(to Bethlehem)
I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered me yet.
But I hear him coughing all night long,
a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.
Leonard Cohen
And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth, to Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be enrolled with Mary, his betrothed, who was with child.
Luke 2.4-5
And he arose and took the child and his mother by night, and departed to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod.
Matthew 2.14-15
You may be fortunate enough to receive this Christmas a traditional Christmas card with a picture of the Holy Family on it. I hope that you do. I have no systematically philosophical grounds for disliking robins, snow, stage-coaches, jolly Santas, or vaguely artistic seasonal nothings, but I tend to take the opposite view from the woman who, when shopping for Christmas cards, said to her daughter, "Try and find me some that aren't too religious." You may smile at the anomaly, but I have had funeral directors telephone me and ask whether I could conduct a funeral, with the family's specific request that "It must not be too religious." I refuse on those particular terms with the reply, "I am a Methodist minister. I do 'religious' – that's what I do. If they want me to conduct the funeral, their loved one will get a Christian funeral. Is that what they want?" On reflection, they always say, "Yes." And so I do it.
Well, there you are with your card of the Holy Family on your mantelpiece, artistically conflating the different Gospel traditions by having rustic shepherds jostling alongside wise men from the east who are all trying not to tread on any of the animals who are also attempting to get a look in. You may think to yourself, "That all looks a bit matey. It must be a portent of the 'togetherness' which is the true spirit of Christmas." And I want to ask, "Is it? Was it really like that?" because I suspect that loneliness has always been an unacknowledged undercurrent feature of Christmas – even of the first one.
Firstly, there was the journey to Bethlehem. An older carpenter took his sixteen-year-old fiancée who was heavily pregnant ('great with child' sounds so much better, doesn't it?) to fulfil some Roman imperial diktat for tax registration purposes. Despite the angel's assurance in a dream, Joseph was probably still pondering on whether he ought to take Mary as his wife, and who the father of her child really was. I imagine that it could have been a rather tight-lipped sort of journey, with a young Mary feeling so alone in her conflicting emotions. Perhaps there were many travelling on the way with them, but as you know when you go up to London to do some Christmas shopping, the crowds may well be heaving all about you, but you can stop on a pavement and feel the solitude of a desert island, where the crowds are like the waves breaking around you.
Within two years (possibly considerably less), there was the flight into Egypt, a journey into an unknown land, even if Joseph bore the same name as the ancient Patriarch who had once held such sway there (have you never noticed that before?). Long since there had arisen a pharaoh who knew not Joseph – a change in the pharaonic dynasty – and so Mary and Joseph and Jesus really were alone, travellers and sojourners in a foreign land. They had each other? Yes, they had each other, but beyond that only the whispered promises of God and the memory of a birth.
Recently, I have been thinking through some of the lyrics and poetry of the American folk tradition of the 1950s and 1960s. It is a long time since I read Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" or Woody Guthrie's "Bound For Glory", but the sound on the radio of Woody Guthrie (or Bob Dylan) singing "This Land Is Your Land" stops me dead in my tracks every time and reminds me of the tradition that Bob Dylan picked up in "I Am a Lonesome Hobo"…
I am a lonesome hobo
Without family or friends
Where another man's life might begin
That's exactly where mine ends
I have never heard "that lonesome whistle blowing" across the vast open spaces of America, but I seem to be able to imagine it (aided by the fabulous American steam railway photographs of O. Winston Link), and to picture the Beats and the hobos, hopping freights, all bound for glory. Simon and Garfunkel, of course, gave the lonesome wanderer a new twist in their classic song of the late Sixties, "America"…
Kathy, I'm lost, I said,
Though I knew she was sleeping,
I'm empty and aching
And I don't know why;
Counting the cars on the New Jersey turnpike,
They've all come to look for America.
The archetypal poet of the loner, the "poet of the bed-sit", the man whom doomed love seemed to follow inexorably, is Leonard Cohen. When he seemed to be so out of fashion that he had all but disappeared from the cultural radar, he brought out his collection of songs on the album "I'm Your Man" in 1988. "Tower of Song" says it all about loneliness and urban alienation in modern times. How remarkable that he should imagine an attempted conversation with Hank Williams, country singer of the Beat era, and the subsequent non-communication…
I said to Hank Williams: How lonely does it get?
Hank Williams hasn't answered me yet…
But in the human ant-heap of modern tower blocks and tenements, there can still be utter loneliness…
But I hear him coughing all night long,
a hundred floors above me in the Tower of Song.
Kirsty MacColl and The Pogues also brought the loneliness and alienation up to date in a specifically Christmas setting in "Fairytale In New York" which, remarkably, is the most popular secular Christmas song (yes, now even more popular than "White Christmas" or "Frosty The Snowman"). Perhaps it taps into something very deep that we all try to hide at this time of the year…
It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, wont see another one
And then he sang a song
The rare old mountain dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you…
It turns loneliness into a kind of romance, as many of the hobo ballads did, but through the sentimentality there gleams a truth of heaven…
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing Galway Bay
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas Day.
Don't tell me that you are not humming it to yourself as you read these lines! Perhaps you are humming it on your own, when the vagaries of life's shifting chapters have changed chosen occasional solitude into enforced continuous loneliness. I think that Saint Joseph (as Christians ought to refer to him) knows how you feel, since he seemed to live his life subsequently with all the focus and attention upon his wife and his child, and then to fade from the story completely after Jesus' twelfth birthday.
Who knows whether the shepherds of the Bethlehem fields also know your emotions? Amongst the Communion of Saints, I suspect that they do. Perhaps they were often lonely in their night-long vigils out on the hillsides. Loneliness is a strange thing. Circumstances bring it upon us, but we can terribly compound those circumstances by how we respond to them. The saddest people I ever visit are those whose loneliness has driven them to introspective bitterness (despite having many blessings in their earlier life) and whose determination to inflict that bitterness on their remaining friends and family drives even those away from them. They often seem adamant in not finding hope anywhere.
But there is hope to be found. On Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, make your way to church, even if you think that the only footsteps that you can hear are your own. Perhaps you will find it difficult to go out, so switch that radio or television on for the Christmas services and, in your heart and mind, join the people there. Imagine you hear the soft sweet voice of a young woman beside you saying, "Go on… go on, my friend. Find the stable, for when you do, you will find my Son." The old, old carols with their words of wonder and worship will echo about you, and you will find truths and promises in them that you have never found before…
Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see him; but in heaven,
Set at God's right hand on high;
Where like stars his children crowned
All in white shall wait around.
There is no loneliness in that companionship, or in its earthbound counterpart in the church to which you are making your Christmas journey. You are doing what the shepherds and the wise men did. You are seeking the Christ-child, and joining the company who are there to worship him…
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas Day…