Rector’s Reflections Wednesday 18th December 2024
In the Bleak Midwinter: A Victorian View of Christmas
We have reached the fourth verse of Christina Rossetti’s carol. The fourth verse reads as follows:
“Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But only his mother in her maiden bless
Worshiped the beloved with a kiss”.
In common with many societies, the Victorians were interested in the idea of importance. What made a person important? What made an event in history important? What made a nation important? The Victorians took the view that some people and some countries frankly didn’t matter. Similarly, some opinions and some works of art didn’t matter. But some people, some ideas and some nations really did matter. They were important. So what made the difference? How did some one or something achieve significance?
Sometimes importance was all about quantification: the bigger the thing, the greater the importance. The bigger the population, the more important the town. The greater the exports, the more important the country. The bigger the house, the more important the person who lived in it. The same logic applied to the building of churches and chapels. If you were building a new church building, your building needed to be bigger or taller than any other church buildings in the area. Size indicated importance.
Sometimes importance was about professionalisation. The Victorian Age saw the increasing professionalisation of the Middle Classes. Doctors, engineers and scientists were all expected to have received appropriate training and to be members of appropriate professional bodies. The age of the gifted amateur was increasingly at an end. Professionalisation increasingly became of a feature of other professions as well, for example teaching, the Army and Navy, and the Church.
Importance was also still connected with social status. Although Victorian Society was becoming increasingly democratic in its values, social class still mattered. The higher your position in the social hierarchy, the greater your importance. In theory at least, the importance derived from social status was quite independent of any importance one might derive from having plenty of money and an extravagant lifestyle. But in practice, social status was intimately connected with economic wealth, and Victorians society found it difficult to deal with high status individuals with limited financial means.
Finally, importance was often associated with national and racial assumptions. As a general rule, in England at least, you were generally considered to be more important if you were white and English. Generally, non-English races were considered to be inferior, although Germans were often considered to be (almost) as a good as the English, because they were of a common Germanic descent. The Celts and the Irish were generally considered to be of a lower standing, although some of the English were gracious enough to say that the Celts and Irish had some special qualities which made them useful sort of people to have around the place. Finally, it would be fair to say that the majority of the English looked down upon most of the native population of Africa and Asia. There was plenty of racism around in Victorian society.
What did Christina think about all this? I think she wished to promote a different approach to the subject of importance. For Christina, our importance is n’t about how much money we have, nor is it about our social standing or our professional qualifications. Neither is it about our national or racial identity. Our importance is rooted in love: in God’s love. Do we allow God’s love to be at the centre of our lives? Do we allow God’s love to be expressed in the way we care for others? When Jesus was born, the presence of Angels and Archangels was neither here nor there. What mattered was a simple act of love: the kiss which Mary gave to her newborn son. “But only his mother in her maiden bliss worshipped the beloved with a kiss”.
The great and the good are not as important as they think they are.