Christchurch Parish News, December 2018
A personal reflection on the hope of Christmas, even when times are difficult.
The ritual would begin three days earlier. Half-disappearing into the cupboard under the stairs, the cold winter air escaping into the hall, my father would choose the bottle of wine we were to drink on Christmas Day. He had made a practice of buying wine produced in each of the years my sister, my brother and I had been born (thankfully, they were all good years for Bordeaux!).
The wine would be stored horizontally, waiting for the occasion when it would be selected. My father would then carefully take the chosen bottle, as if holding up a newborn infant, and stand it vertically in the dining-room on top of a bookshelf, well away from inquisitive small fingers and stomping feet. He would explain that given the nature and age of the wine, it had to be allowed to stand for two or three days in order to let the sediment—the dregs—descend to the bottom of the bottle.
On Christmas Day, an hour or so before the late ‘lunch’, as darkness would begin to fall outside, with the kitchen full of the smell of the roast in the oven and with steam rising from the pots and pans on the hob, the time would come to decant the wine. This was always a moment of great anticipation. Like a theatre director, my father would call for all the blinds in the kitchen to be drawn. This we would do. Not just the big blind in the window overlooking the garden, but also the little one behind the kitchen sink.
Then would come the order to turn off the lights. We would run around the room, switching them off, all except one. With this one light left on, my father would disappear from the kitchen only to return a moment later carefully holding the bottle of wine. He would then position it on the long kitchen table next to a napkin, a box of matches, a candlestick and a glass decanter. Having peeled off the lead foil, he would then carefully proceed to extract the cork. When the muffled pop finally came, there would be a tangible sense of relief—given the age of the wine, we were all aware of the risk of it disintegrating.
My father would give the nod and the last light would be turned off, the kitchen now plunged into darkness. And apart from the noises from the cooker, silence. A moment later, the rustle of matches. Then, amidst the darkness, the sudden strike of a match. The candle lit, the darkness would withdraw to the corners of the room. My father would then summon one of us to come forward (I remember the pride I felt the first time I was deemed old enough to hold the candle).
‘Careful,’ he would warn as he passed me the candlestick, indicating with a nod where I should stand. Then, his left hand holding the neck, with a napkin wrapped around it, he would slowly lift up the bottom of the bottle with his right hand, coaxing the wine into the decanter.
After what would seem like an age, came the quiet yet firm ‘Now!’, the moment when I would have to position the candle quickly underneath the bottle, just below the neck. With the candle in the right place, the light illuminating the dark red liquid, we would wait patiently, watching for the first signs of the cloud of sediment as it slyly drifted towards the neck of the bottle. The skill was to let the dregs drift leftwards just far enough so as to decant every last drop of good wine; but then, just at the last minute, to stop the sediment’s advance with a swift upwards turn. Do it too quickly and precious drops would be lost. Too late and the outpoured wine would be spoilt.
The wine successfully decanted, the odd dribble wiped away with the napkin and the dregs passed to my mother to form the gravy base—for nothing would be wasted—my father would take the wine through to the dining-room. No instructions were needed now. The blinds raised to reveal the fading winter light, I would lean towards the candle and blow it out, licking my finger and thumb before pinching out the glowing red tip of the wick.
*****
I first read Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night in 1988. His poetry hadn’t been part of the picture when we were young, which in a way was strange as my father was very proud of being Welsh. On a Saturday afternoon during winter, though growing up in Oxford, there was never a question as to which rugby team we were supporting in what was then the Five Nations tournament. Not being a religious man, if you’d asked my father about the Holy Trinity, I reckon he’d have been more minded to speak of Gareth Edwards, JPR Williams and Barry John.
So as an undergraduate in my first year, Dylan Thomas’ poetry was almost entirely new to me. I got hold of a recording of Richard Burton reading Under Milk Wood and as part of the collection there was this other poem that jumped out. The first stanza goes, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night. / Old age should burn and rave at close of day. / Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.’ I went on to read in the notes that this was a poem Thomas had written whilst his father was approaching death, and that though his father had been a fierce man in his youth, in his old age and sickness, he had become, disappointingly for Thomas, soft and gentle.
