Christmas Greetings

I wish you all a blessed Christmas. 

For your meditation today, that wonderful Christmas poem by St Robert Southwell, 'The Burning Babe'. In this poem St Robert travels across the English countryside in the winter snow carrying out his secret ministry to persecuted Catholics; he experiences a vision of the Christ Child who is wrapped in the fire of his love. It is a poem about the birth of Christ and the suffering he has come to endure - the reason for the season of Christmas. May you all find warmth in the fire of Christ's love.

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
      So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
      With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away,
      And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day.