Twinning

What British town might best be twinned with Bethlehem?

Musing on this I feel that perhaps a city twinned with Bethlehem ought to be - well - holy and perhaps very old. We might think of St Albans, with a history going back to Roman times and architecturally dominated by a great Abbey Church and Cathedral honouring an early martyr of Christ. Not very Middle Eastern though.

The most obvious place to twin with Bethlehem has, in a sense, already started. It is a little Carmarthenshire village once known as Dyffryn Ceidrich. The village chapel was (not unusually) called Bethlehem and such was the overwhelming nature of the spiritual revivals experienced in the area and the smallness of the village that somewhere in the mists of history the village stopped being known by its original name and took on the name of the chapel. Hence Britain has its very own Bethlehem, complete with nearby sheep.

However the truth is that just one British place is twinned with Bethlehem. I confess to a whiff of pride as Diane and I are former residents of that place. On the other hand, even as I write this article, my head continues to involuntarily shake from side to side in a kind of deeply disturbed bewilderment. For the British city now twinned with Bethlehem is....

Glasgow.

Yes, that Glasgow. Rangers and Celtic, Billy Connolly, Barlinnie Prison and a homing device for Atlantic low pressure areas. Whether I was climbing over a sozzled seasonal celebrant on the underground, fighting the wind and rain between shops on Sauchiehall Street, queuing in a launderette full of students or sitting in a bleakly dark and forbidding kirk, thoughts of Bethlehem rarely surfaced in my student life in Glasgow - even near Christmas!

Yet thinking on, Bethlehem and Christmas are all about incongruous twinning.

I don’t know what angelic heralds do after a major performance - do they get straight on with heavenly ministry or do they take time out? If the latter then surely, as the shepherds made their expectant way down to Bethlehem to see the Christ-child who was Lord of glory, one of the heavenly chorus muttered to another, "I just don’t understand why He would twin with them"

King of kings, yet born of Mary,

As of old on earth He stood,

Lord of lords, in human vesture,

In the body and the blood;

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 9:

Considering the number of religious buildings that are in the Biblical nativity scene (zero) it is of more than passing interest how many appear on Christmas cards, usually in the snow.  How easily the meaning of God becomes architectural, a misfortune that is almost as old as religion itself.  When Peter saw Christ transfigured on the mountain his immediate reaction was a desire to build.

This card looks a little snowy but this may be a trick of desert light.  It's a great card and full of buildings behind the holy family.  But wait . . . what are those buildings?

Apart from the stable, Bethlehem clearly has an inn and one or two of the buildings could pass for that.  Less understandably the Judean hill town might have acquired a lighthouse over to the left.  Is there a mosque there?  No, that would be a few hundred years early.  There are certainly two churches, judging by the crosses on the towers.

No, hang on.  Churches?  Crosses?  It's like announcing a birth with the babe's obituary!

Thus, inadvertently, this card profoundly reflects the meaning of Christmas as the angel described it - You will call his name Jesus ['God saves'] for he will save his people from their sins.  The nativity has no meaning apart from the cross, and the cross no meaning apart from the body of people - the Church - that it wins for heaven from the darkness of sin.

Out of a card's chronological confusion we see light.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No. 3: Angel Bird

Starting at the top of this Christmas card it is immediately apparent that this is the standard picture of an angel accompanying the star over Bethlehem.  We don't really know about angel wings but as angels sometimes appear in the sky and move swiftly the wings are a reasonable bet.

So far so good.

But wait - is it an angel?  Is it a plane?  It's a bird!!

It's all about perspective but in this picture that is one BIG bird.  A perfectly decent image biblically - Noah's Ark, various prophets and Psalms, a symbol of the Holy Spirit at Christ's Baptism and so on.  But perhaps the artist who drew this forgot that in the birth narratives of Jesus the only doves are dead ones, offered as a sacrifice when the newborn is taken to the Temple.  That dove needs to be careful . . .

Snowlessness

So we reach the end of January without a snowflake in sight.  If I wanted this I'd have moved to Australia years ago!!  I was feeling miserable enough about a lack of snow when I came across this picture from just before Christmas in Bethlehem.

 

So, after all those over-clever Christmas talks about there obviously being no snow in the place where Jesus was actually born it turns out, this winter at least, to be more snowy than High Wycombe . . .

Happy Christmas. But get real about it . . .

Bedlam

Is there time to write a blog today?  Has anyone time to read it?  The last working/full shopping day before Christmas weekend.  It's bedlam!

But then Christmas always is bedlam [a place, scene, or state of uproar and confusion].  The roads are bedlam, the shops are bedlam, the church is bedlam and the home is bedlam!

Though in a way the problem is that they are not bedlam.  The word's association with chaotic situations derives from the Bethlem Hospital in London which was, in fact, a lunatic asylum of such grandeur that it became a tourist attraction.  Unfortunately it was not an attraction for those confined within and their miserable environment was both the voyeuristic draw and the derivation of the name for chaos as bedlam. 

Originally it began as Christian foundation and the Order that ran it was named, of course, after the place and the event that the other sort of late-December bedlam ostensibly celebrates but more often buries beneath its confusion.

Thus the answer to Christmas bedlam is, well, Bedlam.  Caught neatly, I think, in the folk carol Joly Wat that feels more like the first Bedlam where the Prince of Peace was found.

Whan Wat to Bedlem cumen was,

He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;

He found Jesu in a simpell place,

Betwen an ox but and an asse.

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

‘Jesu, I offer to thee here my pipe,

My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip;

Home to my felowes now will I skip,

And also look unto my shepe.’

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.