19 December 2024
Hello,
Behind today’s door in the Advent Calendar we find our story approaching its climax.
Feathers
Part 19
The story so far: Joe and a heavily pregnant Maryam are in St Andrews on a clear midwinter’s afternoon, having had to make the journey for Maryam to be registered.
It was a Davidson family tradition to go to St Leonard’s Chapel for Carols by Candlelight. As this coincided with the day of the Census in Parliament Hall, Maryam and Joe walked the five minutes down South Street, the midwinter darkness fully descending as four o’clock approached. Chilled under clear skies, they entered the candlelit warmth of St Leonard’s Chapel just in time. The main chapel was completely packed with rosy-faced students, staff, children and townspeople, and there wasn’t really room for them in even the stone-floored ante-chapel, but the janitor took pity on the heavenly pregnant young woman and her man, and somehow found a space for Maryam and Joe between a kid in a donkey onesie and a woman wearing flashing antlers.
The last chord from the organ faded into the flickering candlelight, like the final notes of birdsong before nightfall, and the Chaplain began the service, “Welcome to Bethlehem. We’ve gathered as the darkness deepens to wait again for the birth of a child, to hear the angels sing of peace and goodwill, and to celebrate the coming of Emmanuel, God with us. Our opening carol is ‘O little town of Bethlehem.’ ”
As Maryam struggled to stand, her neighbour’s antler brushing her left ear, she felt a little funny. By the third verse, as she was singing, “O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray,” she was pretty sure he was coming, far faster than she’d been led to expect at ante-natal classes. It was no use sitting down at the end of the carol. Her waters had broken; her womb was tightening and relaxing; she was in pain; she felt the urge to push her baby out into the world. Her time had come.
Joe called 999, but Maryam wasn’t sure Josh would wait for the paramedics, so she had Joe call out at the end of the prayer, “Minister, I think my partner’s having a baby.” The congregation all laughed – the children’s talk usually involved audience participation. The Chaplain, however, knowing it wasn’t in the script, didn’t announce the next reading straight away, but asked instead, “Is there a midwife in the chapel?”
And so, with the moving of a lectern and the unusual use of an altar-cloth, space and a hint of privacy were found for Maryam. Rapidly though not without pain, her hand tightly gripping Joe’s, her voice calling out in her mother tongue, helped by a first-year Canadian medical student who had a sketchy grasp of what was going on, Maryam gave birth to her first-born son, who was wrapped in a student’s red gown, and laid in straw in the crib, a rather lifeless doll hastily removed to the vestry.
The Nativity, panel, Castello Brown, Potofino
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain