And so time seems to slow and the light thickens, and for a short and sheltered few hours we try to fall into step with eternity. Those of us brought up to love Christmas will always feel the tug of the ancient festival , however busy and preoccupied we may be (I am at work as I write this, and a police siren is howling not far away) at some point on the 24th December.

As children, we came to it through presents and rich food (in the austere Protestant Britain in which I grew up this brief period of luxury and affluence was far more separate from normal time than it is now). So we remember it, not as a series of single Christmases but as a time set aside in each year when the usual was held at bay, the shouting and the mechanical roar of the modern world ceased, and we only realised in the following silence how much we had been longing for them to stop.

The music, the feeling of the world holding its breath, the bells, the haunting light from the low sun, the sensation of the past being mixed up with the present, went deep into us, so that later we came to look for a more important meaning in a time that inescapably changed our mood.

I think those of us who have this inside us are far more fortunate than those who don’t. Even sensible unbelievers will concede that the Christmas story, especially when told in the lovely cadences of the Authorised Version of the Bible, is an especially powerful evocation of the heart of the faith it promotes.

Those of us who learned it as children find it yields even more to us as adults, if we let it. Lancelot Andrewes’ tremendous Christmas Day sermon, preached to James I in 1622 (and borrowed by T.S.Eliot in his fine poem on the Wise Men ‘ A cold coming they had of it…’ ) , gives us a grown-up, unexpurgated and much grimmer understanding of the feast and its meaning, death and birth, fear and joy mixed up together, no less glorious for all that:

‘Last, we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and specially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, the very dead of winter…. This was nothing pleasant, for through deserts, all the way waste and desolate. Nor secondly, easy neither; for over the rocks and crags of both Arabias, especially Petra, their journey lay. Yet if safe, but it was not, but exceeding dangerous, as lying through the midst of the black tents of Kedar, a nation of thieves and cut-throats; to pass over the hills of robbers, infamous then, and infamous to this day.’

And yet it concludes (being a meditation on the star and its meaning) ‘There now remains nothing but to include ourselves, and bear our part with them, and with the angels, and all who this day adored Him.’

Tonight or tomorrow we may hope to hear again those most astonishing words of hope which, if they are true, transform all history and philosophy ‘And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth.’

And these words of reassurance, as the storms of the material world rage round our rooftops

‘Thou Lord, in the beginning, hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands. They shall perish, but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.’