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| Christingle at Canterbury Cathedral, December 28th, 2019 |
The fourth day of Christmas commemorates the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, or to give it its Old English name, Childermas.
Childermas, which has been part of the church year since the 5th Century, remembers the story found in Matthew's Gospel (2: 16-18) that, at the time of Jesus' birth, & fearing a challenge to his own power, King Herod of Judea ordered the massacre of all male children under two years old in the vicinity of Bethlehem.
Some estimate that between 6,000 and 14,000, or even 144000, children were murdered, although when considering the size of Bethlehem and surrounding settlements, it is more likely to have been a few dozen, if the event happened at all. Whether it is historical fact is debated, especially as it echoes Pharoah's attempted murder of the Israelite children in Exodus when he is warned that the birth of Moses will become a threat to his crown.
The beautiful but haunting 16th Century 'Coventry Carol' refers to the massacre of the innocents, and is a lament by a mother for her doomed child.
In the Middle Ages, Childermas was taken as an opportunity for role reversal, with teachers and pupils changing places and church services being presided over by 'boy bishops'. And it was once the custom to refrain from work on Childermas day and to avoid work on that day of the week for all of the following year; being taken as an opportunity to play perhaps. This playfulness is echoed in Spain where the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents is a time for pranks, much like our April Fool's Day.
And at Canterbury Cathedral the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents is a day for their annual Christingle. This service raises funds for the Children's Society which works to support vulnerable children in England and Wales. It brings shame on us all that so many children in this country, the fifth richest in the world, are living in poverty and peril.
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| Canterbury Cathedral Christmas tree, 2019 |
In March, 2019, the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) estimated that there were 4.1 million children living in poverty in the UK from 2017-18 (9 in a classroom of 30). By 2022 this is expected to have risen to 5.2 million. 43% of children living in a family with three or more children are living in poverty. 45% of children from minority ethnic families are living in poverty, so too are 47% of children from lone parent families. 70% of children living in poverty are in working families. When a Government minister was recently asked about these appalling figures he replied that we could 'argue about the definition of poverty'. We might shudder when reminded that, in 2016, the Government abolished their own child poverty unit.
But then to keep children in poverty suits our Government because it provides fodder for their lucrative war machine. In Britain, 16 year olds can’t vote, drive a car, or drink alcohol, but they are able to join the army. No other country in Europe recruits at such a young age. Only 17 other countries in the world allow it, including Zambia, El Salvador, and Iran.
Between January and October 2017 more than 19,000 under 18 year olds applied to join the army folliwing the controversial 'This is Belonging' campaign, which was run in partnership with private recruitment agency Capita & designed to attract young people from working class and poor backgrounds, targetting children from deprived areas particularly; they are more desperate you see, more compliant.
In addition, thousands of schools across the UK invite in the military. This despite the UN committee on the rights of the child informing the UK Government in June to “reconsider its active policy of recruitment of children into the armed forces and ensure the recruitment practices do not actively target persons under the age of 18 and ensure that military recruiters’ access to schools be strictly limited.”
And, of course, the army may provide these young people with many good things but statistics show that, although children can’t be deployed on the front line before the age of 18, when they are those who are recruited from 16 are twice as likely to die.
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| St Martin's Chrustingle, 2019 |
And children from other lands fare no better. One of the Boris Johnson Government's first acts after the December 2019 election was to "tear up” a government hard-won pledge, known as the Dubs Amendment, to protect child refugees in Europe seeking to reunite with family in the UK post-Brexit. These are children who are alone asking to join their families who are already here. To deny them is monstrous. Máiréad Collins, Christian Aid's Senior Advocacy Advisor on Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, said: "There is a grim irony in this decision being made a few days before Christmas, when two billion people around the world mark the birth of a Middle-Eastern child who became a refugee, and found sanctuary abroad." On 21st December, 2019, The Guardian reported that the Home Office had rejected 1,400 offers from local councils, one third Conservative led, to house child refugees and that numbers of arrivals are "pitifully low."
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| All Soul's, Cheriton, nativity, 2019 |
It's estimated that more than 200 children, many who are eligible for settlement in the UK, remain living in terrible conditions in Northern France, with thousands more trapped in Italy and Greece. Clare Moseley, founder of Care4Calais, said: “It’s become absolutely horrible, I do not understand how it can be this hostile, how our country can behave like this, how they keep saying no to this.”
Matt's Bible Blog comments that, "Herod’s shadow still stalks the land. Only that’s not true, is it? Because Herod’s not our shadow, he’s our mirror." May we all be grateful to the mirrors that show us who we are, not who we wish ourselves to be. And, if we can't bear our own reflection, let us change something.
This is relentlessly heartbreaking, bewildering, and dispiriting I know, and Christmas is so much about joy. But it also unfolds at the darkest time of the year, and it too has its dark side. If anything, Christmas teaches us how to negotiate the tension that we must increasingly learn to hold well if we are to keep our hearts open and be any use; gratitude in one hand and grief in the other, joy and despair, and discounting neither.
But how might we do that? Matthew 2 tells us that, after Herod had made his pronouncement, "what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more”, echoing the same words found in Jeremiah 31:15.
