The 21st December was the shortest day and the longest night. Nature seems to have gone to sleep. The leaves have fallen off all but the most resolute of oak trees and the garden lacks life.

As early as the 2nd century, the Romans believed that the ‘Unconquered Sun’ would rise again and warm the earth and bring things back to life. Darkness and Light. Death and New Life. And they prayed to their god ‘Sol Invictus’ or ‘Helios’ if you prefer, that light would come again. It’s no accident that the Christian Church celebrates the birth of the ‘true light’ at the darkest time of the year. He is the light that darkness could not overcome.

There’ll always be a struggle between darkness and light.

We feel that at both a personal level and in the public world around us as well. Nowhere is this more graphically seen than in the destruction and war being waged in Ukraine, in parts of the Middle East and in parts of Africa. Bombs and bullets, terror and violence seem to be the only language being used in these parts of the world, including the lands of the Bible and the places that we hear about in the story of the Incarnation.

And, of course it’s the innocents who suffer and it always has been. 

Who could fail but be shocked by the sheer terror on the faces of children and families as homes and schools, hospitals and clinics and essential parts of the infrastructure of towns and cities are destroyed in ways calculated to instil fear, misery and suffering into the largest number of innocents? Whether these images come from from Aleppo or Mosul, from Gaza or Nablus, from Kiev or Kherson and so many other places whose names we either don’t know or can’t remember, as we watch on our TV screens or read our newspapers, we are appalled.

The story of the birth of Jesus resonates with the story of humanity at it’s darkest hour.

These verses of Malcolm Guite’s poem ‘Refugee’ puts it so well:

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.

For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.

Malcolm Guite “Refugee”

At this time of year, as Christians we hear and proclaim the universal message of the need for peace on earth. Peace isn’t just the absence of conflict and war. Each of us has some responsibility to create at least some of that peace in our own life and community, not least by working for a more just society and world.

These are the ‘hopes and fears’ we focus on at Christmas and as we remember the Holy Innocents.

Blessings
James

Are you someone who when you’re reading a book, tends to skip to the end to see what happens rather than sticking with the hero through thick and thin. When Andrew and Daniel were young, on long journeys they’d start asking if we were nearly there yet, before we were a couple of miles from home.

Part of the problem is a failure to be content with now. How much of your time do you spend thinking about the past? How much time do you spend worrying about or anticipating the future? How much time does that leave for living in the present?

The spiritual writer Anthony de Mello suggested in his writings that most of us spend far too much time anywhere but in the present. In Advent it’s so easy to think about Christmases past or to have already arrived at Christmas to come. C. S. Lewis wrote a story called “Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus” about a land in which there are two festivals that overlap by just one day.

The first festival is called Exmas and for fifty days the people prepare for it, buying and sending cards and gifts, decorating trees and preparing food

“But when the day of the festival comes, most of the citizens being exhausted with the preparation, lie in bed till noon. But in the evening they eat five times as much supper as on other days and, crowning themselves with crowns of paper become intoxicated.”

The other festival, called Crissmas, starts on the day that Exmas finishes. But those who keep Crissmas, do the opposite, they

“rise early on that day with shining faces and go before sunrise to certain temples where they partake of a sacred feast.”

and then celebrate for several weeks afterwards.

For me Advent is about waiting for the unexpected. It’s a shame to miss all that by skipping ahead to what we think we know happens at the end of the season, on 25th December. To fail to engage with the now part of the story day by day and week by week. To fail to really listen to and reflect on the now part of the story. To have already moved on to the next part, because we know what happens next and it’s more exciting, more interesting, or perhaps more comforting.

This Advent how about really living in the present? Resisting that strong temptation to skip ahead, Enjoy the anticipation. Enjoy the state of not-knowing, because, if you enter into it, almost anything could happen. Enjoy the possibility that something truly amazing might come to pass. That God might just do something in your life that you didn’t expect, and that His coming into the world – your world – might mean that things are never the same again.

Blessings

James

We are now entering what some call the ‘Season of Remembrance’. It starts with All Saintson 1^st November (though this year we will celebrate All Saints on Sunday 30^th), followed by All Souls on 2^nd and continues with Armistice Day on 11^th until Remembrance Sunday (this year on 13^th). It’s a time when we remember the Saints of the Church, those men and women who are recognised as having an exceptional degree of holiness and who are felt to have a particular likeness or closeness to God. We remember also friends and family members, who we have loved but see no more. And of course we remember those who’ve given their lives in the armed conflicts of more than 100 years. In churches and communities across the United Kingdom, all of these events are marked with public acts of worship and of remembrance.

On April 5, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and teacher, was arrested by the Gestapo and thrown into prison; on April 9, 1945, he was executed. Whilst incarcerated, he wrote a collection of the letters, essays and poems. They were addressed to his parents and to a friend, and form an extraordinary picture of a sensitive man whose faith and dedication to service never wavered, whose spiritual depth enabled him to overcome the most trying of circumstances.  Tain CoS Film Club will be showing a film about him on Friday 11^thNovember at 7:30pm (see Diary).

