Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

1 December 2023

6 min read

The poem became flesh and dwelt among us

Ponder the poetic depths of Frank Skinner’s thoughts on the Incarnation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Against a night blue sky an angel cradles a baby and is followed by an angel train of cherubims

E.R Hughes, 1912.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

This summer I got to interview Frank Skinner; comedy-legend-come-football-anthem-maestro. The whole interview was a lot of fun, but the final six minutes were my favourite. They’re the reason this article exists.

Frank, who is the host of Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast and carries a pocket-sized book of poetry with him wherever he goes, spoke about the "super-poetry" of Jesus.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, do. Frank is incredibly worth an hour of your time.

But, for now, allow me to summarise his thoughts:

"Christianity is like living the poem… it’s like the Old Testament was a collection of poetry, I’m not saying that there’s no factual stuff within it, but clearly it’s written in a poetic style, with great truths and insights into human nature. And then, with that whole phrase, “The Word became flesh”, it’s like now the poetry gets real, there’s going to be a poem that lives, and it’s all going to make sense… this is super-poetry, this is poetry that’s actually physical, it actually exists."

Frank goes on to suggest that we’ve lost sight of this, that humanity have forgotten, or perhaps never fully grasped, that we exist because of this super-poetry, that we exist within it, that ‘there’s a line waiting just for us’. And then he turned to me and Justin (my co-host) and said,

"Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it, go and sort that out."

So, here I am. Sorting that out… Kind of. That’s a lot of pressure, Frank.

The Word became flesh

The ‘phrase’ to which Frank is referring, the one which turns poetry into super-poetry, can be found in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. And it is a theological juggernaut of a chapter – mind-bendingly complex and eye-wateringly dense – it is arguably one of the most influential chunks of the entire bible. So, a nice and easy place to start.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

That’s the incarnation summed up in ten words. It’s ironic that it would take ten-million words to fully unpack the depth of them, isn’t it? Gosh. John’s such a genius.

The Word - that’s Jesus – who, as the Prologue goes on to state, is the Son of God, the very source of life itself, and the light of the world. He was present since the beginning, preceding and partaking in the creation of the universe. He, the Word – Jesus - became flesh, and moved into the neighbourhood. And in so doing, he bound together centuries worth of prophecies, predictions, expectations and hopes. The maker squeezed himself into the confines of the made; it is, without a doubt, one of the most outrageous claims that Christianity makes.

The Word has an accent.

The Word gets tired.

The Word burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

And yet, still God. Always God. The Word of God, with a name and a birthday and a bedtime. Wherever you fall on the whole ‘believing it’ scale, you have to admit, it’s pretty astonishing. It is a cosmic-sized plot-twist.

But what if one were to assume that this really happened? If one were to believe that a God who transcends time, space and matter actually made a physical appearance in human history, as Frank Skinner does, then it changes everything. Such a belief leaves nothing untouched, it is utterly un-containable.

The poem became flesh

And that’s why I think that Frank’s poetry analogy is so genius. Let’s follow his train of thought for a moment, shall we?

Poetry has a tendency to dodge and disobey definitions at any given opportunity. It is, in its very essence, defiant. In fact, poetry’s unwillingness to sit contentedly in any given definition might be the only way in which it can be defined. And yet, despite very few of us feeling confident in our own abilities to define or explain the inner workings of poetry (perhaps we can leave such a task to Frank and his podcast), we all know it when we see it.

It would, I suppose, be rather poetic of me to suggest that there’s something innate going on there. To wonder whether there’s a capacity woven into us, a capacity to feel poetry to a degree that we could never understand it. I think this to be true even if our only exposure to it is through the snippets that have leaked through the cracks, the phrases that have escaped their literary confines and snuck their way into popular culture. And perhaps therein lies its power; we are able to spot poetry and somehow know that it is wanting access to parts of us that move through, but ultimately beyond, the cognitive. And then I suppose we decide whether we shall let it.

