After a year of COVID-19, and what has felt like a long Advent of waiting and longing, “heart-sick with hope deferred”, it’s time to remember that “Love was born at Christmas”. Carol O’Connor* reflects on how the poetry of 19th century English poet Christina Rossetti can speak to us afresh at this time, and help us come alive to what is most precious and dear.
by Carol O’Connor
“Watchman, what of the night?” we cry
Heart-sick with hope deferred….
(from Advent 1858)
Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas,
Star and Angel gave the sign.
(from Christmastide)
This year of 2020, when the virus of COVID-19 has wracked the world so painfully, has felt at times like one ongoing Advent, a long, hard, waiting pilgrimage, full of longing. 2020 has been a year of loss for many people, of planned events cancelled, and expectations of life once taken for granted have been upended. Truth itself has been put under examination, becoming counter-intuitive at times: staying apart saves lives. Getting away has meant, at best, a meal in the back garden, for those of us fortunate to have one.
As the year draws to a close the poetry of Christina Rossetti speaks with a new clarity. Throughout her life Christina Rossetti wrote many poems which directly concern Advent. One of the most dominant traits in these poems is those four great themes of Advent often overlooked today: Judgment, Death, Heaven and Hell. Advent for her is a time when:
We weep because the night is long
We laugh for day shall rise,
We sing a low contented song
And knock at paradise.
(From Advent 1858)
And she “pleads” to God for “mercy” and is “heart-sick for hope deferred”. Her words reveal the terrain of longing and waiting and not knowing, where grace, much longed for, can appear unexpectedly and from left field. It’s a landscape she knows that has been traversed before and will be again. When we weep and knock at paradise.
But in her Christmas poems, the four great themes of Advent are let go entirely. Now purged of the struggle with passions and very human questions, Rossetti’s poetry becomes a lyrical celebration of a God who simply overflows His divinity in His Love for all people and creation. The hope-longing has been fulfilled, the Bridegroom cometh. At Christmas, God cannot contain God’s very self, and lets go, spilling into the world:
Earth, strike up your music,
Birds that sing, and bells that ring;
Heaven hath answering music
For all Angels soon to sing:
Earth, put on your whitest
Bridal robe of spotless snow:
For Christmas bringeth Jesus,
Brought for us so low.
(from Christmas Eve)
Christmas cannot come without Advent. We can never truly know or understand the deep truths held in Christmas without the labour of this time. Rossetti instinctively knew this. And perhaps that first journey of Mary and Joseph as they traversed toward Bethlehem was as equally fraught and hope-filled. They travelled to Bethlehem to be registered as citizens of the Roman world but after the birth of Jesus the family are legitimised as people in God’s kingdom.
The first Christmas story, particularly in Luke’s Gospel, is full of angels and prophecies found in dreams. These are not superstitious or superficial answers to perplexed yearnings, but most likely drawn from deep contemplative silence. Rossetti understood that true words, life and action come out of deep silence:
Sowing is a silent day,
Resting is a silent night;
But who reaps the ripened corn
Shall shout in his delight,
While silences vanish away.
(from Golden Silences)
In this year of 2020, many have known all too painfully that place of “the silence that nothing saith”, that is, “the silence of death”.
But it’s also been a year when some of us have felt the urgent need to come alive to all the things that we hold precious and dear, found only after entering silent contemplation. Events of the last eleven months necessitated that we draw on something deep inside ourselves, a more nuanced listening, a reaching out to people, a searching to speak rightly and act with greater clarity.
We are human, frail and full of longing. But we also have deep resources contained within our Christian narrative, and in this first nativity story of Mary, Joseph and the birth of God in Jesus. It’s a story which teaches us that that lockdown of any sort never means to be locked out of God’s presence, of God’s eternal Love. And like Christina Rossetti, we are told that Christmas is always that time, born out of Advent, when “I shall see that heart’s desire/I long to see.’ (From A Hope Carol).
Carol O’Connor is a poet, teacher, and retreat leader. For over 20 years she has managed a small religious bookshop, St Peter’s Bookroom, in inner city Melbourne, Australia.
Christmas image used above: The Gift, a painting by Ivan Smith: www.ivansmithdesign.com