O Come Let Us Adore Him
With only a very few days left now until 25 December and the great feast of Our Lord’s Nativity it is, as we so often hear sung now, beginning to feel a lot like Christmas. The smell of Christmas trees and cakes being prepared wafts through our houses. Cards come through our door with the familiar handwriting of great aunts or upside-down stamps of Jacobite friends. The High is crowded with panic-stricken last-minute shoppers and the roads are jam packed with the hoards of Oxonians who have remembered that “one more thing” which has to be got.
Amongst the jollity and the busy-ness it can be hard for us to capture something of that moment, some 2000 years ago, when the Word was made Flesh, something of the intimacy of that moment in the manger, or very simply of the quiet prayerfulness of the day “when ages beyond number had run their course…the whole world being at peace” as the Martyrology has it. There is a remarkable contrast here on the Woodstock Road between the crowds heading down to the town and the interior of our church. Here, now, as on every day, this house of God, this Bethlehem, offers an oasis of prayer and of stillness where any one of us can come, kneel, and simply enjoy being in the Presence of Almighty God amidst that peace which the world cannot give.
We do all rush around at this time of year. There is much to be done and that is no bad thing — we want to make Christmas the best it can be for those whom we love and with whom we wish to share the feast of Our Lord’s Incarnation. But let us not forget to prepare ourselves, to sweep out the manger of our hearts by a good confession, to unwrap the gifts the Good Lord wishes to bestow upon us in prayer and in sacrament, and to make our own soul a fitting place for Him to be born.