Palestinians walk in the empty square outside the Nativity Church in the Biblical city of Bethlehem ahead of Christmas amid ongoing battled between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza strip (The Irish Times)
‘A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.’
The lamenting words of the Prophet Jeremiah are an integral part of the first Christmas story. They are quoted in Saint Matthew’s Gospel to describe the weeping of mothers over the massacre of their children by King Herod who felt insecure and threatened in his rule in Judea.
Death, weeping and the inconsolable laments of mothers, and the violence of the capricious and the despotic, have long been part and parcel of the religious, political and social history of the region that has become known as the ‘Holy Land.’ Today, Ramah is a Palestinian town in the occupied West Bank, on the north-east edges of Jerusalem, but isolated from its neighbours by the Israeli-built ‘security wall’.
The massacre of the innocent children, the Christmas Gospel says, came after the visit of the Wise Men from the East, but only after Joseph had managed to flee from Bethlehem with Mary and the new-born Christ Child, finding refuge in Egypt.
The Christmas cribs and decorations in brightly decorated windows and shopfronts for the past few weeks appear distant and disconnected from that first Christmas story, which is always challenging and discomforting. The only bright light is the star over Bethlehem, but that first Christmas story is one of a family on the move, far from home and without home comforts, unable to find affordable accommodation and eventually forced to flee as refugees.
Indeed, the first Christmas story finds echoes in today’s heartbreaking reality for many on the move: mothers weeping for their children, families grieving for their loved ones, in Gaza, in kibbutzim across southern Israel, throughout the West Bank. The violence that has continued for eleven weeks since October 7th renders meaningless many plans to celebrate Christmas in the coming days in the land of the birth of Christ.
The daily news from the Middle East has made many of us forget the other dark news that continued to engulf the world throughout this year: the continuing war in Ukraine and Russia and the new refugee crisis it has created throughout Europe; accelerating climate change that has made this the hottest year on record; the looming prospect of Donald Trump’s return to office; the rise of the far-right across Europe; and the increasing antipathy towards refugees, expressed in the legislative priorities of the British government, last month’s riots on the streets of inner-city Dublin, the burning of an hotel in Co Galway and low-level but persistent and pernicious protests throughout Ireland.
Those who claim their aggressive and confrontational attitude to refugees and migrants is rooted not in prejudice and intolerance but in traditional values, need to be reminded again that – as a Meme that is popular this year says – the traditional Christmas story rejoices in the birth of a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern, undocumented migrant child.
Those who would say No to the refugees at the door of their local hotel reflect the attitude of that innkeeper who says there is no room for a family on the move and not the values that would be proclaimed by the child born at Christmas. When Donald Trump ranted in New Hampshire last weekend and again in Iowa this week about immigrants coming to the US ‘destroying the fabric’ and ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ bringing crime and disease, he was reflecting the values of a cruel and despotic Herod and repeating words in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and denying the priorities expressed in the Sermon on the Mount.
But the Christmas story remains persistently the story of hope coming into a world racked by violence, of light breaking into a world shrouded in darkness; it is the promise of rest for the sleepless, of peace in times of war and oppression, of sanctuary for refugees on the move, of joy in the midst of sorrow. The hope Christmas brings has inspired some of the greatest works of art in Western culture, from paintings and poetry to song and stained-glass. It is, as the Poet Laureate John Betjeman once said, ‘the most tremendous tale of all.’
Following the death of Shane MacGowan earlier this month, the Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’ has a new-found popularity this Christmas and almost became this year’s Christmas No 1. It is a song filled with images of poverty, pathos and despair, and with images of the downward spiral that fills so many with dread at this time of the year: couples and families, the elderly and the lonely, those whose dreams have been shattered and stolen.
Yet, some lyrics in this song also summarise the hopes that so many cling to in the season of Christmas:
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true.
This full-length Christmas editorial is published in The Irish Times today (23 December 2023)
‘And what can I tell you my brother, my killer’ (Leonard Cohen) … ‘Cain, where is Abel thy brother?’ or ‘De Profundis’ (1943), by Arthur Szyk
Patrick Comerford
This has been the shortest possible Advent in the Church Calendar and we have come to the final countdown to Christmas. Tomorrow is the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Christmas Eve (24 December 2023).
Later this evening, I plan to attend the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols in Holy Trinity Church, Old Wolverton, at 6 pm. Before today begins, however, I am taking some time for prayer, reflection and reading this morning.
Throughout Advent this year, my reading and reflection each day include a poem or song by Leonard Cohen. These Advent reflections are following this pattern:
1, A reflection on a poem or song by Leonard Cohen;
2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is the sixth track on Leonard Cohen’s album, ‘Songs of Love and Hate’ (1971)
The Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen: 21, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’:
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ was recorded by Leonard Cohen as the sixth track on his third studio album, Songs of Love and Hate (1971). By 1971, I had already become an avid reader of Leonard Cohen’s poems, and I listened to this album throughout that summer of 1971. I was in my late teens, and it was a summer that became nothing less than life-changing in terms of my spiritual growth and maturity.
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ has no Christmas associations, and has few Biblical or religious allusions. But it is written in the cold at ‘four in the morning, the end of December.’
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ offers perhaps the clearest synthesis of Cohen the poet-novelist and Cohen the singer-songwriter, as he relays a vividly characterised tale of adultery, regret and loneliness.
The poem or song is written in the form of a letter, and many of the lines are in amphibrachs. The original recording starts in the key of A minor, but switches to C major during the choruses. Cohen said, ‘That’s nice. I guess I got that from Spanish music, which has that.’
The lyrics include references to the German love song ‘Lili Marlene,’ to Scientology, to efforts to give up drugs, and to the bohemian lifestyle on Clinton Street in Manhattan, where Cohen lived in the 1970s when it was a lively Latino area.