Here, Rachel is remembered as the archetypal mother who mourns and intercedes for her children. It feels significant too that her weeping is for her descendants' suffering in exile from the land of their birth. So many are in exile now, or feel unwelcome in this, their own land. And that is worthy of tears.
Childermas is a reminder to offer love, gratitude, and support to all those who work to make the lives of children better, but also brings an invitation to look deep into the mirror and to mourn, not a tale found in the Bible but the ways in which we fail to protect and love our children now. We must guard against hardening our hearts, and we must honour our tears as strength, not as weakness. Let our tears be the medicine that unlocks the door of compassion for all the world's children.
If you would like to offer prayers for our children I have added some links below. Both relate to the situation in the US where children are being forcibly removed from their parents at the border with Mexico and then detained in inhumane conditions, or returning from school to find their parents who had found a home in the US deported. It is horrific that these prayers are so very easily adapted to our own circumstances here in the UK.
I end with a slightly adapted version of my own prayer, written as part of our Novena for the Fallen Through in December 2017. You can read the full piece here.
Novena for the Fallen Through: Peace on Earth.
Blessed Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy Mothers of Peace,
Sisters of Reconciliation,
Singers of the Mending Song.
We stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth.
We seek Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness, in the depths of winter cold.
With you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in the midst of anguish and despair.
We seek a Revolution of Love.
We expect Justice.
We speak for Peace.
We will not be shut out.
We will be heard.
Room will be made.
We ask for nothing less than Peace on Earth.
We cling to the stubborn hope of light in the darkness.
We allow our waiting to become a prayer.
Mary, singer of wild songs, mother of the Light, Mari, drummer of the wild hills, companion of Stars,
we ask for your help in the protection of our children,
suffering in poverty; cold and hungry, even now at Christmas time,
for the protection of our children,
called to war from a life of lack;
of opportunity, of wealth, of hope.
Kept poor to become prey.
We ask for power to come to the peaceful,
for love to come to the lost,
for hope to come to the hopeless.
Blessed Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy Mothers of Peace,
Sisters of Reconciliation,
Singers of the Mending Song.
We stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth.
We seek Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness, in the depths of winter cold.
With you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in the midst of anguish and despair.
We seek a Revolution of Love.
We expect Justice.
We speak for Peace.
We will not be shut out.
We will be heard.
Room will be made.
We ask for nothing less than Peace on Earth. We cling to the stubborn hope of light in the darkness.
We allow our waiting to become a prayer.
Mary, singer of wild songs, mother of the Light,
Mari, drummer of the wild hills, companion of Stars,
We ask for bright paths to be illuminated for our children, for lanterns to lead their way to futures filled with possibility.
We pray for the day when the Feast of the Innocents becomes truly that;
a celebration of the child,
of the innocence of the young and the innocence in us all.
We pray for a time when our innocence is not taken by the things we have seen and what we know. When we need not stand guard to protect our babies from the machine of war, power, and greed, but can lean back and be supported by the sweet waters of life knowing that they are safe to explore the world in freedom.
We listen for the hoofbeat of the Mari Lwyd, we listen for the revolutionary Magnificat of Mary,
we look to the Star fallen to earth,
sing the Spirit in,
gather up the pieces of broken hope,
weave starshine in our hair,
stand with the saints with starlight at their brow, knowing that we also shine.
Like all that is born, Sun and Son, vulnerable and new in the midst of this deepest dark, May we be undefended and undefeated, bright with possibility and hope reborn.
Blessed Mari, Hallowed Mary,
Holy Mothers of Peace,
Sisters of Reconciliation,
Singers of the Mending Song.
We stand in solidarity with you at the gates of Birth.
We seek Light in the luminous beauty of Darkness, in the depths of winter cold.
With you, we follow the silver thread of starlit Hope,
in the midst of anguish and despair.
We seek a Revolution of Love.
We expect Justice.
We speak for Peace.
We will not be shut out.
We will be heard.
Room will be made.
We lift the shard of a shattered star.
We hold the vision of a shining light of protection around our children, allow innocence to be reborn.
We allow the wild hope of Peace on Earth to sink into our bones, and for our very bones to shine.
The lights ARE going on.
For this we pray.
References:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Innocents
https://billpetro.com/history-of-childermas
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/childermas-day-1.229056?mode=amp
https://harpers.org/blog/2007/12/the-terrible-fourth-day-of-christmas/
https://mattsbibleblog.wordpress.com/tag/childermas-day/
Child Poverty ~
https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/child-poverty-facts-and-figures
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/dec/20/fears-after-government-abolishes-civil-
services-child-poverty-unit
Child Army Recruitment ~
http://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2017/12/novena-for-fallen-through-our-third.html?m=1
Child Refugees/the Dubs Amendment ~
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/boris-johnson-withdrawal-bill-brexit-child-refugees-dubs-amendment-a9253841.html
https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/38578
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/21/home-office-ignore-offers-of-uk-homes-for-child-refugees
Prayers for Children ~
https://reformjudaism.org/blog/2018/06/19/3-prayers-children-our-borders
https://parisbooksandcats.wordpress.com/2019/06/28/a-prayer-for-the-children-at-the-border/
http://radicalhoneybee.blogspot.com/2017/12/novena-for-fallen-through-our-third.html?m=1
Great post.
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