The Jesus child,
The Jew,
is front and centre,
of our tinsel dreams
about the world
as it might be,
as it could be,
in the economy of innocence.
The icons of mother and child,
vivid in images and echoing in songs,
shimmer with possibilities
that many think
and many feel
are all too hard to realise
and yet so insistent
in human desire
for something good beyond nothing.
Christ, the Messiah,
born of Mary,
is icon of an unstated togetherness
and euphoria
that bind us together
just at this one time of year,
this crazy time of good will,
as atheists, believers
and those who
care only for the sacred in the now.
Christ at Christmas
is the shared consciousness
of the desire to
be more for each other
and to give the tangible
and the intangible
as a cohesive act in
a world the consistently
defies the cohesive.
In all this ritual,
with celebration and the mute
joy of the presence of the other,
there is the emblem of the Christ
that exists and does not exist in the revelry,
as a faint memory for some,
and a vivid expansive experience for others.
Yet, outside the gates of our joy,
outside the confines of class and culture,
in the streets and houses of disaffection,
lie the other ones,
who are wrangling with survival
and living with the pressure of the lie of prosperity.
Does the Christ at Christmas live there?
Does the Christ,
the baby born in obscurity,
the wandering refugee,
live there as a drug for despair?
Or is the child just the sign
of this profitable time?
A meal is shared
and a gift is given;
churches fill that are mostly
empty,
and the refugees
and those who sleep hard
or not at all,
look up at the stars
and think of the child,
the Christ at Christmas,
who shared their poverty
and lived their despair.
20/12/2015