Historical Setting: Jarrow, 793 C.E.
Tonight, I hear the ruckus down the hall as the soldiers, incognito as monks, shift their vigils: two go out and two return with shivers, welcomed by the third pair ready with the ale and the songs of the Christ birth. Even this seasonal welcome with ale is a tradition here. This missionary, Augustine of Canterbury, now a saint, left a deep path from Pagan to Christian for the people of Anglia to follow. What I assumed would be the Christ mass is so flavored with traditions of the new light rising and the New Year celebration of solstice when the eons become a baby. So, the Christians give him the Christian name, and his mother becomes the new Queen of Heaven.
Luke offered this pathway from the beloved traditions of old into the Christian celebration, but in my own brief time of friendship with the man Jesus, these stories of his birth in the style of an upside-down Caesar, lifting up the poor and humbling the kings, were really about the ways of the followers, not the facts of his life. That is something I would never say aloud in these times. To mention the possibility that Luke captured the beauty of the virgin birth and the magnificent infant from pagan tradition based on solstice, would surely be anathema to all those Christians who so loyally mouth the creeds, human and God, born of Virgin Mary.
Was Jesus, my dearest friend and teacher, some magical being in the sense of a pagan notion of a god, and necessarily definitive of God? Or is the Creator of all that is the invisible presence of love for all, Mother of life, intimate holy, bigger than words, Yahweh, awe, something more than a human being? I keep my wonder to myself. To argue again the old wars of Trinity is only divisive and counter to God’s love for all, and it changes nothing of the reality of God. God is.
Tonight, the beautiful carols of the season that seeped into the Christian love through a pathway from pagan are the love songs bonding earth with heaven. I will just go sing with them and not argue the nature of God from this mere hill crest of earthly shepherds, drunk on ale, seeing angels landing among us. I go down the hall with my song and an empty cup. “Weal hael” or “Ves heill” they say as they fill my cup. “Good Health” to all. [Footnote]
[Footnote] Old English words that span from Pagan to Christmas becoming a tradition of caroling https://researchersgateway.com/wassail/ retrieved 8-20-25
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 