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From the Dean.... |
| Having just put the Christmas tree up in Church with its twinkling lights, it’s time to think about getting the crib figures out once again. I wonder why we bother putting them away at all! Just when we’re feeling safe from all things ‘Christmassy’ it creeps up on us and almost catches us out. In some offices, shops and streets the Christmas decorations never seem to get taken down. They stay up as a catch-all decoration for any festival, religious or secular, that happens to come along or just evidence of sheer laziness. |
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There are those of course who are increasingly bold and vociferous in advocating that Christmas should be a totally secular thing anyway – a celebration in the midst of the darkness of winter (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere), a ‘Seasonal’ or ‘Winter Festival’. Is this a case of the pagan world trying to claim back its pre- Christian legacy? This all seems to me to miss a crucially important point. The advocates of non-Christmas are quite happy to encourage Halloween with its ghosts and weirdies or Fr. Christmas with his elves (without connection to St Nicholas of course) and any other fantasy, particularly that panders to the childlike in both adults and children and is a good money maker to boot. I become increasingly aware that we live in a world obsessed with fantasy and dark things; just look at the films on offer at your local cinema preoccupied with gun totting, knife wielding monsters, human and otherwise. Perhaps the Christian nativity story is rather tame compared to all that stuff! Yet is it any wonder that we watch in horror as the weird, the bad and the downright disgusting and inhuman gets played out before our very eyes in news headlines anywhere in the real world of today? The Christian gospel, the Christmas message, is the record of the light of the presence of God in the midst of this darkness today, not just 2000 years ago. Yet we are being encouraged to persist in following the darkness and encouraging our children and young people to do so and then wonder why they turn on each other with knives and guns or spend hours on the computer in an often violent fantasy world. Whatever happened to the real world and the striving after the good, the excellent, the beautiful and truly creative. Christianity is often caricatured as being an irrational fantasy. On the evidence of events in the world today I really don’t think so. The Nativity account of the birth of Jesus is about God coming into that darkness and leading humanity out by his light to life in all its fullness if we would but follow. With every good wish and blessing for Christmas and throughout 2009. Alan Hayday |
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