Poetry, at least the good kind, describes the indescribable, explains the unexplainable and identifies the unidentifiable. We can feel that it is making profound sense of us, even if we haven’t made sense of it. I haven’t worked out how it does that; if I had, I’d be putting such knowledge to good (and profitable) use. But there are incredibly deep insights beneath each word chosen in poetry, there are ‘ah-ha’ moments waiting to be stumbled upon, there are echoes of our own feelings – our fears, our longings, our hopes and our struggles – encapsulated in each stanza. Our choice is whether we’ll give it the time to shows us such. And if/when it does, will we trust it? Will we pay attention to our strangely warmed heart? (to borrow a phrase – many thanks John Wesley)

The truth that poetry is seeking to tell cannot be wholly proved by whether or not we can expound it with words or measure it with reason. The whole point is that it cannot be contained in such a manner. The truth of it can be more aptly identified in the odd resonance that we can no more deny than we can explain, it is in the familiarity that we find in brand new sentiments, it is in the ache that binds us to the words. It is in those places that the truth of poetry is most keenly felt.

And that is the case with the Christian faith, the epic story of the made and their Maker, the ultimate poem of the cosmos. And so, the story of Christmas, the enchantment of the Incarnation, and the beauty of Jesus is that the poet became the poem.

The Poem with an accent.

The Poem who gets tired.

The Poem who burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

Jesus is the super-poetry that I live and breathe, he is the poem to which I can belong. I can’t make sense of the incarnation, but I know that it makes sense of me. The intricacies of that poem can be debated, they can be observed, they can be weighed up – I’m not opposed to putting the Incarnation under the microscope – I’m just opposed to that being the only means by which we assess its truth. Rather, I would suggest that its truth can be more keenly felt in the places that poetry is designed to be felt – the deepest ones. Just as we have an oddly innate capacity for poetry, I believe us to have an innate capacity for Jesus.

The Poem became flesh, and he dwells among us. You know what, that is pretty insightful. Bravo, Frank.

Voting is much more than a token gesture

The political practice can capture something heavenly.

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

What makes an act sacred? Who it excludes, or who it welcomes? I found myself pondering this looking at the thin metal discs in the box I’d pulled off the shelf. I’d seen their tagged under glass at Scotland’s National Museum. Now, in an archive housed in the old kitchen of our rural community’s school, I had my first chance to touch what was once called “the open sesame to the bliss of so great a mercy”, a Church of Scotland communion token. Now items for collectors, filling drawers in local history museums, they once were the necessary payment for participation in one of the rites at the heart of Christian worship. They were the coin that verified that its holder’s faith and morals had been examined by an elder of the kirk and been found satisfactory.

Holy Communion, or the Eucharist as it is called in other churches, has its origins in the Last Supper, a meal of bread and wine Jesus shared with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. Christians may disagree on the exact meaning of the meal, but all hold that it is, in some way, sacred and central to the Christian life and the recognition and celebration of Christian community. Communion tokens were but one example of a strategy that Christians have employed time and again to ensure that the mystery and sacrality of the meal is properly recognised: stopping the wrong sorts of people from participating in it. Ironically, in this we have often been much more discerning, or perhaps discriminating, than Jesus himself. The companions he chose to initiate the practice were a quarrelsome lot. They were mostly provincial fishermen more concerned with establishing their place in the new kingdom they imagined Jesus would establish after overthrowing the Romans than in participating in the meal with due reverence and seriousness.

All who came were for that day, in that room, in that act, equal. All who came were welcome. No one was turned away.

A year later, I found myself sitting behind a table in the rear of our community’s nursery. It was election day for the Scottish Parliament, and I had added polling clerk to the miscellany of part-time jobs I had taken after finishing my studies. We had all arrived early to ensure that we had time to wrestle enough string and cable ties together to secure the polling station sign around the ancient tree that marked the entrance of the nursery’s car park before polls opened at 7am. It was the first, and only time I have worked a sixteen-hour day, and my exhaustion at the end of it probably contributes to much of it being a bit of blur. What I do remember is the flow of people: mums in smart blouse and skirt combinations with kids in tow, fitting us in first thing before a stop by the childminder’s on the way to the office; tradespeople and farmers catching us between jobs, their trousers still spattered with paint or mud; scions of the local aristocracy; proud parents bringing teenagers to vote for the first time once the school day ended; a couple with a young baby, asleep for now, arriving just before closing, “We’re not too late are we?”.

My fellow poll workers, two old hands, knew most of our customers by sight. I knew a few, mainly other parents I had met during school and nursery drop-offs, but it didn’t matter as the rite was the same for all. They would approach the table, give us their name and address, and once a line was drawn through them on our roll, they were given the elements, two ballots, one to vote for their constituency Member of the Scottish Parliament, and another to vote for their preferred party. All who came were for that day, in that room, in that act, equal. All who came were welcome. No one was turned away. All that was needed was their word that they were who they said they were. Once the ballots were completed, we made sure they put each in the correct ballot and then they were out the door, on to the rest of their day.

