27th December, St. John
Day 3 of the Octave of Christmas
Christ the Lord is born today;
today, the Saviour has appeared.
Earth echoes songs of angel choirs,
archangels’ joyful praise.
Today on earth his friends exult.
Glory to God in the highest, alleluia.
12 Days of Christmas Carol:
On the third day of Christmas, my True Love gave to me three French Hens: The three theological virtues
Poem: Richard Bauckham – “Song of The Shepherds”
We were familiar with the night.
We knew its favourite colours,
its sullen silence
and its small, disturbing sounds,
its unprovoked rages,
its savage dreams.
We slept by turns,
attentive to the flock.
We said little.
Night after night, there was little to say.
But sometimes one of us,
skilled in that way,
would pipe a tune of how things were for us.
They say that once, almost before time,
the stars with shining voices
serenaded
the new born world.
The night could not contain their boundless praise.
We thought that just a poem —
until the night
a song of solar glory,
unutterable, unearthly,
eclipsed the luminaries of the night,
as though the world were exorcised of dark
and, coming to itself, began again.
Later we returned to the flock.
The night was ominously black.
The stars were silent as the sheep.
Nights pass, year on year.
We clutch our meagre cloaks against the cold.
Our ageing piper’s fumbling fingers play,
night after night,
an earthly echo of the song that banished dark.
It has stayed with us.
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The featured image is “Adoration of the Shepherds” (1622), by Gerard van Honthorst, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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