The Child I Was Keeps Coming Out Of Corners

The Child I Was Keeps Coming Out Of Corners

Author Fr. Colm Kilcoyne

Photo Gemma Hill 2018
Christmas time is memory time. For these few days the graves are open. Bushes whisper our history at us. When Cliff Richard and Johnny Mathis sing their Christmas songs we float back in time.
The child I was keeps coming out of corners; holds my hand and leads me back.
Back to an evening outside the County cinema in Castlebar.Those were the years when four of us went to every change of pictures. I was maybe 12.
We had crossed the street to buy sweets in Redmonds. Cars were passing – so we had to wait. Outside the cinema, a choir was singing, Silent Night. One of my friends had a brother who had died a few months before. Like any 12 year old boy he had only partly mourned. The event was beyond him at that time.
I waited to cross, barely listening to the choir. Came the chance and I turned to my mate to tell him “now”. Tears were streaming down his face as he looked across the street at the ragged choir singing Silent Night.
A vein had been cut after all these months, and loss came pouring out. Something in the night and in the carol-singing outside the cinema reached down into a young boy’s memory and touched his loneliness for a dead brother.
I mover hear Silent Night now without being back outside Redmond waiting to cross the street and not knowing how to handle a pal’s deep tears.
Once again the small boy that was me takes my hand and leads me to the crib in the church in Castlebar. Brother Baptist once told us that our crib was the biggest and the best in Ireland. We had no problems with that. We just knew it was a beauty.
Every Christmas day, sometimes after the dinner, our mother engineered us out of the house. Our father quietly did his duty and brought us for a walk around the Mall and back to the crib. Magic.
Mary in the crib was soft blues and creamy whites. She leant over the manager but I never saw her pose as one of prayer. More the alertness of a mother ready to move if her child stirred in discomfort. Like the mother I knew.
Just outside the circle of mother and baby was Joseph. Minding both. The kind of father I had. A man who let the mother get on with the rearing, but was there if either a crisis had.
Tree-bark made the arch of the crib in Castlebar.The ceiling was canvas. Here and there it had been slashed to suggest poverty. Through the slits you could see blue sky dotted with stars. In the corners were sheepish sheep and shy shepherds.
That crib in the church in Castlebar was one of the most powerful images of my childhood. Its beauty and message have stayed with me through thick and thin.
It was put up very year by my neighbour Tom Dunne.
I hope this Christmas all children have someone to bring them to the crib.
Another memory – this one more recent. I recently spent Christmas in Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is an island tucked into a curve of the mainland called Kowloon.
In Kowloon, near to where you get off the ferry there was a huge crib built on an overhead walkway, right over the wide street.
It was big, oriental and colourful. The Chinese love bright colours and this crib pumped at you bright basic colours.
Why I remember it is because every day people gathered in their thousands to look up at this crib. They just stood there for ages and looked.
The funny thing is that only a minority of these people could have been Christians. It didn’t seem to matter. There was a truth they could connect with, just by being still before the crib.
It has to do with both the human search and God’s love. A truth partly hidden in straw and partly in the heart of anyone who tries to live right. In the Christmas story these truths touch fingertips. Whether you are from Kowloon or downtown Castlebar, you sense that.
Every year at Christmastime the small boy of my childhood pulls my sleeve and haunts me to rummage the past. We meet again dead parents and remembered friends. He walks me a hundred times to the crib and back.