Childish, maybe but Hardy set me wondering. We all know that lovely poem ‘The Oxen’ in which Thomas Hardy imagines the oxen kneeling on Christmas Eve. Going to the strawy pen at the invitation of a friend, he saw himself eyeing the scene with hardly a doubt. But no. It could not be. But it just might. So he went and we have that wistful ending: ‘Hoping it might be so.’
The Christmas story: if only it might be so. If only we could believe that the Maker of the universe confined himself to a human frame and moved among his creatures. If only…But we denizens of the 21st century know that this is fantasy, at best hopeless yearning. We know ourselves to be the products at the end of an evolutionary chain. The magnitude of the cosmos and the insignificance of our little oasis compels us to abandon any thought of such a happening.
But childish, I yet wondered. When I see some of the masterly model railway lay-outs that have taken hours of work by a celebrity, with passengers standing silent waiting for a stopping train, with steam, smoke and whistle, I push myself into thinking how it would be if I could be inserted in that lay-out and sample it just for a moment as it deserved. Childish, of course. Life is not like that. We may let our imaginations rove but we know it is no more than passing fancy.
Yet, I wonder. There is no reason to be intimidated by what is great or small. The galaxies and the atoms are no cosy retreats for humans. Imagination says it might be but arithmetic says no. Common sense backs up arithmetic. We humans should know our place. Reality does not come in pretty packets. The story does not end happily. Whatever our ancestors may have comforted themselves with has no place in our massively enhanced understanding.
But ‘hoping it might be so’ has in it a germ of possibility. Perhaps Jesus was the Son of God. Perhaps his inspiration and particularly the manner of his life and death have changed the world for ever. Perhaps what Christians believed actually happened.
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