Newsletter: December 2024
Greetings again wherever you read this. Here in the UK, the darkness deepens and the damp chill creeps into our sun-hungry bones as we journey to Christmas. How are you?
It’s a festival that evokes such diverse and disparate feelings. Is it the best time of the year or the cause of deep dread? And how do you feel? Rage at the crass commercialisation and insistent feel-goodery of the adverts – or delight in the lights, carols and excited laughter? Or both? Like a wedding, the Christmas season can painfully expose the cracks in family life, both past and present. Or it can arrive among us like a kiss from heaven.
Whatever our personal feelings about this season, created by our experiences down the years, there’s no question in my mind that Christmas is the champion of Christian festivals; that if there was to be only one celebration in the year, it would be Christmas with its remarkable message: God with us.
Here is the beginning and end of everything; in many ways, nothing more needs be said. In fact, let’s pause for a moment, for – if it’s true – this is no place for words. A few deep breaths at this point in the year might do us some good.
God with us.
Other festivals have their place; but in essence, they can only expand on this shockingly happy announcement, giving it further colour. The Easter story reveals the staggering extent of this solidarity between God and humanity, the lengths to which it will go. While Pentecost displays the bubbling energy of this union, of God with us. It is an energy.
But I’d say all this and more is contained in the Christmas announcement, ‘God with us’. In a way, there’s nothing else we need know. Christmas says it all. And each year our spiritual self, who may be a little jaded, seeks the meaning of this afresh. Christmas past is different from Christmas present: what does it mean for me today? And so we journey… we journey. Each year, through staff parties and financial worries; through physical pain, overwork and fears too many to mention, we travel with the magi to the stable, not knowing what we will find. The only Christmas is Christmas present.
I talk about this journey in a blog called Towards our secret Christmas.
And that’s probably enough of an interruption in your magnificent life. So I’ll take my festive coat from the hook and make my way past the nativity set and star to the tinsel-bordered exit.
But before leaving, as the door closes behind me, I may be heard muttering, ‘God with us? I mean, really??’
Simon x
Photo by Wesley Tingey
