What Child is This? - Hird

What Child is This?

-an article previously published in the Deep Cove Crier

One of the most favorite Christmas Carols is William Chatterton Dix’s “What Child is This?” At the age of twenty-nine, Dix was struck with a sudden near-fatal illness and confined to bedrest for several months. He went into a deep depression. Out of this near-death experience, Dix wrote many hymns, including ‘What Child is This?”. Written in 1865, Dix made use of powerful word pictures that still speak one hundred and forty-one years later:

"What Child is this who, laid to rest
On Mary's lap is sleeping?
Whom Angels greet with anthems sweet,
While shepherds watch are keeping?"

What is it about the Christmas story that keeps capturing our hearts year after year? What child is this?

Why does this baby on Mother Mary’s lap win the attention of billions of people every December? Why angels? Why shepherds? What child is this?

One of the strangest things about the Christmas story is the birthplace of the Christmas child in a cattle shed. What kind of place is that to celebrate Christmas? It wasn’t even sanitary.

"Why lies He in such mean estate,
Where ox and ass are feeding?
Good Christians, fear,

for sinners here The silent Word is pleading."

There is something about the Christmas Child that will not go away, that cannot be avoided, that is inescapably part of Canadian culture.What Child is this anyways?

William Chatterton Dix’s Carol had this response:
"This, this is Christ the King,
Whom shepherds guard and Angels sing;
Haste, haste, to bring Him laud,
The Babe, the Son of Mary."

What Child is this? Why do wise men still seek him?

"So bring Him incense, gold and myrrh,
Come peasant, king to own Him;
The King of kings salvation brings,
Let loving hearts enthrone Him."

This Christmas, may loving hearts enthrone the Christmas Child. May loving hearts welcome this Child into their homes, their lives, their souls.

The Reverend Ed Hird+

Rector, St. Simon’s Church North Vancouver

Anglican Coalition in Canada

www3.telus.net/st_simons/cr0612.html