The contrast between the European imagery of Christmas and its Australian reality has struck all immigrants since settlement. Christmas carols sing of cold starry nights and snow. The re-creation of an English Christmas dinner with its hot turkey, roast potatoes and steamed pudding in 40 degree heat, preceded by an appearance of a sweat-drenched Father Christmas, has continued to try the endurance of cooks and the temper of families.
This year the contrast between the original story of Christmas and its Australian circumstances has cut even deeper. Bushfires have taken lives, destroyed properties and spread smoke and ash over cities. Even holiday-makers who leave the city for the seaside and the country will cautiously study the weather forecasts and listen for fire alerts.
If the theme of the first Christmas was one of hope and joy, behind the bushfires this year lurks anxiety about the future of Australia, and indeed of the world. Are the high temperature, drought and destructive fires of this Christmas a preparation for a man-made world to come of merciless sunshine and burning?
The conjunction of Christmas with fear and loss, however, is not foreign but is part of the Christmas story. The bushfires that lap at Christmas this year remind us of one of the loveliest of the English Christmas poems, 'The Burning Babe'.
Jesuit Robert Southwell wrote it at a time when his own horizon was bounded by the likelihood of torture and execution — he was tortured, hung, drawn and quartered in 1595. His poem encompasses not only Jesus' birth, but the rejection, torture and death that brought salvation.
Given the circumstances of its composition, the poem is understandably unrelenting in turning away from easy sentiment. It begins with the narrator shivering. A sudden heat he experiences warms him but makes him anxious about its cause. The burning infant whose apparition is responsible for the rise in temperature is scorched by the heat and weeps uncontrollably:
As I in hoary winter's night stood shivering in the snow,Surpris'd I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shedAs though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed.
Southwell goes on to describe Jesus as a furnace, in which humanity is refined by his sufferings and