Poor as I am

Any degree of belief in God is the beginning of an awareness of His existence. Any awareness of God’s existence is an open door to an experience of His presence. Any experience of God’s presence will draw us closer to an encounter with Him. An encounter is something real, something undeniable, and something that challenges in some way. It deepens the impression made on us by the experience, and marks us indelibly in a way that may not become fully apparent until long after.

Christmas, for the most part, has always been a wonderful story for me: a story conveying the reality which is often all but buried beneath colour, wholly artificial light, extravagance, commercialism, and the excesses of celebrations which, while still being loosely associated, no longer feel as though they are truly connected with it. It has always been that story, but the process of belief becoming awareness, developing into experience, and transforming into encounter – a process with which I have become familiar in other parts of the story of Jesus – has never really begun for me in this, the quiet beginning of the whole Christian experience, available not only to true followers of Christ, or even to those in the far wider circle of people who call themselves Christians, but for all mankind.

But this year something was different. As in previous years, emotional involvement with the gospel narrative rose with my watching of any depiction of the story, but the BBC’s four part Nativity in the week before Christmas managed to deepen my involvement and to heighten my emotional response beyond the usual level. The final part left me disturbed to a degree that did not diminish until it was squeezed out by everything else going on around me; a diminishment I resisted but which completed its progress after four or five days of trying to find the mental space to engage with what had disturbed me. I longed for that engagement. In my own experience, such disturbance has always preceded a meaningful encounter, and running from the disturbing force, or even making no attempt to focus on it rather than striving to meet with it, would be denying much that the last twenty years has laid on me as the truth of my relationship with a living presence: the presence of He whose birth is the reality of the Christmas story.

My sense of involvement and disturbance was further heightened during the carol singing which preceded ‘midnight’ mass. As I had entered the church, my dipped finger had found “water like a stone” in the frozen font outside the door; though that description only came when those words were sung in the first verse of ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’. But it was a question in that carol’s final verse that grasped me suddenly, firmly, and in a way that troubled me for those next few days. “What can I give Him, poor as I am?” The emotional involvement in the story increased further, and I was unable to shake the words from my mind. It happened to be my turn as Reader, and I kept the question at bay while at the lectern, but by the time I had to return there for the Bidding Prayers I could not deny the build-up of pressure within me; I knew I had to highlight those words for everyone else, not just for myself. I believe that all He wanted then, and still wants, is for us all to come to Him as ourselves: as who we really are; to shed all our masks, and pretences, and pride, and to approach Him as the persons we were made to be. Even as the new-born babe, He was, and is, longing for us to come to Him.

I had come to the church prepared for what I was expected to do, but perhaps I was a little too prepared. I had forgotten that we are not the ones who set the agenda; God’s agenda is the only one that matters. His presence as an infant had momentarily come as close to me as the companion who had walked with me years ago. It was a gentle encounter: a child to child encounter; it was a passing smile, as Joseph drew me closer to look on The Light in Mary’s arms rather than being content to hang back and simply believe that He was there. He had fleetingly enabled me to live the story through the eyes and the heart of the child who still lives in me.

Though sure I have been brought close to my answer, I continue to dwell on that question: –

“What can I give Him, poor as I am?”