He was a man of great faith, intelligence and compassion, who understood so well the problems of the modern world. Resisting ease and compromise, he was constantly ministering to his fellow prisoners right up to the time of his death. He was a saint, a friend to many and a casualty of war and therefore part of each element of our Season of Remembrance.

One of the short pieces that he wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge is called “Stations on the Road to Freedom”. In it there’s a short verse on each of four ‘stations’ on that road: Discipline, Action, Suffering and Death. This last he described as “the supreme festival on the road to freedom”. The verse on Death reads as follows:

Come now, Queen of the feasts on the road to eternal freedom! 
O death, cast off the grievous chains and lay low the 
thick walls of our mortal body and our blinded soul, 
that at last we may behold what here we have failed to see. 
O freedom, long have we sought thee in discipline and in action and in suffering. 
Dying, we behold thee now, and see thee in the face of God.

“Stations on the Road to Freedom” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Blessings

James

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

Proverbs 31:8-9

Bishop Mark is among leaders from faith communities, charities, front-line support organisations and trade unions who signed an open letter to Prime Minister Liz Truss, urging her to “ensure that people on the lowest incomes have enough to live in the months ahead”.

The letter read:

“As faith groups, charities, trade unions and front-line organisations we have seen the cost of living emergency escalating not only in the statistics but in the lives of people we meet day to day, in foodbanks, debt centres and in our places of worship. The least well off in our communities are facing the sharpest end of this crisis, and without substantial support will be dragged into destitution.

It is the urgent, moral responsibility of the Prime Minister to ensure that people on the lowest incomes have enough to live in the months ahead. Spiralling costs are affecting everyone, but for those who were already fighting to keep their heads above water this winter’s challenges will be a matter of life and death.”

The release of the letter coincided with new analysis from Prof Donald Hirsch, which calculates that despite the Energy Price Guarantee announcement made by the government on 8th September, a family of four receiving Universal Credit will still require an additional £1,391 over the next six months to stay warm and fed. It also came ahead of the government’s fiscal statement issues on 23rd September, when they announced further measures targeted at combatting the rising cost of living, focussed mainly on tax cuts which offer little help for those most in need.

The letter was signed by 52 charity, faith and community leaders, including representatives from The Methodist Church, The Muslim Council of Britain, The Hindu Council UK and Jewish leaders from the across the UK, as well as charities and organisations such as The Food Foundation, the Child Poverty Action Group, Action for Children, The Big Issue and The Trussell Trust.

The letter called for targeted financial support which takes into account family size and need, can be distributed quickly and in amounts large enough to enable families to live decently this winter and beyond.

The signatories argue that

“increases in poverty and destitution because of this crisis are not inevitable, if government, business and civil society recognise that this is an emergency and act now”,

and called on the government to use the tools at their disposal to urgently deliver support.

In the meantime, the Food Banks and the St Finnbarr’s Charities Shop need our support as never before, as they do what they can to help plug some of the gap.

“When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the LORD your God.”

Leviticus 19:9-10

Blessings
James and Simon

In Autumn 2019, no-one predicted how things would be a year later – covid, lockdowns, working from home, few people flying, etc. In the optimism surrounding COP26 in Autumn 2021, whilst few expected that the political rhetoric about targets for reduction in fossil fuel use would be matched by decisive and legally binding action, a complete abandonment of them wasn’t expected either. Back then, the idea that Russia would invade Ukraine within six months was not something that any of us expected, nor the consequences of that for fuel prices and the worldwide supply of staple foods.

Since 2019, six months is a very long time in terms of making plans for the future. On Friday we learned that the energy price cap for domestic gas and electricity is to rise by 80% in October and that will put keeping warm this winter out of reach of a large number of people in the fifth biggest economy in the world. Is that something that you would have believed just a couple of years ago, pre-brexit, pre-covid, pre-invasion?

So here we are at the Season of Creation again, with news items about burning more rather than less fossil fuels, a large number of the bathing beaches in the UK polluted with raw sewage, hosepipe bans in a number of areas but also flash-flooding and in much of Europe soaring summer temperatures. It’s the stuff of the Book of Revelation:

“And there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a violent earthquake, such as had not occurred since people were upon the earth, so violent was that earthquake. … And every island fled away, and no mountains were to be found; and huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, dropped from heaven on people, until they cursed God for the plague of the hail, so fearful was that plague.”

Revelation 16:18-21

If things can change so drastically over a short period of time, can we not hope for, pray for and work for positive change in our society, our country and our world. A society based on God’s values, where everyone no matter what their circumstances is of value and their identity is based on being beloved children of God, rather than a society based on world values, where what you have, what you do and what people say about you determine your identity. 

During 2020 many people discovered that there was more to life than work as they worked from home. They learned to love family and friends more when they were unable to visit them. They helped their neighbours, who they hadn’t really got to know before and appreciated a cheery ‘hello’ from a stranger. We could base our positive new world on a more positive image from Revelation:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth … And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children.”

Revelation 21:1a,5-7

“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.’”

Revelation 7:16-17

Blessings
James