18 December 2011 5:23 PM
And Thy Years Shall not Fail – a Christmas Reflection
First of all may I thank the hundreds of people who have contacted me to express sympathy on the death of my brother. I have tried to reply to as many such messages as I can, but it is physically impossible to answer them all in a reasonable time. So may I say to all of you who took the trouble to write, that I am very grateful that you did so, and am comforted by what you said. This applies perhaps most especially to those who wrote to me across great gulfs of disagreement. Civility between opponents is a light in the darkness, a recognition that we are all more united, as humans, than we are divided as supporters of causes or believers in faiths.
I shall once again be travelling during the next few days, so this is my last chance to write here until after the Feast of the Nativity. The Mail on Sunday will not be appearing on Sunday because it is Christmas Day, so there will be no column that week.
This will be a long gap, and during the brief period of peace in the storm of life, which I hope Christmas will be, I thought I would try to explain why for me, and for many others I suspect, this is such a precious season.
Of course, like most children in countries where Christmas is celebrated, I was from my earliest childhood thrilled by the promise of presents, the exhilarating, intoxicating smell of the pine tree in the house, the rich foods and the feeling that this was above all others a special time of year.
I cannot remember (and for the sake of Mr ‘Bunker’ I am sorry about this) ever being particularly enthused about Father Christmas. Perhaps this is the fault of my father, who could be wonderfully unsentimental about his children, forgetting our names even though there were only two of us and he had presumably helped to choose them, referring to us as ‘that boy’ and ‘that wretched boy’ (these titles were interchangeable, depending on our most recent crimes and misdemeanours). There is also a superb passage in my brother’s memoir ‘Hitch-22’ in which he records trying to strike up a conversation with our father one breakfast time. The head of the Hitchens family blasphemed briefly before growling ’It’ll be family prayers next’, and returning to a bloodshot examination of the Daily Telegraph. Many years of shipboard wardroom breakfasts, conducted in grumpy silence as the ship pitched and rolled and the plates slid this way and that, had left him hopelessly unprepared for domesticity. I have no recollection whatever of him attempting to impersonate Father Christmas.
In fact I much preferred the weeks before Christmas, the strange light in the sky (the melodramatic, suspenseful nature of late December English weather is perfectly described in John Masefield’s enchanting book ‘The Box of Delights’) , the carol singing, the stirring of the pudding (the Church of England has now abolished ‘Stir-Up Sunday, in its incessant effort to get rid of everything about the Church that anybody actually likes. The prayer for that day contains an exhortation to ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people’ and refers to ‘plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works’, and that Sunday, a month before Christmas, was also in many homes the traditional date for stirring of puddings. I have never been sure if this is an accident, or a light-hearted insertion by a jolly Bishop centuries ago) .
And, as a boarding school child, there was the long clattering train journey home behind a snorting steam engine (F. Scott Fitzgerald, in one of his short stories, don’t ask me which, is the only author I know of who has been able to reproduce the excitement of such a land voyage at this time of year. I suspect he quite liked trains. He is buried, perhaps irrelevantly, perhaps not, in a small graveyard in Rockville, Maryland, very close to the railway line which runs from Washington DC to Chicago, within earshot of the evocative moaning hooters of the huge American locomotives. It was only when I visited his modest tomb that I realised that his full name was Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, and that he had been called after the author of the US national anthem).
So for me the season is one of darkness illuminated with carols sung by lamplight, the sun low in the sky, and a promise, never entirely fulfilled on the day itself, of something wonderful to come. That sticks, when all else falls away.
It is only more recently, when it has become (as it wasn’t in my childhood home , though we got plenty of religion at school) an occasion for churchgoing that I have been captivated by the extraordinary, disturbing beauty of the Collect, Epistle and Gospel for ‘the Birth-day of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day’ as prescribed in the Church of England’s 1662 Book of Common Prayer. If you are really fortunate, you may be able to find a church where these passages are read at midnight on Christmas Eve. Listen carefully, if you do. It may not be long before this lovely ceremony is entirely stamped out by modernising fanatics. You could be one of the last to hear it.
The Gospel is the soaring, fiery declaration from the opening of St John’s Gospel – ending with ‘and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of his father, full of grace and truth’.
But the Epistle, that of St Paul to the Hebrews, borrows from something much older, the 102nd Psalm, when it draws itself up at the end to declare this promise :’And thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish: but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment: and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up , and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail’.
Now, I know there are plenty of readers here who find this sort of thing meaningless or actively repellent, and who could not imagine themselves taking it seriously or taking part in the ceremony which follows.
But I ask them, at this season, to set aside their scorn and their reductionist belief that the universe is no more than the sum of its parts. And to try reading these words out loud with an open mind and seeing if their poetry does not catch them somewhere deep inside. The dead are very present in our minds at Christmas (as A.S. Byatt rightly remarks in the extraordinary quartet of books that begins with ‘the Virgin in the Garden’ ) and the past so close around us that you can almost touch it. There is no moment at which the fierce, all-consuming passage of time is felt so clearly.
Is everything that is gone lost forever? Or does it continue to exist in eternity? Well, as with all things, you may choose. But if you choose to hope that our small, squabbling lives have some greater meaning and purpose than we can at first see, then the words ‘Thou art the same, and they years shall not fail’ seem to me to be so full of meaning (and themselves so very old that their mere survival is in itself astonishing) that they are enough to make anyone tremble.
