FROM COOP TO BYRE

There is an old tradition that in the night of the Nativity, the animals can talk. Only to one another of course, not to us: we lost that privilege long ago. They murmur to each other, from coop to byre: there is a low clucking in the henhouse, a soft cheeping in the occasional tree, and there are strange quiet grunts in the cowsheds and the pigpens. They owe this to the ox and the ass who were present in the stable on the original Christmas Night, and whom we see here, in Lorenzo da Monaco's painting from New York's Metropolitan Museum, gazing with benevolent intensity at an apparently levitating Christ child. Joseph, whose neck must be deeply painful, is gazing at the angels. I love the thought of the animals talking, and murmuring the Holy Name. The cat murmurs it, on this night of truce, to the mice; the hawk to the rabbit; the deer to the hunter's mastiff; the badger, perhaps, to himself. As we move into Christmas, via a Midnight Mass, a réveillon, or just a quiet evening before the celebrations of the morning, it is good to think that we are surrounded by a world of quiet joy and shared languages. May we come to be worthy of such small but immense miracles. Sssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhh . . . . . . .