A little girl is singing for the faithful to come ye
Joyful and triumphant, a song she loves,
And also the partridge in a pear tree
And the golden rings and the turtle doves…..

Read it all (Hat tip MDS).

The plain meaning therefore is, that the Speech begotten by God before all ages, and who always dwelt with the Father, was made man. On this article there are two things chiefly to be observed. The first is, that two natures were so united in one Person in Christ, that one and the same Christ is true God and true man. The second is, that the unity of person does not hinder the two natures from remaining distinct, so that his Divinity retains all that is peculiar to itself, and his humanity holds separately whatever belongs to it. And, therefore, as Satan has made a variety of foolish attempts to overturn sound doctrine by heretics, he has always brought forward one or another of these two errors; either that he was the Son of God and the Son of man in so confused a manner, that neither his Divinity remained entire, nor did he wear the true nature of man; or that he was clothed with flesh, so as to be as it were double, and to have two separate persons.

–John Calvin (1509-1564)

Thousands of people in Lancashire came together this Christmas for the county’s first interactive carol concert.

Singers and musicians performed live in the BBC Radio Lancashire’s Radio Theatre for the unique carol service.

People gathered at pubs, community centres, supermarkets, and even a funeral parlour to listen and join in the festive sing song.

Read it all.

The challenge of contemporary politicians was enormous. Bishop Redfern said that Prime Minister David Cameron’s task, just like the Emperor Augustus in Jesus’ day, was to hold all those different tribes together: “Modern politics is about the challenge of creating a kind of public space which brings together many disparate elements.”

Here, said Dr Redfern, the Church also had a mammoth role to play: “Remember that Jesus was born in the public space. The Innkeeper took them in and he made them part of his family.

He added: “Jesus, of course, was to continue this work of taking people in from all families, tribes and the sense of a family identity was expanded. “The Church is there to serve all people, we are there for everyone. That is the reminder which the story of Jesus’ birth brings.”

Read it all.

Read it all and take the time to see the video (just under nine minutes).

…the religious leaders of Jesus’ day regarded God….[chiefly in terms of His holiness] ”“ [they viewed him as]…a God set apart from His world and separate from everything that might be unclean and messy and unworthy.

So the emphasis is on the importance of dignified worship, carried out in church buildings with due reverence, awe and majesty which nothing must interrupt or disturb ”“ the world kept at a respectable distance so that it doesn’t sully what is going on inside the sacred space. The holy must not be contaminated with the unholy, or the spiritual with the material or political.

But it is precisely this view of God’s holiness that Jesus shattered. He spent most of His ministry out of doors, not in synagogues or temple but preaching to ordinary people, attempting to relate ordinary everyday events to God. He saw everything within that world as having a connection to God such as treasure in a field, a lost coin, a lost sheep, a lost son. And He was born in a cowshed amidst the mess and smell of animals. God, in the midst of the warp and woof of real human existence; the link between holy and unholy, inextricably joined.

Read it all.

Read it all.

But the object of divine action in the Incarnation is man. God’s free decision is and remains a gracious decision; God becomes man, the Word becomes flesh. The Incarnation means no apparent reserved, but a real and complete descent of God. God actually became what we are, in order actually to exist with us, actually to exist for us, in thus becoming and being human, not to do what we do-sin; and to do what we fail to do”“God’s, His own, will; and so actually, in our place, in our situation and position to be the new man. It is not in His eternal majesty”“in which He is and remains hidden from us”“but as this new man and therefore the Word in the flesh, that God’s Son is God’s revelation to us and our reconciliation with God. Just for that reason faith cannot look past His humanity, the cradle of Bethlelhem and the cross of Golgotha in order to see Him in His divinity, Faith in the eternal Word of the Father is faith in Jesus of Nazareth or it is not the Christian faith.

–Karl Barth (1886-1968)

This is a time of great anxiety about what lies ahead. The global balance of power is changing and here at home at a time of financial stringency there is an urgent search for how human beings and communities can flourish at a time when having and consuming more and more things no longer seems a plausible road to happiness.

Today’s good news is that God so loved the world that he was generous and gave himself to wean us away from our obsession with power over things and people. The way of Herod the Great and the way of the Emperor who decrees that “all the world should be taxed” is contrasted with the future opened up by the infant king born into a poor family. He comes to initiate us into a way of generous living; in love with God and his world which involves loving ourselves and our neighbours equally.

A few years ago the former President of the Royal Society published a book about the prospects for the human race worryingly entitled “Our Final Century” ”“ without a question mark ”“ although he has ascribed this to a publisher’s error. There is a question about whether we shall develop the wisdom to channel the power we have acquired from the scientific knowledge and discoveries of the 20th century? Where indeed, to quote T.S.Eliot, is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge and the knowledge we have lost in information.

Read it all.

O Gracious Father, who sent not thy Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved: Fulfill the good tidings of thine angel and bring great joy to all people through the nativity of him who is the Prince of Peace; to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be glory in the highest, now and for evermore.

A shameless lover of Christmas carols, I have found support for my sentimentalism in a most unlikely place; an essay by Dr. Lewis Thomas, one-time dean of New York University School of Medicine. He notes that the human faculty for language is rooted in a specific collection of neurons in the left hemisphere of the brain. This corresponds with a similar center of neurons in the brain of a song bird. It is there that the bird’s song is “recorded,” that is, if the bird learns it as a nestling. If the bird hears the proper song at that stage it will have it in mind for life. It can then add its own arpeggios so that it is the song of the species and at the same time the bird’s own recognizable voice””“perceptively different from the song of all his relatives.” But, according to the dean of medicine, if it does not hear the song as a youngster, the collection of neurons cannot compose the song on its own. Sadly enough, “what comes out later when it is ready for singing and mating is an unmelodious buzzing noise.” The song isn’t instinctive. The urge to sing is instinctive, but not the song. The little bird must first be sung to if it is to know and sing the song.
I think of this fascinating fact as we draw closer to when we shall sing again the Song of Christmas. Like the brain of the song bird we cannot nor did we compose this song on our own. It was a song sung to us. Sung to the human race, to our species, by angels. They sang it to the shepherds out in the fields near Bethelehem on that first Christmas night. It is the song of the Savior, the God-Man Jesus Christ. We did not create it, for Christmas was not an idea of the human race. In our sinful condition we could never have composed it. We tend to want to save ourselves””to find a way out of our problems by our own ingenuity and effort. But we never get there. All we produce in our attempts to save ourselves is the “unmelodious buzzing noise” of human pride and striving. The truth of the matter is that we are saved by God’s grace or we are not saved at all.
There were many who were striving to save themselves when the Angels first sang the song of Christmas to the shepherds. Caesar Augustus tried to bring peace to the world by the power of the Roman Empire””by its unique blend of politics, statesmanship and military might. Among the Greeks, the intellectual sophisticates of the day, it was the aspirations of culture, science, art and thought that promised from year to year a salvation for humankind that never came. The Priests in Jerusalem sought salvation by the sacrifices offered daily in the temple. The Scribes and Pharisees tried to deserve God’s favor through their religious perfectionism, by keeping the demands of the Law. But religion then, as it too often does today, brought only conflict to the individual’s conscience and from there to one’s relationships with others. Instead””from politics, culture, and religion””there came only the unmelodious buzzing noise we hear all too often in the world around us today.

But, to certain poor shepherds the song was sung; they, in their everydayness, represent all of our race, the entire human species””existing somewhere between animals and angels””to such the angels came. And the Glory shone around them and the song of salvation, the song composed in heaven (to be lived out on earth) for our species was first sung”¦. “Behold, I bring you good news of a great joy that will come to all the people, for unto you is born this day, in the city of David a Savior who is Christ the Lord.” Of course the shepherds””just as you and I would have done, for this is hardly a story of their virtue but of God’s grace””ran with eager steps to Bethlehem. It was God’s grace-filled invitation that sent them breathless across the fields.

