Newsletter: December 2025
Christmas is generally a rather public event.
When someone asks you about your Christmas plans, they’re probably not asking about the soul journey you are about to undertake. Instead, they’re wanting to hear where you’ll be and who you’ll be with and for how long and what you’ll be eating and what you’ll be watching – and are you going to that ice show again that was so brilliant last year?
But having just returned from leading a Meister Eckhart retreat at Othona, in Dorset, I’m more in the soul journey camp, for as the great man said, ‘People should not worry about what they do, but who they are.’ I sense this should appear on every Christmas card. It would make the season more festive, less restive.
The equation is simple: it’s who we are which gives radiance to what we do. Our being colours our action. It doesn’t work the other way round, however. Action doesn’t change being. We can cook a fine meal for everyone and still behave ignorantly, without care or awareness, and thereby ruin the meal. As Eckhart adds, ‘Little comes from the works of those whose being is slight.’
So my guide for these Advent and Christmas seasons, from December 1st to January 6th, will be the 14th century Eckhart; and, in particular, his words about touching our truest selves, which would be quite a Christmas gift. And the good news is – for we may find ourselves busy in the coming days – we don’t have to do anything; we just let go of things.
He compares us to a sculptor working with wood. ‘When a sculptor fashions a figure from wood, he does not place the figure in the wood – but carves away sections that hide and conceal it. He gives the wood nothing, but merely cuts away the excess… and then polishes what is discovered beneath. He seeks the treasure within by cutting away all that isn’t the figure.’
If we possess a secret Christmas within, if the stable birth is somehow about ourselves, we may live the public and much-tinselled Christmas drama more freely and with more joy.
Meanwhile, and quite different, I recently wrote a comment piece for the Church Times on the dangers of our present and fast-expanding grievance culture:
Culture of grievance is a threat to society
While my bid to dominate the Christmas book-buying market this year lies with Shelf Life, published by Penguin. It’s a diary of my three years stacking shelves in a supermarket, and actually sold more copies on my Eckhart retreat than my Eckhart book. Who’d have thought?
Of all my books, it’s the one people most often speak of reading and ‘laughing out loud’, adding, ‘I’m giving it to my husband’, who apparently also laughs out loud, and in the bath, generally. So, don’t skimp on the cheer this Christmas, go for full-throttle laughter – and it contains a special Christmas chapter, of course, because supermarkets absolutely love Christmas. It’s when the profits speak most clearly.
And hold the front page: there’s also still time to order your copy of London’s Knotty Pickle, my recent illustrated novella about our capital city in extreme peril. It will be a merry Christmas present for someone. Not so much a stocking-filler as a stocking-thriller. And signed, if you wish it so.
And now I take my leave, and you must also, as your magnificent life mysteriously unfolds. As I write that, I think of some lines by Robert Frost:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The best Christmas story will be your truest self living free. And in my experience, such things do occasionally occur.
Simon x
Illustration by Joyce Caleze
