In The Bleak Midwinter

Chris Renzema's "In the Bleak Midwinter" carries Christina Rossetti's 1872 poem through its full original text, opening on landscape rather than theology — "earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, snow had fallen, snow on snow." The cold isn't decorative; it sets up the strangeness of what's about to happen inside it.

"Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain, Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign, in the bleak midwinter, the stable-place sufficed" states the poem's real argument plainly — the one thing too vast for the universe to contain chose, for a while, a stable in the cold instead. It's close to what Paul tells Timothy directly: God was made manifest in the flesh, mystery folded into something small enough to be seen.

Renzema's added chorus, "you are the light bringing dead things back to life... you are my hope that the spring is gonna come," translates Rossetti's winter imagery into present tense. Rossetti's own closing question — "what can I give Him, poor as I am?" — still gets the same answer nearly a century and a half later: not gold or a lamb, just "what I have I give Him, give my heart."