Well, that’s it. I think Christmas is a religious festival, and pointless without religion. But I wish you all, even the unbelievers, a peaceful and blessed Nativity, safe and warm amid the blast and tumult of our tottering civilisation.
This is Peter Hitchens' Mail on Sunday column
We all know now that Neville Chamberlain made a huge fool of himself when he came back from Munich in September 1938 claiming to have won 'peace for our time' and 'peace with honour', and waving a worthless piece of paper in which Hitler promised that Britain and Germany would never go to war again.
But look at the newspapers of the time and you will find almost all of them crammed with sickly praise for Mr Chamberlain. He was invited on to the balcony of Buckingham Palace by King George VI and was there cheered by a gigantic crowd, many of whom would die in the war that followed.
They should have booed him - not because of what he had done but because he was fool enough to think that Hitler could be trusted. They applauded him because they did not want to be bothered by the boring details of European politics, and preferred to think that he had in fact bought peace.
Something similar is happening to us. Many people who should know better are still cheering David Cameron for his supposed mighty veto in Brussels on December 9.
They are doing this because they passionately want it to be true. They want Mr Cameron to be a patriotic conservative. But he isn’t.
They want Britain to stand up to the EU. But it hasn’t.
Mr Cameron did not in fact use the British veto. There was no treaty to veto. France and Germany were quite happy to get what they wanted by other means - France positively wanted to do so, and Jean-David Levitte, a senior aide of President Sarkozy, has described Mr Cameron’s action as a 'blessing'.
They were happier still to let Mr Cameron take the blame on the Continent - and the credit among his gullible and simple-minded 'Eurosceptic' backbenchers, who really oughtn’t to be allowed out on their own if they are this easy to swindle.
Nor did Mr Cameron save the City of London.
The French, who have never forgiven us either for Trafalgar or for not surrendering in 1940, are still determined to destroy the City. And they can do so - as long as we are idiotic enough to stay in their power by belonging to the EU.
They can and will do this through 'Qualified Majority Voting', under which Britain does not have a veto. Wishful thinking on this scale may not lead to war, as it did in 1938. But it will not help us get out of the EU, or protect us from those who pretend to be our partners, but are in fact our rivals.
Stop cheering. Start booing.
So which country will we ruin next?
President Obama wisely didn’t claim 'Mission Accomplished' when he posed with troops to proclaim the ‘end’ of the invasion of Iraq. If only it were the end.
Once the U.S. troops go, Iraq will become a new battleground between Iran, already hugely powerful through Shia Islam, Turkey, which hates and fears the growth of an oil-rich Kurdish state, and Saudi Arabia, which hates and fears Iran.
Not only was this war fought on a false excuse. It was then justified by another false pretext. And now its outcome is a far graver risk of instability and war than existed before we started.
Now, which Middle Eastern country can we mess up next?
* * *
Well, I knew that, and you probably knew that – but the anti-religious lobby have until now always pretended that they were just nice, tolerant people.
They’re not. They’re as intolerant as the Spanish Inquisition, but not yet ready to show it.
We need fathers - not social workers
If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. The British Government annually aids the creation of thousands of fatherless families, by the simple procedure of subsidising them with your money and mine.
That is why we have so many father-free homes. Married families with fathers are better, and we should stop being afraid to say so.
Rather than doomed projects to use the State to 'transform 120,000 households in the grip of drugs and crime', all we need to do is stop these subsidies, and the number of such households will instantly begin to diminish.
Setting up yet more social-worker agencies to poke their noses into people’s lives never works. Yet the Prime Minister plans to do this. It is as illogical and hopeless as trying to turn down the central heating by stuffing raspberry jelly into the controls, instead of simply altering the thermostat.
But the mad revolutionary dogma of political correctness falsely condemns the obvious solution as a ‘war on single mothers’. No, what is needed is a war on the people who want to keep those mothers single.
* * *
Last week we learned that more than £1billion in fines will never be collected. And the unlovely Ryan Girdlestone (pictured) was let off without punishment after hurling a 40 lb paving slab at a 79-year-old pensioner.
He faked remorse in court, then laughed about it on his Facebook page.
These things follow dozens of ‘crackdowns’ and ‘tough’ speeches. These crackdowns and speeches are all lies. Yet you still vote for the people responsible. Why?
A sermon of empty words
This is because he’s a rather dull mainstream leftist, who talks about politics when he ought to be urging our neo-pagan country to return to Christianity. At the moment we’re more interested in shoes and booze than we are in God.
Since all three major political parties are also controlled by dull, conformist leftists, the Archbishop (pictured) is superfluous when he enters the political arena. He is powerless in the material world. As we have seen in the past few months, he doesn’t even control his own cathedrals.
But when the Prime Minister talks about religion, it’s a different matter. Mr Cameron has the power to shift this country sharply towards Christianity.
All he needs to do is to dismantle the many anti-Christian laws which have attacked the faith over the past half-century – for example, instant divorce, mass giveaways of contraceptives to children, the teaching of promiscuity in schools, the licensing of greedy commerce on Sundays, plus of course the total abandonment of right and wrong by the justice system.
He won’t do any of those things. In fact, he’d sneer at anyone who sought to do so. So his creepy pose as a ‘committed Christian’ (committed to what?) on Friday is – like almost everything about this man – a brazen fraud on the public.
Of the two, I think I prefer the Archbishop, who promises nothing and delivers nothing, to a premier whose parcels, when we eagerly open them, are always empty. Oh, and Merry Christmas.
Posts