After the angels departed, and the glory that shone around them had given way to the normalcy of the night; after the shepherds returned from the stable, the night song of the Savior, once heard, was never forgotten. Sure, the night was still dark; the air cold; the duties still needed to be done. The wolf and bear still lurked in shadows of the glistening moon. Nothing had really changed, and yet everything was different. I remember. For that’s how it was for me when Jesus Christ came into my life as a college student some 38 years ago. Nothing had changed, and everything was different. It has been that way for me ever since. The Song of Christmas, the song of Salvation, the hope of Jesus the Messiah, once heard, was never forgotten. And like the song of the songbird, it can be heard in the darkest of nights, and on the coldest of mornings.

I have heard it myself in the waiting rooms of hospitals. I have sung it as I have walked before a hundred caskets”¦leaned my ear near to the beds of the dying to hear it whispered in the last breath of the faithful. It is why the trees, and lights; the eggnog and the parties are only a preparation. For perhaps you’ve noticed, as one preacher has put it, “the hurt of life does not become suspended, magically put on hold until the festive days are done.” And he is right. It is not only priests and preachers who live with these things. You too find yourself going from a divorced friend’s loneliness to another friend’s wedding; From hospital room to holiday party; From toasting champagne to tossing dirt on a coffin. And among the glow of Christmas lights are a score of grieving memories for each of us””grief and worries that trouble our hearts even while we are digesting the evening’s dinner. Yet that is why we gather for the Christmas Eucharist. To sing again the song that the Angels first taught our race to sing. The song that announced the Savior was born. Born in a stable; “ right between the mystery of the angels and manure of the cattle.” (J. B. Shepherd) In that very intersection where we so often live our lives. That is where the song was first sung to our race; and once the Angels had sung it, it is now ours to sing. It is the reason we will gather on Christmas Eve: singing the song of our Savior; experiencing anew the birth of his grace in our lives.

You can hear it again this Christmas season. Hear it in the words of the Gospel; in every poorly crafted, but faithful sermon. It vibrates in the strings of the harp; in reed and brass and flute. In the chords of carols and anthems. Once you have heard the melody, like the young song bird, you will never forget it. You may add your own arpeggios; your personal witness to his salvation. For each human voice is unique and like no other. God made it that way. Just as he also made your voice to sing the song that heaven composed for our human race””even when you sing with wounded voice. His birth and his cross are the only things that can keep us from singing again that old unmelodious buzzing noise of a fallen and sinful world. It may be your instinct to sing. But this song, composed in heaven, sung first on earth by angels to shepherds, lived out from crib to cross by Jesus Christ, shall be passed on person to person and sung again soon in a thousand thousand churches around the world; sung by voices all around: wounded or angelic: it is the same song they sing”¦The Song of Christmas.

–First penned to the Diocese of South Carolina in 2009 but well worth a rereading I think

Dickens and Disney’s Tiny Tims both hope that those who feel pity for a poor crippled boy in church “”¦ will think of Him who made lame men walk” at Christmas time.

This was a lesson that Dickens meant for adults, as well as children.

There is no separating the generosity we owe to others from the generosity God has shown to us by sending his son to give us new hearts. Christmas shouldn’t just bring out the best in us once a year; it should transform our lives””as it did for Scrooge. Dickens knew where he wanted to end his story, and finished it accordingly:

“Some laughed to see the alteration in [Scrooge] but he let them laugh … he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed that knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!”

Read it all.

Listen to it all. A reminder of the English translation of the words:

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
Christ the Lord.
Alleluia!

