The Airy Christ

The Secret Message of Christmas to the Outcasts, the Misfits, and the Invisible, Powerless Poor

“Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East?
This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.”

— Stevie Smith, from the poem “The Airy Christ”

It’s Christmas 2025, and I am sat alone in my van in an RV park somewhere in the States—never mind where, it could be anywhere, it could be a mile or two from where you live—and I really love that I’m here in this RV park, even though it’s tucked away in an industrial part of town far from anything resembling nature, and it’s all dirt road and dirty patches of artificial grass laid out sadly next to each rig. I love it because it’s one of those RV parks where a number of the people are living here full time. I’m hemmed in by their rigs, most of them older models not more than 25 feet long. The stacks of cinder blocks holding up their trailer hitches look like they’ve been there for years. There’s wild grass shooting up all around them, and yard ornaments sometimes, to soften the hard lines. Next to those, typically, sits an extra large propane tank, along with some version of a makeshift storage shed, most of them covered by a pine green tarp. The tanks and sheds are the real giveaways, the signs that those who live on that patch of earth are not going anywhere anymore.

And in case you’re wondering, yes they have jobs. I hear their diesel trucks and old Toyota two-door coupes sputter and rumble to life each morning before they head off to work, and settle in at night when they come home. But it’s not enough, clearly. They live every day of their lives just a few steps away from homelessness.

If Christ’s arrival at Christmas is for anyone, I figure it’s for souls like these, the invisible people who live on the fringe, the ones who don’t quite fit, or don’t fit at all, into the story society spins about who and what it is. The outcasts, the don’t belongers, the invisible, the rejected, the ones life knocked flat on their asses sometime ago and who haven’t been able to find their way back to their feet quite yet. Or maybe they’ve given up trying to stand at all, and have turned all their energy to keeping their head down. After all, when the world seems hell bent on taking you out, keeping your target as small as possible might be the better strategy.

Until I sold my house in 2022 and moved into my van full time, I had never been without a roof over my head. It’s strange what it does to you. How it simultaneously makes you feel more vulnerable and exposed, and yet also sets you free. You find you don’t care about more than half the things you used to care about because it’s suddenly obvious that absolutely none of them matter. Nearly everything related to titles or labels or status has turned all vapid and ethereal for me, like imagined ghosts in a fog—as has absolutely everything related to the accumulation of stuff, beyond that which keeps me alive and healthy.

Living on the road these past few years, I’ve often thought how it’s better for me to live this way. I’ve spent my whole life feeling like I don’t quite fit, like I just don’t belong in the world, at least not in the world as it is. I’ve always related more to the outcast and the stranger than to anyone who has ever been on the “inside.” I have a recurring dream of going to this huge house party at night but not being able to find my way into the house. I end up standing alone outside on the front lawn, watching everyone having fun through the picture window. I pound on the glass and yell, but I’m unable to get anyone’s attention to come open the door.

I’ve never been homeless. But I’ve never been home, either. I’ve always felt a bit like an alien here, a misunderstood wanderer who cannot find shelter, a sojourner through a world that is not my home.

It has been better for my soul, these past two years, to stop pretending about that. To make believe I do fit in when, clearly, I don’t. To act as if the way of life we in the West have created for ourselves is not absurd, when, quite obviously, it is. To vainly claim I follow Christ when I will not give up my entitled life of comfort and power to associate with the invisible outcasts with whom Christ most passionately identified.

I can barely imagine the level of cognitive bias I have had to employ in reading the story of Joseph and Mary each Christmas all these years…how they were turned away again and again from the hearth of belonging, how they could find no shelter in the long night of their travail, how they were ultimately forced into a barn full of animal shit, how this is where the Savior of the World chose to be born…and yet still stubbornly refuse to hear the clarion message of who Christ actually came to save:

The outcast. The stranger. The invisible, powerless poor.

This is good news for my neighbors here in the RV park. Good news for me, too, and for every other soul out there who has never belonged or been invited in, the ones who walk the earth as strangers and sojourners in a land that has never felt like home. Weirdos. Oddballs. Mystics. Freaks. The coming of Christ at Christmas may be available to everyone. But it’s mostly for people like us. People like Mary and Joseph. People like Jesus himself.

And that is a comforting thought.

My all time favorite Christmas poem is by Stevie Smith, and it really isn’t even about Christmas, exactly. But it is about Christ, and the absurdity of how he came to earth knowing full well he would be misunderstood. Knowing full well, in fact, that both his message and his image would be repeatedly coopted and leveraged for power and status by all kinds of ridiculous factions. Christ knew his message would be abused, that the fearful and the greedy would claim his name as their exclusive property and use it as a weapon of control. He knew they would twist his words and use them to craft a pantheon of false Christs, including but not limited to the Capitalist Consumer Christ, the Prosperity Christ, the Partisan Christ, the Magic Mascot Christ, the Vengeful Warmonger Christ, the Vaguely Disappointed Christ, and the Christ Who Loves Us More Than He Loves Them.

And yet, Christ came anyway.

One has to wonder why.

I don’t know. Maybe Christ is the prince of lost causes, a do-gooder with a savior complex who doesn’t know when the odds are stacked against him. Maybe he’s a hopeless romantic, and just couldn’t do anything else but try, even though he knew it wouldn’t work.

Or maybe he came because, despite all the absurdity and machinations of the greedy and the fearful and the cravers of power, he knew that a few of us oddballs and outcasts would see through all the shit and the stench of that manger scene, and get the message he meant us to hear…

The Airy Christ

by Stevie Smith

Who is this that comes in splendour, coming from the blazing East?
This is he we had not thought of, this is he the airy Christ.

Airy, in an airy manner in an airy parkland walking,   
Others take him by the hand, lead him, do the talking.

But the Form, the airy One, frowns an airy frown,
What they say he knows must be, but he looks aloofly down,

Looks aloofly at his feet, looks aloofly at his hands,
Knows they must, as prophets say, nailèd be to wooden bands.

As he knows the words he sings, that he sings so happily   
Must be changed to working laws, yet sings he ceaselessly.

Those who truly hear the voice, the words, the happy song,   
Never shall need working laws to keep from doing wrong.

Deaf men will pretend sometimes they hear the song, the words,   
And make excuse to sin extremely; this will be absurd.

Heed it not. Whatever foolish men may do the song is cried   
For those who hear, and the sweet singer does not care that he was crucified.

For he does not wish that men should love him more than anything
Because he died; he only wishes they would hear him sing.

Source: The New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1988). Available for purchase here.

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