This is a Christmas poem, a miraculous one – harrowing too – and I’ve made it into a song. I’ll write more about that later, but first let’s engage in imagining something human. Let me intentionally start the story in present tense, as all history, like all miracles, is felt by flesh and blood men and women.

It’s summer, July, 1586. A twenty-something-year-old man landed surreptitiously on the coastline of his own country on a mission he’s spent several years preparing to do. He knows this secret mission risks imprisonment, mistreatment, torture, and death. Perhaps he’s relieved that his landing seems to have kept its secrecy, but his country’s police-state spies had already gotten wind of it, knowing at least in general that he, and others like him, are coming. The kind of things he’s planning to do are illegal.

Let me not leave present tense: I’m writing this story today in a country where the state of having crossed a border without central legal approval is subject of considerable governmental concern. There are secret police, established by the authoritarian head of state, to seek such people, and anyone who shelters them, out.

In 1586, the country is England, the monarch Queen Elizabeth, and the man landing as a huntable alien-in-effect in his own country was Robert Southwell. Southwell took an assumed name and begins to do his work. He’s a priest and a writer, and these things, done by someone like Southwell, were what the secret police are charged to suppress. During the 16^th century, England is whipsawed by vicissitudes in the official state religion, from Catholic to Protestant, back and forth – the religious beliefs once seen as proper, even required, could become forbidden. Southwell, this Catholic priest, is now operating in a time his beliefs and practices are outlawed. English laws speak plainly about this: in 1584, it’s declared that any English-born man who entered the Roman Catholic priesthood during her reign had to leave the country within 40 days. Like the laws and practices about borders that change over time, this could seem strange to Southwell, or to us, reading about this now. Southwell would have known people who had lived in England when the Catholic church was the state’s religion. Now it’s a state crime.*

Southwell’s foray as an underground writer and priest, an alien in his own country lasts six years, until someone who knew of his activities and location gives him up under duress in 1592.

Over the next couple of years Southwell is tortured and mistreated, but he did not give up others’ names. I suspect this interval was because he would have had valuable information on others due to his prominence in the underground, and that to break him into a confession or renunciation would have propaganda value, but I haven’t read details on this. This could be long work. One of the torture interrogators writes down that their subjects’ resistance under torture was so steadfast that he had to ascribe such strength to either God or the Devil.

Did that state official wonder too about God or the Devil regarding themselves? I can’t say that was written down.

That next couple of years will be the last years of Southwell’s life. Some of the treatment was so rough that Southwell’s own father petitioned the authorities to get on with executing him rather than to continue the mistreatment. Yet, at other times, though he was locked up in the Tower of London, Southwell was allowed some books and was able to write. Was this a “good cop/bad cop” move by those looking for information from Southwell? Again, I don’t know the details, but then most of these details are sorrowful stuff.

In the new year of 1595, that execution came. Treason is the crime they write down. Our current Mad King throws around this very charge rather casually, but his midnight blathering will sometimes include a reminder that the penalty is death. Southwell’s execution was by being hung, drawn, and quartered. I’ll spare the details once again – look’em up if you want torture porn. It’s an act that is supposed to dehumanize the criminal – what it says about the state and its agents, I’m going to assume goes without me writing more.

This is not the depiction of the Nativity in Southwell’s poem, but I choose it since it included human music in the event.

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Why have I quartered your attention for this story which I’ve made as brief as I can, and with worries that it’s inappropriate for what is the nation’s leading holiday of gift-giving and children’s joy? It’s all in the hope that you can experience this visionary Christmas poem, apparently written during Southwell’s imprisonment, more completely. Here’s a link to the text of that poem. The Christmas in Southwell’s poem is the ignition, the conflagration, of the moment the Godhead crosses the border to humanity; and so it is that “The Burning Babe”   is a vision of the infant Jesus, not sheltered in a stable however far from hearth and home, not asleep in a manger with livestock and farmworkers in attendance, but suffering in flames, his tears accelerants to the flames, not balms to sorrow. Despite being newborn, this vision miraculously speaks not just of the suffering, but that somehow merciful  justice exists and may even increase from some refinement of mankind’s souls.

Southwell ends this poem, this vision, somewhat flatly with a statement mundane on the face of it. Perhaps that’s the only way human beings can speak when trying to understand such suffering we as creatures create and practice with earnest effort while congratulating ourselves on serving correction, justice, and the solemn dictates of our tribe, religion, nation, leader, party. The ending? Southwell simply notes, that he’d forgotten it was Christmas Day. That’s my point in taking your time today: so you could hear that statement knowing what I’ve laid out above, about why he’d forgotten this.

To hear my musical performance of Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe”  you can use the audio player below. No player? Some ways of viewing this blog suppress showing the audio player gadget – I don’t know why, but do you suppose Bari Weiss has something to do with that – so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*I’ll leave this a footnote, but this battle between Roman Catholics and Protestants – including official state-religion sanctions – lasted a long time, with many deaths and atrocities on both sides. If Queen Elizabeth’s secret police could seem to be concerned about mere heretical spiritual beliefs and practices, they bolstered those practices with the uncovering of murderous plans of resistance among the Catholic underground.

And oh – if you want to hear of gifts – around the time the poet/priest Southwell was arrested and executed, a poet/actor named Shakespeare was starting to make a name for himself in the same Elizabethan London.