During the festive period of 1941, you could barely move for Christmas messages in London. The capital in the Second World War was a city of exiles. Generals Sikorski and De Gaulle and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands bustled between hotels, embassies, and recording studios to give messages of hope to their peoples back home. Their Christmas messages were a panoply of tongues, often inspiring and flowery in their rhetoric, a festive glossolalia more Pentecost than Christmas. George VI, whose propensity to be tongue-tied was well known, may well have felt his own speech a little sidelined amid the bombastic continental leaders. He was probably not heartbroken that his own verbose prime minister was in Washington DC at the time.

Christmas 1941 was an especially dark time. The situation in North Africa was precarious. Japan had just entered the war on the Axis side. There was no guarantee that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union would be a failure. It was in this context that George prayed simply that ‘strength will be given us to overcome whatever perils may lie ahead’. It wasn’t very Christmassy; exile from Christmas wasn’t just a question of geography.

While they played host to exiles, the English themselves had known periods of festive exile, too. The Royalist ballad, The World Turned Upside Down, lamented, to an ironically jaunty tune, that ‘Christmas was killed at Naseby fight’. The apparent Roundhead victory in the First and Second Civil Wars seemed to many to mark the end for festive celebrations, banned by Parliament since 1644, among the English.

Yet Christmas wasn’t killed. Bishop Duppa – quondam Bishop of Salisbury, who spent the Interregnum living in quiet internal exile in Richmond – reported to the exiled Charles Stuart that, in 1655, at the height of the Cromwellian Protectorate, the old festivities were kept, but in private houses. Clearly there were plenty of priests happy to minister to their flocks, to keep hope alive, like the monarchs and generals of wartime Europe.

There were also feckless ones. Bishop Juxon, who ministered to Charles I on the scaffold, spent his exilic Christmases hunting and feasting at his family estates. By contrast, the holy Jeremy Taylor spent his Royalist exile in Ireland, ministering and writing. The results were a collection called The Golden Grove. Published in the same year as Duppa’s report of an underground Christmas, it includes reflections on the Incarnation, the concluding lines of which speak of the particular hope it gave even as its public celebration was restricted:

An Ox and Mule stand and behold,

And wonder,

That a stable should enfold

Him that can thunder.

O what a gracious God have we?

How good, how great! even in our misery.

As with those broadcasts in 1941, exile can be its own creative impulse.

Such an observation predates Christianity; doubtless those Caroline Divines would have turned to Ovid for comfort. He wrote these lines of his exile in Pontus, trying to keep the Roman kalendar among the uncultivated and disinterested Getae:

Nil homini certum est. Fieri quis posse putaret,

ut facerem in mediis haec ego sacra Getis?

Nothing is certain for mankind. Who would have thought

that I’d be celebrating this festival amongst the Getae?

There is a narrative that Christians in the West are undergoing a sort of internal exile. The decline of Christendom as a political reality might have robbed the West of some of its critical societal underpinnings, but its loss as an intellectual project is perhaps the thing that has made the celebration of Christmas in the here and now most difficult. Christians face the challenge of living in a world that has simply forgotten how to speak of things that matter. They are called to proclaim this most delicate truth, this most complex doctrine, this most controversial of their beliefs, in a world where appreciation of nuance and detail in belief has long been dispensed with. Indeed, some Christians themselves are complicit in this. How many churches will simply present the mystery of the Incarnation as a nice fairy story about people coming together as opposed to the transformation of man’s fallen state by the coming of the living God? Are they not now among the Getae, facing the tyranny of the banal?

If this is true – and we might challenge it on a number of fronts, not least the gentle but determined uptick in attendances and engagement with the Christian faith – then ought it to worry Christians? Perhaps not. After all, Christians in the West face nothing like the persecution of their brothers and sisters in the East and South. Those Christians know that, to keep the faith, it is often worth recalling not the first Christmas, but the second, quite possibly spent in Egypt.

This episode is often used in a slightly trite way to claim ‘Jesus was a refugee’, as if the point of the Holy Family’s travails was to make a very specific point about the failures of state policies within globalised late capitalism to manage population shifts. Exile, I think, is a more potent word. Not only has it echoes from the Old Testament, but it speaks, too, of a state of the heart rather than citizenship. It also has, wrapped up deep within it, a hope for return.

It is a hope for return that is at the heart of the message of the Incarnation. That God’s entry into flesh, into a fallen world, into the manger, is the act which gives hope that one day our humanity might be returned to the fullness of God’s love. Such a hope is expressed in the 11th-century hymn which honours Mary for the wonder of the Incarnation, the Salve Regina.

Et Iesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

And after this our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus.

To the Christian, regardless of the political realities of their time, there is something of exile to all existence this side of Heaven. Christmas gives us ‘strength to overcome whatever perils may lie ahead’ and a little glimpse of the hope that this same exile will one day be but a memory.