Christian faith in Kenneth Steven's new Christmas poems
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Christian Viewpoint by John Dempster
Something happened to the innkeeper, his wife muses.
Last night – a stormy evening, the inn seething with customers – something happened after that young couple knocked at the door. He went outside with them and returned inexplicably different. “It wasn’t him that came back somehow.”
The Innkeeper’s Wife is one of three Christmas poems in Out of the Ordinary (right), a newly published collection by Highland poet, writer and broadcaster Kenneth Steven.
As always in Kenneth’s work, many of the poems are about the natural environment: birds, wildlife, wide open spaces.
As always we see his deep affinity with nature, and his rare gift of expressing delight in the living landscape – sea and sky, otters and stars, changing seasons.
There are tears and pain in Out of the Ordinary, the poems do not hide from reality. But there is also quiet Christian faith in a God who speaks healing and light in dark places.
The things we call “ordinary” are in fact, the book suggests, extraordinary things summoning us beyond ourselves, living expressions of God’s creativity.
The monks in the poem The Holy Isle chose a place of silence and simplicity to seek and await those moments, “now and then” when they’d break through to a ‘“realm where they could know the voice of God.”
The speaker in Sabbath goes “outside into the worshipping of the larks, the thanksgiving of the spring.” He’s joining in Creation’s ceaseless “Yes!” to its Creator.
And God’s profoundest self-revelation is yet again seen in the utterly down-to-earth of a stable, “a child crying softly in a corner” as the poem Nativity describes it. “There was no sign that the world had changed for ever or that God had taken place.”
A wonderful phrase that – “God had taken place” – God has happened, God has entered space and time.
The third Christmas poem, The Star, is a monologue by a well-off Bethlehem businessman who is somehow troubled by the star overhead. A star so uniquely bright that everything else seems dark in comparison. He feels a fleeting discontent, “emptiness” – but how can that be since he has all he will ever need, and more?
One night he glimpses the family in the stable, utterly poor, yet so contented, somehow so rich. “I was sure that they had more than I would ever know.” And days later he stills feels a lingering sad longing. “A star is keeping me awake.”
The innkeeper in the poem saw things more clearly and acted on what he’d seen. He was out at first light with a pailful of milk for the family in the stable.
The Star lay sleeping.