God with us means more than God over or side by side with us, before or behind us. It means more than His divine being in even the most intimate active connection with our human being otherwise peculiar to Him. At this point, at the heart of the Christian message and in relation to the event of which it speaks, it means that God has made himself the one who fulfills his redemptive will. It means that He Himself in His own person ””at His own cost but also on His own initiative””has become the inconceivable Yet and Nevertheless of this event, and so its clear and well-founded and legitimate, its true and holy and righteous Therefore. It means that God has become man in order as such, but in divine sovereignty, to take up our case. What takes place in the work of inconceivable mercy is, therefore, the free overruling of God, but it is not an arbitrary overlooking and ignoring, not an artificial bridging, covering over or hiding, but a real closing of the breach, gulf and abyss between God and us for which we are responsible. At the very point where we refuse and fail, offending and provoking God, making ourselves impossible before Him and in that way missing our destiny, treading under foot our dignity, forfeiting our right, losing our salvation and hopelessly compromising our creaturely being””at that very point God Himself intervenes as man.

–Church Dogmatics (IV.1) [E.T. By Geoffrey Bromiley and Thomas Torrance of the German Original] (London: T and T Clark, 1956), page 12

The Bishop of St Albans, Dr Alan Smith, said that “those of us in Weste­rn Europe cannot go on con­suming more and more when so much of the world has so little.” He called for “a new moral vision of what we do with our wealth and how we ensure that everyone has a fair share in it”.

The Bishop of Whitby, Dr Martin Warner, in a Christmas message on his website, said that Britain was “riven by inequality of opportunity and the enjoyment of material wealth. . . This year we should be concerned not only about the rise of unemployment towards the three million mark but more particularly about the fact that so many young people are bearing the brunt” of it.

The Bishop of Bath & Wells, the Rt Revd Peter Price, preaching at Bath Abbey, said: “There is a sense of the very fabric of society being torn apart. Accompanying this is a feel-ing of loss about the way we used to live our lives, the way we managed our relationships, the way education was. . . There is something missing.”

Read it all.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

–Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

…in all of our giving, even in our best gifts, there is always, to a greater or lesser degree, there is always a gap ”“ a gap between the sign and the thing signified, between the gift and the giver. We say “it’s the thought that counts” because we have to, because the thought and the gift can never be identical.

But here’s the thing. Again, here is Christmas: God does not give us something external to himself; God gives us himself. In this child born unto us, that gap between the Gift and the Giver has disappeared. That baby is not a gesture. In this Gift, it really is the thought that counts, because in this gift the Thought, the Heart, the Logos, the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

Read it all.

As with the holiday, so with the culture at large. The increasingly post-Christian culture of America and Europe are nevertheless more deeply rooted in Christianity than is usually recognized by its opponents (and some of its adherents). It’s at least theoretically possible that this culture will eventually get Christianity out of its system, out of the roots of its consciousness, and negligible as a cultural force, reduced to the private practices of an eccentric few. This would take several generations, and I don’t think it will happen, but it certainly could. And if it did, the resulting culture would, like Christmas, lose the hope and the humanism which had been its legacy from Christianity. As with Christmas, if the heart were to stop beating, the body would die.

We have seen the prospects for that new culture already, in the totalitarian nightmares of communism and fascism, in the wasteland of pleasure-and-power-seeking which is offered as the good life by much of the entertainment and advertising produced by capitalism, in the drab materialist collectivism of “Imagine” and the absurd materialist egoism of Atlas Shrugged.

Perhaps it’s not even too much to say that if Christmas were to die, the remains of Christian culture would die, too, and with it that softness toward the individual human person””imperfect, of course, and slow to develop””that has characterized it. As long as the mad mixture of the very earthly and the very heavenly which is Christmas””the poor and vulnerable newborn baby among the animals on the one hand, choirs of angels on the other””remains at the heart of the holiday, and the holiday remains very much alive in the culture, the natural coldness and brutality of the human race is always challenged from within the culture itself. Should that challenge be removed, no one would be more surprised by the result than those who worked to remove it. They might not live to see that result, but if their souls were not lost altogether, part of their purgatory might be the knowledge of what they had done to their descendants.

