ADVENT/CHRISTMAS/EPIPHANY 2004
From the editor…
What Kind of Love Came Down at Christmas?
Christina Rossetti’s
words pierce my heart at Christmas, year after year:
“Love came down at Christmas, Love all lovely, love
divine;
Love was born at Christmas, Star and angels gave the sign.”
It is worth pausing
and pondering the answer to the question: how deep and how broad was
that love?
To move with me
toward an answer, journey to a small chapel in Cartmell Fell, a little
known
holy place in the North of England. If
you know where to look when you arrive there – the stone is half hidden
in the
chancel — you can find a 1771 inscription with elegant lettering:
“Underneath this stone a mouldering Virgin lies,
Who was the pleasure once of Human Eyes.
Her Blaze of Charms Virtue once approved
The Gay admired her, much the parents loved.
Transitory life! Death untimely came.
Adieu, farewell, lonely leave my name.”
The words describe
Betty Poole; she was a little girl who died at age three.
Christina Rossetti also wrote:
“In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan;
Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone…”
It is only when the
bleakness of this world and its iron hardness is fully felt, that the
miracle
of melting which began at Christmas can penetrate and shock us into
appropriate
awe. God’s love enveloped the whole
moaning, stony, sin-sick world. It is
broad enough to embrace it all, in this world and the next.
I imagine being with
Betty Poole in Heaven and hearing her say with a smile, “God’s love was
bigger
than I thought!”
The Rev. Canon Dr. Kendall S. Harmon
Contact Dr Harmon by e-mail at ksharmon@mindspring.com
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