Knitting the universe new

The nativity scene beside the fire is a present from our friend Gwen, knitted by her 74-year-old mum. Shepherds, wise men, Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, sheep – each stitch created with love. A lovely, lasting gift.

Our Celtic ancestors saw Christmas – God present in one particular child – as a symbol of God’s close involvement in the whole of creation. I imagine God, sitting in a fireside rocking chair like a contented grandmother, flying fingers knitting the cosmos.

Our nativity scene is undeniably cute, but we tend to overdo the cuteness at Christmas, with the cards and the bright-faced kids recreating Bethlehem in the school hall. Someone could quite legitimately point at our sentimentality and exclaim ‘What possible relevance has this kitsch cuteness in a broken world?’  A world where, entrusted with pins and wool, we too often knit chaos.

What does our sweet, knitted nativity have to say to people facing hardship, poverty, homelessness, exile, stigma, oppression?

But the story of the birth of Jesus concerns a child born in poverty, in an occupied state; born with the stigma of illegitimacy; born to be smuggled abroad by his parents, long migrant miles to Egypt to escape a massacre; born to be executed as a young man by those who felt threatened by his palpable goodness.

Christmas is not cute. Christmas reminds us of God’s presence with us not just in the joy of life, but also in its mis-knitted awfulness.

Each year we try to knit December 25^th, following the pattern for ‘The Perfect Christmas.’ We knit into our lives presents and cards, turkey and trimmings (or the vegetarian option), mulled wine and cake, family and church.

But what about people for whom Christmas is nothing but a sad agony of loneliness? And what about those (most of us, perhaps) for whom Christmas Day is an anti-climax, and fails to deliver our expectations?

What is at the heart of our Christmas? A fulfilling joy rising within us, or an emptiness which all our frantic knitting cannot fill?

But that’s another question: this story of a God who loves us, and comes among us in Jesus to bring us wholeness and healing – is it simply a story we have knitted over the generations, just as other cultures have knitted their stories, to give us meaning? Or do these stories – and particularly the Christian story – reflect something real?

I think we will never find the answer to that question unless we first of all discover what it is to be unravelled, unknitted, for only then are we open to God.

My friend Colin from Buckie was asked to read a Christmas poem at a concert this year. Someone suggested T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, a monologue put in the mouth of one of the Wise Men by the poet, describing the journey to the manger and its imagined aftermath.

‘I don’t think I’ll read that one,’ Colin decided. ‘The ending is too dark.’

The Magus describes the experience of being present at the birth in the stable. It ‘was  hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’ Afterwards, he adds, the Magi returned home, but were ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.’ And he finishes morosely ‘I should be glad of another death.’

The Wise Man found himself unravelling in the presence of the Christ child. He recognised that the birth was something so revolutionary, so game-changing that he could never look at life, pleasure, religion in the same way again.

And yet (perhaps reflecting a stage in the poet’s faith journey) he was not ready, or willing to commit to the implications of what he had seen, and so the only escape was death.

Did he, like Eliot, move on? Did he realise that the ‘death’ of bidding farewell to the old story which had hitherto sustained him was essential if he was to be born into a greater story?

‘Over again I feel thy finger and find thee,’ says another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins after his own unravelling.

That finger reaches into the manger as our soul lies content, conscious of new life and new purpose surging within us. We open our eyes and look up into the attentive faces of Mother Spirit and Father God.

And once again God hands us a pair of needles and we knit our futures, but this time we know that the pattern lives within us. We no longer attempt to knit a perfect Christmas, or success and fulfilment for self and family. Instead we knit as Jesus knitted, and we suddenly realise that in our hearts Christmas has come.

For we are partners with the Father, who is patiently knitting the universe new.

Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 24 December 2015