Perhaps it is also true that sometimes, as much by accident as intention, we happen upon a form or practice in our shared political life which captures something of heaven.

As someone who did my first voting in the United States, I was a little stunned the first time I cast a ballot in the UK. Instead of having to use a black ink pen to assiduously fill in ovals on a ballot that felt like an extended multiple-choice test, all I needed to do was make a single penciled ‘X’ on a half sheet of coloured paper and make sure it wound up in the secure box. Was that it?

As I’ve reflected on that experience and had a few more goes of voting here, I have come to appreciate the elegance of the British approach. Instead of making the voter feel like an overwhelmed bureaucrat having to make a couple dozen underinformed choices on matters as diverse as national representatives, state laws, school boards, and local ordinances, the simplicity of the UK ballot means that what is centred is the social meaning of the act itself. We may be differentiated on all other days by class, culture, income, region, or football club allegiance, but in this act we come as close in our political practices as we ever do to touching something which Christians know, something which Christians sometimes see as they share Communion, that all these distinctions are ultimately passing, that beyond them each one of us is imbued with a dignity which the greatest worldly failure cannot take away from us and to which the greatest worldly success cannot add.

There is a school of thought in political theory which says that all our most important political concepts are actually secularised theological ones. They say, for example, that our exalted ideas of state sovereignty find their origins in our forebears’ understanding of God’s. Theologians draw various lessons from this approach, some worrying that what it really reveals is that we have made an idol of the state. They may be right, but perhaps it is also true that sometimes, as much by accident as intention, we happen upon a form or practice in our shared political life which captures something of heaven. It is not wrong, I think, to accord such secular practices a certain level of sanctity. It is not wrong to call the principle of ‘one person, one vote’ in some sense sacred.

No longer are we allowed to trust that people are who they say they are. They are assumed to be imposters until they produce a piece of paper which says otherwise.

But once that sacredness has been granted, we face a very similar problem to the one faced by those early Scottish reformers regarding Communion. How do we ensure this sacredness is protected, that it does not become debased? A traditional answer has mirrored the reformers’ approach to communion: erecting hurdles to ensure that only the truly worthy are allowed to participate. The unmaking of this approach has been the slow work of centuries as the franchise was eventually extended down the social and property ladder to all male citizens and, then, belatedly, to all women as well. What I experienced at the polling station that day was a miracle secured by many years’ of struggle, reform, compromise, and collective recognition that what has made this act sacred is not its exclusion, but its welcome. In this it has mirrored the welcome of most contemporary Communion services in the Church of Scotland where participants are, to be sure, asked to approach the act soberly, having examined themselves and made confession to God, but where the default is to trust that people have done so. No longer are people considered unworthy until proven otherwise by their possession by a metal disc.

When I first heard of the possibility of the introduction of Voter IDs at polling places, my mind immediately flew to how such laws were aimed in the United States. Like here, there is little to no actual evidence of voter fraud there, but in a country where the archaic system of the Electoral College means a few thousands votes in the right state can decide a presidential election, there is a real threat that such laws will sway election results. Here the influence of such laws is less clear. While they do seem to have a small effect of driving down participation, at last year’s local elections four pre cent of eligible non-voters cited the ID requirement as the reason they did not vote, recent election results have not been dramatically out of step with opinion polling.

What I do worry about losing with these laws is a little bit of the elegance and dignity which has previously imbued the UK system. No longer are we allowed to trust that people are who they say they are. They are assumed to be imposters until they produce a piece of paper which says otherwise. It is a small change, but one which nudges the rite closer to being just one more bureaucratic transaction, a bit more like picking up a package or going to the bank, than one of our most important public rites. It is a precaution that seeks to preserve the sacredness of the act, but is chipping away at what it is that makes it sacred.
If I wind up working in a polling station on July 4th, I will dutifully check every voters’ ID prior to handing them a ballot. I will send friends and neighbours home to get theirs if they’ve forgotten it. I will be careful to bring my own. I am sure if I had lived in former times in Scotland, I also would have been careful to remember to take my communion token to church. Those are the rules of admittance and the rite is too important to skip. However, I will mourn a little for what has been lost and hope for more places where we recognize the possibility of the sacred dwelling in our practices of welcome, recognition, and trust rather than exclusion.