Christmas 2025

Merry Christmas in these unmerry times. Last night, Christmas eve, we once again sang Christina Rosetti’s “In the Bleak Midwinter,” set to that gorgeous Gustav Holst tune. It begins, as you probably know, with snow, a sort of “White Christmas” from a different time and a different place:

In the bleak midwinter
frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone:
snow had fallen,
snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter,
long ago.

Clearly this is not Bethlehem. Not Tucson either, where we just arrived. No snow here. Today is rainy with temperatures in the mid-sixties. Yesterday, over eighty degrees. But the poem and the song are not about those kinds of temperatures. They are about finding ourselves in a bleak midwinter of the soul, as we surely do in these times. Has there been a year bleaker than this year past? A year “hard as iron” and just as cruel?

I was brought up short yesterday while listening to Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me (2025). She was talking about the change that came over India with the accession in 2014 of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the political party of Narendra Modi, the current prime minister. She said, “It wasn’t just a routine change of government. It was the beginning of what would turn into an ideological coup. . ..” She means that there is no going back. India will never again be the India she knew when she was growing up. The same is true for us, living in this country, is it not? Something fundamental has shifted. Whatever we are to be in the future, it will not be what we were before 2025.

So there is no going back. But that’s the point of Christmas, is it not? Was the point of Christmas. For those living in the 1^st century, there was no going back. When we for lack of imagination want to go back, God comes to us in new ways: as a child, as promise, as a new sort of kingdom. In Rosetti’s words: 

Our God, heaven cannot hold him,
nor earth sustain;
heaven and earth shall flee away
when he comes to reign:
in the bleak midwinter
a stable place sufficed
the Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

“Heaven cannot hold him nor earth sustain.” Christmas is God’s future breaking in. It’s this view of Christmas that can hold us fast in this bleak midwinter. The one who came once comes to us still. In the midst of those who want to close down possibility, box us in, claim that they are restoring what has been lost when all they are really doing is destroying the very thing they claim to be making great again, whether church or country, God births something new. 

We still have little idea what it will look like. We are in the shepherd season. Go to Bethlehem, the angel said, and you will see the future. They went and saw only a child born in the wrong place, powerless, its arms swaddled. But the future was there already, in the child.

In the shepherd season, we don’t know what the future will look like. We have only our imagination. And the child. And with the child the promise that even in the bleak midwinter the new breaks into the old. And what we have glimpsed brings us joy.

And so in these unmerry times, we say—I say—merry Christmas. The world is about to turn.

Clay