The Oxen by Thomas Hardy
Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.
We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
(This is going to be hard to write.)
I used to love Christmas.
I realize that I am not exceptional in this. I know others. It is a special kind of disease to love Christmas, I mean to really love Christmas. You may wonder what the symptoms are, in case you or someone you love has this disease.
Ask yourself a few questions. Have you ever made goose or plum pudding for Christmas dinner - even if you're an American? Do you have an Advent wreath in your home, which you light faithfully and appropriately? Is there a poem you simply must read every Christmas Eve? Do you know all the verses to "The First Noel"?
If you answered yes to any of the questions I've just asked, you may be infected. You may also be infected if you understand the allusions in the poem above by Thomas Hardy without having them explained to you.
The poem refers to a folk tale, still told among some, that on Christmas Eve the beasts of the farm, like those who attended the birth of Christ in the stable, kneel down at midnight to honor the newborn king. Some even say that they speak with voices like men.
Like almost every poem that I know well, I learned this one set to music. I forget the composer, but it was a really lovely setting, one that helped you understand the import of the text. We sang it in high school chorus. It's really a marvel in terms of craft, isn't it? "So fair a fancy few would weave . . . " Let that roll from your tongue a dozen times.
The story about the oxen is not in the Bible. It would hardly be out of place, though. The birth of Jesus is extraordinary, as recorded in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Divine messengers. The virgin conception. The prophetic utterances of so many characters. The birth in a stable. The appearance of the hosts of heaven to shepherds. The search for the baby by mystics from Persia. The bad king's murder of children. The flight into Egypt.
Of course, all of that pales in comparison to the central fact of the story: the infinite power and majesty of God, incarnate in a small child, to redeem a wicked people. The Word made flesh. Even as I type those words, they bring chills to my flesh and tears to my eyes.
There are stories like that all through the book. Fish swallow men whole. A nation is fed from bread that falls from the sky for forty years. Sticks turn into snakes. Rivers become blood. A shepherd boys kills a giant with a slingshot. Men are cast into a furnace and are unharmed. The dead come to life. And a prophet named Balaam does, in fact, have a donkey who speaks.
For those of you who have never truly believed these stories (or ones like them), it may all be very difficult to take in. The atheist compares them to the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus, but they are something different.
One of my favorite stories is about the prophet Elisha. He angers the king of Aram, who sends an entire army to encircle his home. Elisha's servant sees the army and is terrified, and asks, "What should we do?" So the prophet prays that his servant's eyes may be opened to see things as they truly are. Then the servant looks, and the mountain behind the army is filled with the entire host of heaven, standing to protect Elisha, riding chariots of fire.
It is one of the great themes of the book: things are not as they appear. The climactic story of the Bible is, in many ways, centered on that theme. "Do you see that man there, nailed to that tree, naked, broken, bleeding, dying and being mocked by thousands? He is, this very moment, conquering death and Hell."
If you are a believer, it runs deep. C.S. Lewis wrote that every single person we see will some day, at the end of time, be transformed into something either so glorious and radiant that we would be tempted to worship, or else so hideous and wicked that we should have nightmares forever thinking about them. Paul, writing to the church in Corinth about some very nuts-and-bolts matters, says in passing, "Do you not know that you will judge angels?" He doesn't go on to explain it, he just says it. I remember sitting in church once, looking at the man in front of me, who had arrived late that morning because he had a sick cow, thinking, "This man will pass judgment on God's angels."
It's an extraordinary way to live. Believing that oxen should kneel at the stroke of midnight every December 25 does not seem ridiculous in comparison.
So, I used to love Christmas. It represented to me all the hope that I had. It represented my hope that at the end of days, all would be made right, like in the last verse of that carol:
Then louder pealed the bells more deep,
"God is not dead nor doth He sleep,
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, goodwill to men."
It represented hope that I could be different, that I could be better, that though I was beset by my own native sin, I was not what I appeared to be. I bore the imprint of God's image, the imago Dei. More, I was changed, I was a new creature. I had been raised from spiritual death, as surely as Jesus had raised his dead friend Lazarus from the tomb. I counted God my friend and death as gain. I had hope both here and hereafter.
I've always found arguments against the more fantastical elements of religion completely unconvincing. That the omnipotent God should speak worlds into being was nothing. That He should save a wretch like me was more unfathomable. Armchair agnostics sit at their laptops and ridicule the virgin birth, but they completely miss the issue. The power of the Creator of the elements to manipulate them to His will is a trifle compared to the mystery of grace.
The problem is that I know my own heart. I've known it since I was very young. I know its uncomfortable places and dark corners. I know what's under the floorboards and in the closets. Paul wrote that for those who are in Christ, old things have passed away, all things are made new. Yet my heart tells me I am just a man. Better than some, much worse than many. Son of Adam, to be sure.
I think that others would describe what has happened to me over the last couple of years as a "loss of faith." It seems like much more than that to me, much more than those three words can express. It is as though I awoke from a dream, only to discover than the world was waiting in all its ugliness and pain.
There are those, even some I count as friends, who think nothing of belittling religion and the religious. I forgive their ignorance, but it is ignorance, nonetheless, sometimes a very cruel type of ignorance. To mock that which is the very ground of being of fellow traveler in this world is callous. Strangely, I find it more painful now than when all those things were mine.
I suppose I've lost faith. I've also lost Christmas, or at least, I've lost what Christmas was to me. Tonight we're having friends for cocktails, a Christmas party. I am thankful I have that at least. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die," says the fool.
Thomas Hardy wrote another poem about Christmas called "Yuletide in a Younger World." He writes of remembering how it used to seem to him, then concludes thus:
We heard still small voices then,
And, in the dim serene
Of Christmas Eve,
Caught the far-time tones of fire-filled prophets
Long on earth unseen . . .
- Can such ever have been?
I miss those still, small voices and wonder the same. Maybe I'll make a trip through the gloom this Christmas Eve, and see the oxen kneel. Or maybe I won't and simply hope it might be so.
