Lights As If Out of Nowhere

Marc Chagall, "Holy Family"

Marc Chagall, “Holy Family”

Spiritual Sunday 

Here’s a wonderful Christmas poem, written in 1971 by the Russian Jewish author Joseph Brodsky not long before he was expelled from the Soviet Union. Brodsky tried to write a Christmas poem every year and the complete collection appeared in Nativity (Farrar Straus, 2001).

Given how the eventual Nobel Prize winner was persecuted in the Soviet Union, at one time being found of unsound mind, I love his line, “Herod reigns but the stronger he is,/the more sure, the more certain the wonder.” In Brodsky’s vision, the seeming emptiness of life calls forth our magi selves as we go scrambling for gifts. But that’s only the beginning. In what Brodsky calls “the basic mechanics of Christmas,” we are pervaded by “a sort of good will touched with grace”; then we distinguish (but fail to recognize) a stranger at the door; then, as “the drafts through the doorway disperse the thick mist of the hours of darkness,” we begin to discover “the Spirit that’s Holy” within ourselves; and then we see…a star.

December 24, 1971

By Joseph Brodsky

When it’s Christmas we’re all of us magi.
At the grocers’ all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halvah, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

Nylon bags, carrier bags, paper cones,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod,
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by blizzard.

And the bearers of moderate gifts
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there’s nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Herod reigns but the stronger he is,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
In the constancy of this relation
is the basic mechanics of Christmas.

That’s what they celebrate everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star for a while,
but a sort of good will touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery: features
are not known beforehand, men’s hearts may
not be quick to distinguish the stranger.

But when drafts through the doorway disperse
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stands revealed,
both a newborn and Spirit that’s Holy
in yourself you discover; you stare
skyward, and it’s right there:

                                               a star.

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