Read it all.

Christmas means different things around the world, but in China one of the things it’s come to stand for crackdown. In recent years Chinese courts have chosen the holiday season as the time to hand down the harshest sentences to political dissenters, possibly in the belief that their rulings will received the least attention abroad. On Dec. 26 a court in the southwestern city of Guiyang sentenced longtime dissident Chen Xi to 10 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power,” Reuters reported.

Chen was active in the 1989 protest movement, organizing a pro-democracy group in Guiyang and later serving 13 years in prison after the government crushed the Tiananmen demonstrations. Chen Xi, who is also known as Chen Youcai, was arrested on Nov. 29, a week before the Guizhou Human Rights Forum, a group to which he belonged, was declared illegal, according to Chinese Human Rights Defenders, an activist group.

Read it all.

The Coptic Orthodox Church will send out invitations to presidential hopefuls and all political parties, including Salafi ones, to attend the Christmas holy mass on 7 January, a papal source told Al-Masry Al-Youm.

The source said that Pope Shenouda III insisted on inviting both Muslim and Coptic Egyptians to the celebration.

Read it all.

Almighty God, who hast revealed the glory of thy love in the in the face of Jesus Christ, and called us by him to live as thy children: Fill our hearts, as we remember his nativity, with the gladness of this great redemption; that we may join in the heavenly song of glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, and goodwill towards men; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.

In one of the original episodes of Law and Order, some 15 years ago, I’ll never forget the scene of the three cops doing an all-night stake out from their parked car. It’s 3:00 AM or so and over black coffee they’re talking about the regrets of their lives. The guy in the front under the wheel said he regretted being a jerk to his wife most of their married lives before she died. The cop riding shotgun said he regretted chronically stealing money as a teenager from this hard-working father’s wallet. The third cop is in the back with his eyes closed, half-asleep. And they said to him, “Hey sergeant, what do you regret?” And he finally mumbled out, “I regret everything.”

There’s just a little part of me that can identify. I have my share of sin and regret that stem from a self-centered heart. And the message of the angel, that “to you is born a Savior who is Christ the Lord”, is the most wonderful news I ever heard. Would you agree?

I don’t care how low you’ve sunk, there is no reason to give up or think only somber, gloomy thoughts. I’m with you in that I cannot undo my past. But I am privilege to point to a Savior that can wash us clean. Jesus never once in the narrative of the New Testament turned away a helpless sinner who fled to him….

Read it all.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —
Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,
Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,
The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.
The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,
And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware
Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought
Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now
Be very far off.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

“Rejoice! Rejoice! The kingdom of God is upon us.” This is a phrase that we hear quite frequently during the Christmas season.

When Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth to share her wonderful news about the message she had received from the angel, she proclaimed great joy in the hymn that has come down to us and is recited each day by those who pray the Liturgy of the Hours: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God, my Savior.”

Her joy is reflected in the way we celebrate Christmas: Christmas Mass, the beautiful decorations, the family gatherings, the sharing of gifts. With Mary we can offer our thankful praise to the God who loves us so much and is so generous to us….

Read it all.

The challenge of the Christmas story is to sing this same song of peace and good will amidst the sorrows, trials, inequalities and injustices of today’s world. It means caring about those who are without a job, or without a home. It means trying to build a different world and trying to live by a different set of values. It means remembering those who are worse off, and doing something about it. It means providing jobs and homes and meals. It also means ensuring that people have jobs and homes and meals for life.

None of this will be easy. But the biggest danger of all is starting to believe that nothing can change and that our own contribution makes no difference. It does. Things can change.

And if the Christian faith teaches us anything, it is that one person can make a difference. That person is Christ. He shows us a different way of living. He gives us a different set of values. What he brings is what the world so desperately needs. And he begins that life in solidarity with the poorest of the poor.

Read it all.

