhaps some further directions are in order.
If you had this particular kind of compass I am imagining with you, and if you happened to be looking at it as you took a step away from the Center where you’ve arrived – a step out the front door, say, to stand for a moment under a fathomless sky full of a billion stars in air so cold it prickles your lungs – or a step into the pages of the newspaper you picked up but tried not to look at… If you happened to be looking at this compass as you happened to take that step out the door, you might be surprised to find it telling you that you’d just taken a step closer. And if you took another step, and another – closer still. And so you might consider risking the journey again, back out into the cold, on the way toward Christmas at a new destination that you do not know.
It may have been a kind of gravity that brought you to rest at the Center of your life for Christmas. But now, as you make your way back out into the winter world, something more centrifugal has taken over.
This time, the other lighted windows that you see across the fields aren’t reminding you about your home; they’re telling you about other homes. The edge of the wind isn’t making you pull your coat tighter; it’s opening you wider. The people in your mind aren’t people you recognize.
This new way you have risked – this way toward Christmas – is leading you away from the Center out toward the edge.
This time you let the story light your way – you tell it to yourself again. You remember how the empire’s edict of ethnic sorting, in the days of Caesar Augustus, insisted on registration in the office at the far end of the realm – the dislocation from home, the roads clogged with refugees from the bureaucracy, the fruitless search for lodging in Bethlehem. You remember the risk of travel with the inexplicable pregnancy now so far advanced. You see the hollow scooped out of the slab of stone that had so recently held cattlefeed, and you hope that the bands of cloth were thick enough to soften the cold and roughness.
And as you make your way, you begin to understand that it’s the edge that’s been calling you all along, with a sound that’s hard to make out at first, but still unmistakable. The call to the edge sounds like something – you’re not quite sure what, but it’s getting clearer with each step, and your memory is stirring. You hear it at the edge of your hearing, where all the clamor of seasonal festivities can’t quite drown it out. You see your destination, at first, out of the corner of your eye because, like certain stars, it has a quality of light that’s more legible at the edges of the retina of your heart. And what you begin to see and hear tells you that, to attend this birth, you have to go out to the edge where it happened – because there is where it is happening still.
It is
happening, this birth, at the edge between now and then. It is happening at the edge between despair
and hope. It is happening on the
boundary between “for us” and “against us” – between beginning and end –
between home and journey. It is
happening, this birth, at the outer margin of all that we know.
And if you have “followed the feet where all souls meet / to the inn at the end of the world” – then, when you finally get there, when the spinning compass of your heart tells you that you are near the pole at last – you may notice that the edge doesn’t look like a line at all, drawn through time or between camps or across landscapes.
At first this may be surprising – for we make this
journey and we look to this birth to advance the tide of hope and increase the
perimeter of light. But you may find,
when you arrive at the margin of history and the precipice of poverty and the
edge of grace “where the child in the frost is furled,” that this birth is more
like a dawn than a cusp – and that’s how a dawn works.
Dawn doesn’t really break, when you think about
it. And love seldom if ever vanquishes
fear with one final, definitive thrust.
And if peace ever breaks out, it’s at least as likely to break out one
choice at a time, one relationship at a time, one moment at a time, breath by
breath. On the boundary between night
and day, the very first light almost seems to come as the night simply turns
itself, slowly revealing some startling new side of its nature, one atom at a
time - as though night and day spend the dawn yearning for each other, reaching
to each other and inflaming the sky with their passionate proclamation of
possibility.
On the boundary, at the inn at the edge of the world,
the work of this birth is being done, not at a line of scrimmage, but in the
infinitesimal turning of existence toward the light.
Perhaps when you get there you’ll finally recognize the sound you’ve been hearing on the journey to the edge. Angel-song. Peace and good will on earth, it says – beginning here on the boundary, at the margin. Where else? You have to go to the edge to meet the love at the Center of the Universe.
So you steer your way into the wind, not noticing its
edge now so much as its vitality. You
pick your way across the fields and think of the story that each lighted window
of each house is telling. You measure the
distance now between where you are and what you hope for. You follow the way of your journey – whether
it is to
To an open house in the evening
Home shall [we] come,
To an older place than
And a taller town than
To the end of the way of the wandering star,
To the things that cannot be and that are,
To the place where God was homeless
And all [folk] are at home.[1]
The Rev. Richard E. Spalding
Chaplain,