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At the Nativity (Gloomy Night)MY KIND OF CAROLSr Wendy Beckett - 2 December 2006
In this hymn to the wonder of God's coming to our poor earth, Crashaw addresses Our Lord as "sweet". He is not using an adjective: this is an endearment. It always moves me. This was how my father addressed my mother, and his daughters, too. The protective tenderness in such a word emphasises the astonishing ambiguity of the Nativity. God has come to us, in all his greatness, yet he comes as a baby. "Summer in winter, day in night!/ Heaven in earth and God in Man!" At the Resurrection we cry aloud in joy our Alleluia. But that is full day. Now we have only the "Young Dawn", the small child, "meek Majesty! Soft King", who has still to suffer and die before he rises and lifts us into "eternal day". What overwhelms Crashaw is the sheer gift of it all. God has done this, we have only to receive it. The line I love best is at the end of the third verse: "We saw Thee by Thine Own sweet light." He builds up to it, how the opened eyes of the child dispel the darkness and coldness of the human heart, and how now we can see. As the Psalmist puts it, "In his light, we see light." Jesus is light itself: we have only to look at him and be transformed. But when God gives, it is to enable us to give. Crashaw suggests it happens almost spontaneously. Look at Jesus and you will be changed. Our selfishness will be burned away, and "ourselves become our sacrifice". It may take all our lives before sinfulness becomes love, but it begins now, at Christmas, by the "persuasive powers" of "Thine fair eyes". Amen; may it be so. Listen to "At the Nativity" (Gloomy Night), performed by Quintessential Voices |
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Richard Crashaw, who became a priest and died in his late thirties, was a serious poet, though his stately seventeenth-century diction ("the noble infant" is not our usual description of Jesus) may seem at first rather remote. But his words are suffused with what I would call a loving theology. When he sings of Jesus being born in "gloomy night", he is not just setting the scene, as "in the bleak midwinter" of another favourite carol. He is speaking metaphysically, of the spiritual darkness and distress that enveloped the pre-Christian world. It was only when Jesus "showed his face" that our spiritual darkness changed. It was still darkness, warned Crashaw, but now, "in spite of" it, day has come, the day that is Jesus. 