Faith is risking entering the road of those who, like Him, can forget themselves in favour of others ”“ whoever they are ”“ and can take on the attitudes that derive from this: forgiveness, welcome, listening, solidarity ”¦
The path of losing, marked out by these stages, becomes the path of finding.
Those who take this path, find God, the brother finds himself.
Life is transformed this way.
It may be ”“ usually it is this way ”“ that outside nothing seems to change, that history and, in particular the history of our Holy Land, continues to be the dramatic reality that we see and experience: hatred, divisions, fears, suspicions, prejudice, paralysis”¦
But inside, everything changes!
The way of looking at life changes, the way of being changes and ”“ by grace!- we are pleased with this life, because this life is not only a field, but it is the field that hides the treasure.

Read it all.

The importance of family has, of course, come home to Prince Philip and me personally this year with the marriages of two of our grandchildren, each in their own way a celebration of the God-given love that binds a family together.
For many, this Christmas will not be easy. With our armed forces deployed around the world, thousands of service families face Christmas without their loved ones at home.
The bereaved and the lonely will find it especially hard. And, as we all know, the world is going through difficult times. All this will affect our celebration of this great Christian festival.
Finding hope in adversity is one of the themes of Christmas. Jesus was born into a world full of fear. The angels came to frightened shepherds with hope in their voices: ‘Fear not’, they urged, ‘we bring you tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
‘For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Saviour who is Christ the Lord.’
Although we are capable of great acts of kindness, history teaches us that we sometimes need saving from ourselves – from our recklessness or our greed.
God sent into the world a unique person – neither a philosopher nor a general, important though they are, but a Saviour, with the power to forgive….

Read it carefully and read it all; I highly recommend watching the video presentation.

The regular suggestion that baling out countries will lead them to misbehave again won’t work, either. That might be true of some banks and businesses. It isn’t true of countries like Tanzania, who, after debt remission, have experienced the joy of developing education, medicine and other essentials ”“ in fact, of building a new home.

We don’t just need, in other words, to ”˜turn the economy round’, and get it back to where it was before. We need to turn it inside out. The Christmas message suggests that it’s time for a major, global rethink about the multiple, interlocking problems we can no longer ignore. And about the many-sided, but essentially coherent, proposals that flow directly from the Baby at Bethlehem, demanding to be worked out at street level.

The God who became homeless at Christmas longs to transform this muddled old world into a place where all can be at home at last. That’s what Jesus taught us to pray for.

Read it all.

Christian joy thus springs from this certainty: God is close, he is with me, he is with us, in joy and in sorrow, in sickness and in health, as a friend and faithful spouse. And this joy endures, even in trials, in suffering itself. It does not remain only on the surface; it dwells in the depths of the person who entrusts himself to God and trusts in him.

Some people ask: but is this joy still possible today? Men and women of every age and social condition, happy to dedicate their existence to others, give us the answer with their lives! Was not Bl. Mother Teresa of Calcutta an unforgettable witness of true Gospel joy in our time? She lived in touch daily with wretchedness, human degradation and death. Her soul knew the trials of the dark night of faith, yet she gave everyone God’s smile.

In one of her writings, we read: “We wait impatiently for paradise, where God is, but it is in our power to be in paradise even here on earth and from this moment. Being happy with God means loving like him, helping like him, giving like him, serving like him” (The Joy of Giving to Others, 1987, p. 143). Yes, joy enters the hearts of those who put themselves at the service of the lowly and poor. God abides in those who love like this and their souls rejoice. If, instead, people make an idol of happiness, they lose their way and it is truly hard for them to find the joy of which Jesus speaks.

—Pope Benedict XVI.

Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves His well-belov’d imprisonment,
There He hath made Himself to His intent
Weak enough, now into the world to come;
But O, for thee, for Him, hath the inn no room?
Yet lay Him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars and wise men will travel to prevent
The effect of Herod’s jealous general doom.
Seest thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He
Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?
Was not His pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss Him, and with Him into Egypt go,
With His kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

–John Donne (1572-1631)