This is a very personal song in a form of a letter from one side of a love triangle to another, invoking multiple images including the first biblical murder of Abel by his brother Cain. The letter is addressed to an unnamed man who, we learn, once unsuccessfully tried to prise away Jane, the wife of the narrator, a fictionalised version of the singer himself.
It is an elegiac description of a tortured, twisted love triangle, involving the song’s narrator, a woman named Jane, and an unnamed male figure who is addressed but identified only briefly as ‘my brother, my killer.’
The letter is curiously brotherly in tone, even conciliatory towards the narrator’s rival. The tragedy in the story was never the infidelity, but the way in which the narrator was resigned to the decay of his marriage. ‘Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good, so I never tried,’ he concedes in an arresting line that distils the heart of marital despair and miscommunication.
Cohen’s words are rich in their ambiguity. Was there ever a second man? Is he an alter-ego, an abstract spectral presence? Is ‘going clear’ a euphemism for sex, or a reference to a stage of scientology, in which Cohen dabbled at the time?
Cohen provided little elucidation, and in an interview in 1994, he admitted: ‘It was a song I’ve never been satisfied with. I’ve always felt that there was something about the song that was unclear.’
The second, unnamed male figure, Cohen’s nemesis, comrade, brother – perhaps even his alter ego – wears the ‘famous blue raincoat … torn at the shoulder.’ The ‘famous blue raincoat’ once belonged to Cohen himself, but was stolen in the early 1970s from the New York apartment of his lover, Marianne Ihlen. In the liner notes to the album The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975), which includes the song, Cohen wrote:
‘I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959. Elizabeth thought I looked like a spider in it. That was probably why she wouldn’t go to Greece with me. It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather. Things were clear. I knew how to dress in those days. It was stolen from Marianne’s loft in New York City sometime during the early ’70s. I wasn't wearing it very much toward the end.’
The stolen blue raincoat serves as image of things stolen, things we miss once we realise they are gone forever, people who disappear from our lives, friends, companions and lovers we lose, things that vanish from our very beings, from our deepest souls: ‘I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you.’
Cohen said in 1994 that ‘it was a song I’ve never been satisfied with.’ Yet, ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ is widely considered one of Cohen’s best songs. Ron Cornelius, who played guitar on Songs of Love and Hate, once said: ‘If I had to pick a favourite from the album, it would probably be ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’.’ Far Out and American Songwriter have included the song in their lists of the 10 greatest Leonard Cohen songs.
‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ has been recorded by many artists, including Joan Baez and Tori Amos, Glen Hansard and Damien Rice, who performed the song at the concert ‘Tower of Song: A Memorial Tribute to Leonard Cohen’ in 2017.
The song also provides the title for Jennifer Warnes’s album of cover versions of Cohen’s songs. In 1986, she gave an emotive, jazz-inflected rendition – a version that Cohen worked on himself, and one that he said he preferred to the original. She adapted the lyrics slightly so that the narrator is recast as an observer rather than a participant in the affair. ‘My woman’ becomes ‘some woman’, and the letter is no longer signed-off by ‘L Cohen’ but ‘a friend’.
Cohen never wrote a song that more perfectly encapsulates the regret and loneliness in a tale of adultery and lost love. The singer even forgives his rival:
Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried
‘And what can I tell you my brother, my killer’ (Leonard Cohen) … the Sacrifice of Abel (Genesis 4: 2) in a window in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat:
It’s four in the morning, the end of December
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening
I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record
Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?
Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You’d been to the station to meet every train, and
You came home without Lili Marlene
And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody’s wife
Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well, I see Jane’s awake
She sends her regards
And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I’m glad you stood in my way
If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Well, your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free
Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried
And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Sincerely, L Cohen
An icon of the Birth of Saint the Baptist (see Luke 1: 57-66) from the Monastery of Anopolis in the Museum of Christian Art in Iraklion, Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Luke 1: 57-66 (NRSVA):
57 Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. 58 Her neighbours and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.
59 On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. 60 But his mother said, ‘No; he is to be called John.’ 61 They said to her, ‘None of your relatives has this name.’ 62 Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. 63 He asked for a writing-tablet and wrote, ‘His name is John.’ And all of them were amazed. 64 Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. 65 Fear came over all their neighbours, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. 66 All who heard them pondered them and said, ‘What then will this child become?’ For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.
An icon of Saint John the Baptist in a small chapel in Georgioupoli in Crete (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Saturday 23 December 2023):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), has been ‘The Joy of Advent.’ This theme was introduced last Sunday.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (23 December 2023) invites us to pray reflecting on these words:
‘Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near’ (Philippians 4: 4-5).
The Collect:
O Lord Jesus Christ,
who at your first coming sent your messenger
to prepare your way before you:
grant that the ministers and stewards of your mysteries
may likewise so prepare and make ready your way
by turning the hearts of the disobedient to the wisdom of the just,
that at your second coming to judge the world
we may be found an acceptable people in your sight;
for you are alive and reign with the Father
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
We give you thanks, O Lord, for these heavenly gifts;
kindle in us the fire of your Spirit
that when your Christ comes again
we may shine as lights before his face;
who is alive and reigns now and for ever.
Additional Collect:
God for whom we watch and wait,
you sent John the Baptist to prepare the way of your Son:
give us courage to speak the truth,
to hunger for justice,
and to suffer for the cause of right,
with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Collect on the Eve of Advent 4:
God our redeemer,
who prepared the Blessed Virgin Mary
to be the mother of your Son:
grant that, as she looked for his coming as our saviour,
so we may be ready to greet him
when he comes again as our judge;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
