Farming Life column – Not in that poor lowly stable

Not in that poor lowly stable

Tis the season to sing carols as Christmas approaches. Did you know that the traditional opening song of the BBC Carols from King’s was written on this island? Once in Royal David’s City was penned by Cecil Frances Alexander, a renowned hymnwriter and poet who spent a lot of her life living in rural parts of Ireland. Throughout many of her hymns, she extensively references the beauty of rural life and nature that she so enjoyed.

A budding poet in her school days, Cecil Frances spent her formative years in the countryside of County Wicklow and later lived in various rural parishes, including Strabane and Fahan in County Donegal, as her husband, William Alexander, became Bishop of Derry and later the Archbishop of Armagh. Her writing reflects an acute awareness of nature and the seasons observed in these environments that she was fully immersed in. 

Throughout her life, Cecil Frances engaged in extensive charitable work, often with the rural and urban poor and sick in her community, using the proceeds from her popular books of hymns to fund initiatives such as a nursing service and an institution for the deaf and dumb. 

She experienced the cold wind in the winter and marvelled at all creatures great and small that she came across, lines she wrote in her other famous hymn, All Things Bright and Beautiful. On the farm, especially in the cold of winter, I always think of the lines from her carol when I see calves sitting in straw beds and hear cows murmur in the dark:

Once in royal David’s city, stood a lowly cattle shed,

where a mother laid her baby, in a manger for His bed…

 

This was the incredible, humble environment that Jesus was born into as, due to the festivities of the census in Bethlehem, there were no hotel rooms available for Mary and Joseph to ‘check into’. 

The words of the last verse of Once in Royal David’s City remind us that whilst Jesus was born into unassuming surroundings, when he returns, it will be in the glory and splendour of heaven that we, followers of Jesus, will meet him:

Not in that poor lowly stable, with the oxen standing by,

we shall see Him, but in heaven, set at God’s right hand on high…

That is an amazing promise we can hold on to on cold winter nights. Jesus’ birth was the fulfillment of the promise given in Genesis to provide a Saviour to the world, for the sins of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden that first separated man from God. Jesus is our redeemer, as Cecil Francis reminds us in the third verse:

And our eyes at last shall see Him, through His own redeeming love…

As you tend to your sheep, cattle and livestock this winter, in cold, dark, damp nights, and as you sing this carol in the build up to Christmas, may the promise of the magnificence of heaven act as an encouragement to you. May you and me, like Cecil Frances, give praise for all that the Lord God has made, including, through Jesus, a way back to him. For, as it is recorded in Luke 2:11: “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord.”