In the Bleak Midwinter

MY KIND OF CAROL

Even in the dim and distant past when I was a child, it felt as though our church-going family was slightly odd and removed from the rest of society and its understanding of reality.  Thus it came as something of a revelation when I discovered that my family's take on the "real world" was one that was shared not only by the kind yet definitely uncool people in the congregation at church, but also by others whom my patronising school friends were forced to admire and even to study. Painters, poets, musicians, even scientists, could be Christians too.

I first came across Christina Rossetti as the writer of In the Bleak Midwinter, and I pictured her with a felt hat skewered to her grey curls. Only someone wholly unworldly could have penned the words "a breast full of milk" and expected generations of teenagers to sing them without giggling. And when, later on, I read Goblin Market, I simply assumed that it must have been written by some other C. Rossetti. I had - and still have - very little idea of what is going on in Goblin Market, but it felt dangerous and sensual and tragic and so, obviously, Not Christian (capital N, capital C!).

So I love this carol [Rossetti's poem set to music by Holst] not just for its intense, evocative language, but because it was, for me, part of a growing discovery that there really might be only one reality, and that nothing needs to be excluded for that reality to be Christian. In the Bleak Midwinter, just like Goblin Market, is a very physical and sensual poem, and the God it portrays is mysterious and terrible. All around the child and his mother, the wild elemental snow and the worshipping angels know that this is the God from whom "heaven and earth shall flee away".

While Rossetti contrasts the inside and the outside scenes at the birth of Jesus, she is not simplistically saying that one is more real than the other, whether it is the earth "hard as iron" or the mother's kiss. On the contrary, she is saying that both are equally real, and our response to this one, baffling and glorious reality is to give it our whole heart. It is God's reality, all of it, and it requires all of us. "What shall I give him? Give my heart."

Dr Jane Williams is an author, lecturer and theologian and is married to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Her latest book, Angels, is published by Lion.