I was struck by the potent imagery of the poem and remember wondering to myself how would my own father die and whether when the time came he would ‘go gentle’ or ‘rage against the dying of the light’. But it was hard to imagine his dying. At the time, he had just turned 60 and was in the picture of health. He had been a county rugby referee until well into his 50s, running six or so miles every morning before work, and was continuing to reap the benefits of staying in shape, taking up golf a few years previously.
It was only when he first started to slur his words several years later and trip and stumble with increasing frequency that the alarm bells began to ring. Within a few months, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and we were told that in his instance the neurones that control the muscles in his mouth down to the intercostal muscles in his chest would be particularly affected. He soon lost the power of speech and communication was reduced to his frantically scribbling down words on reams of notepaper.
Although the diagnosis was certain, he refused to accept it and as he did, over the weeks and months that followed, the words of the poem came ever more to mind. He knew the light was dying and, just as Thomas had hoped his father would, my father raged.
In due course, I felt the force of that rage. Due to the dehydration brought on by the loss of fluid (he could no longer keep his mouth closed and so his saliva would pour out constantly), he was becoming often delirious and yet, much to our concern, was still driving. Increasingly, we became fearful that he would injure someone—or worse—by having an accident. But when challenged, he refused to relinquish his car keys. Eventually, the decision to take them away was made. Having done so, my father made it clear that I was to leave. We never saw each other again.
The final stanza of the poem goes, ‘And, you, my father, there on the sad height, / Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. / Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’
*****
I can’t remember who was reading the gospel. It was probably either Fr Hugh or Fr Richard. But standing there, turned towards the centre of the nave, listening to the familiar words of the prologue to the gospel according to St. John that Christmas morning, I clearly remember being struck by one particular verse: ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ However, I thought no more of it. It was Christmas morning, I’d stayed up late for midnight mass and we’d all been up far too early with our very excited daughter. At the time, Jen was heavily pregnant and we were expecting her parents for Christmas Day lunch. A busy day lay ahead.
After church, on our return home, just as we were starting to prepare the food, the phone rang. Jenni came in holding the receiver. It was my mother and she needed to talk to me. I went upstairs to take the call and shut the door behind me. Her voice was strangely calm. She told me that my father had just died, only an hour or so earlier. The decision was made that I should stay in Christchurch for the day and that the festivities should proceed as normally as possible, if only for the sake of my young daughter, who was blissfully unaware of what had happened.
After lunch, we went for a walk at Barton-on-Sea. Overlooking the Isle of Wight, feeling numb, I remember being struck by the timing of my father’s death. He would have died about the same time as we were celebrating the Christmas Day Eucharist at church. The words from the gospel came back to mind, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.’ With the wind buffeting my face, I wondered why that particular verse had jumped out at me so clearly during the gospel reading? That it had, felt given. Something to hold on to.
*****
This year will be the thirteenth year since the Christmas Day my father died. Inevitably, given the timing, the two events have become deeply intertwined and I approach the day with a complex set of emotions. But in this experience, I am far from alone. Whilst the birth of Christ is rightly celebrated, for many of us Christmas Day is a time of mixed feelings. Amidst the sadly normal warp and weft of everyday life—be it due to financial worries, broken relationships, illness and, yes, even the death of loved ones—our private emotions during these public celebrations of God being born to be with us can be hard to bear.
But this is why I draw ever greater comfort from the verse from the beginning of St John’s gospel. In part, that’s because I appreciate its realism. It doesn’t pretend that the darkness doesn’t exist. And that’s important because we know that it does—we all know that hardship, pain and suffering do not stop at Christmas. But it is at its heart an intensely hopeful, defiant declaration of the true state of the cosmos, past and present. The darkness is there, yes, including the darkness of all that is wretched and destructive in our lives. But it didn’t and it doesn’t overwhelm the light—from the very beginning of creation, then at the birth of Jesus, now in our own time, and until the end of time, too. In the darkness the light shines and nothing, thank God, will quench it.