Good Receiving

Being with children in the immediate aftermath of Christmas is not as demanding as many might suppose. It is challenging, but also re-creative, a short period of helping them to find a sense of equilibrium, or peace, following the highs and occasional lows of the build up to this celebration of abundance. Where children are concerned, it is a case of channelling excitement into directions which are going to prove ultimately rewarding. There is, for example, the matter of personal property. This is not just a case of respecting what belongs to someone else, but of respecting ‘things’ as they are and for the sake of the one who gave them. We learn the significance of things, and hence of gift, from a very early age, so we try to teach children that things matter, not only because of their intrinsic worth, but because they are signs of the love shown to us by the giver. This leads us into the deeper meaning of Christmas itself, because what we have really been celebrating and entering into in all the flurry and busyness of the season is the incomprehensible scale and nature of God’s love.

It is easy to blame the retail and advertising industries for playing on our human tendency for excess and greed, and thereby supposedly distracting us from what Christmas is about, but the real challenge to our own self righteousness in this respect is to allow our natural tendency to greed and excess to be transformed. When this happens, and it is down to us to allow it to happen, Christmas becomes a time for connecting with a goodness, often deeply hidden, which exists in ourselves and in human nature – that we want to bless those we love and be blessed by them. This blessing of one another connects us directly with God’s desire to bless us in Jesus. It is up to us to decide to receive that blessing. 

When it comes to the giving and receiving of presents, two things are significant – why we choose a particular gift for a particular person and how, if at all, they will make use of it. The first part of the equation is complex. If we give something because we like it ourselves, are we therefore giving it because we would like to own it? Or are we giving it, even though we may not like it at all, as an expression of solidarity with that person? Are we saying “I know you like these and I have found one which I like too, so I give it to you as a sign of my love and solidarity with you in who you are”? Even a ninja monster can have a certain attraction, but it is not the toy itself which is significant. It is the ‘knowing’ and empathising with the one who will receive it that matters. The ‘knowing’ smile I receive from my grandson as he plays with the ninja  builds an even stronger bridge between the two of us. The giver is blessed in the one who receives well.

The knowing smile exchanged between us is the ‘knowing’ smile given by God to those who are prepared to risk receiving Christ as a gift in their lives. In Jesus, God is saying “I know and love you as the one who matters to me more than anyone, so I give you my own beloved son who will transform your life, giving it purpose and meaning beyond anything you can imagine for yourself.”

‘Knowing’ moments only really happen when we are sufficiently vulnerable to receiving well – when we are prepared to be surprised by the love of the one doing the giving. In other words, when we are not focusing on ourselves. It is hard to do this at Christmas, or in any gift giving season, because we sometimes expect too much for ourselves in what we give, in how our gifts are received and in the host of attendant material and relational issues which surround the whole gift giving process. Where children are concerned, the business of receiving is more a matter of establishing rights and boundaries than of being in any sense open to the deeper blessings which come with gift. The task, therefore, is to teach restraint, patience (especially towards other siblings) and respect for things in a way which will gradually lead into a realisation that there is more to receiving than material wish fulfillment. Gifts matter because of the giver. Paradoxically, when it comes to receiving Christ, there is a certain kind of wish fulfillment, but it is of a different order. It is something that we perhaps never realised we were wishing for, that we are loved and valued by God beyond our wildest imaginings. 

God in a Hard Place

During one of my seasonal family catch-up calls I was telling my French cousin about our carol services. “O yes”, she said “I have such good memories of that charming English custom”. I do not often associate worship with charm, but perhaps she has a point, or then again, perhaps not. Carol services can be an opportunity for turning a deaf ear to the reality of the suffering which so many people endure at this time of year. They can sentimentalise poverty to the point of denial. But they are also good for the common soul. They reaffirm community.

 A good carol service flows without interruption, so it allows those who don’t normally attend church (perhaps because they can no longer bear to sit through bad sermons, and worship which is either arcane or shallow and, in both cases, meaningless) to experience something of the mystery of God’s coming to be among us. Carol services are inherently contemplative. They remind us of the particular bond we have with God in the person of Jesus Christ. They also afford a brief respite from the domestic realities of Christmas and from the harsher realities of the world around us, especially those of the Holy Land. So, in a sense, they are a form of escape, but a different kind of escape, an escape into God. 

 I do not think there is anything wrong with an hour or so spent escaping into God, even if it is only a brief respite from the general busyness of Christmas, as long as escaping into God doesn’t become an escape into sentimentality and self worship. It is quite easy to tell the difference between escaping into God and escaping into sentimentality, or into oneself, because escaping into God involves being absolutely real about the needs and suffering of others, including the needs of the person sitting in the pew in front. Escaping into God begins with sensing, perhaps for the first time, that it is a joy and a privilege to share the load which that person may secretly be bearing. 

This is where true worship begins. True worship only occurs where love is allowed to be in control of our wills and of our lives. The escape afforded by an hour spent singing carols is in fact a journey into the love of God. But it only becomes worship when that love is de-privatised, when it is done in a spirit of desire for God and for the well being and healing of others. Being aware of the person in the pew in front of us as potentially hurting in some way leaves us with no choice but to take that person with us in our escape into God. We hide them in the love of God, while still singing the carol or listening to one of the readings. 

Once the person in the pew in front is safely hidden in the love of God, we can turn our hearts (while still singing the carol or listening to the reading) to the enormous suffering that goes on around us all the time. Invariably, this suffering involves violence of one kind or another and sometimes violence perpetrated in God’s name. I think at the moment of young men and women being radicalised to hate, fight and kill in the name of religion. I also think of the injustices endured by the Palestinians. They, and those who persecute them, also need to be hidden in the love of God. 

None of this takes away from the charm of carol singing. Instead, it raises the charming to the level of pathos, a word which in turn shapes the idea of empathy, or  ‘suffering with’. Pathos, with all its beauty, is what God, in the vulnerability of the infant Christ, brings to the brittle world of cruel achievement. The pathos of the Nativity is in the dispossession of Palestinians. So it is worth remembering, as we sing about the 'deep and dreamless sleep' of Bethlehem, that we are all implicitly involved in the commercial achievements brought about by this particular form of cruelty and injustice.

The mercy which God offers comes from a hard place. In the harsh realities which surrounded the birth of Jesus, he brings together the vulnerability and beauty of all that is innocent with everything that is hard and cruel, from the most petty and seemingly insignificant act of selfishness, to the great swathe of human suffering which surrounds us on every side. In all of this God is reaching out for us in our ugliness and violence and inviting us into himself. It is what those charming carols are all about. 

  

No Passing Joy

The less we understand about the mystery of life and death, the more necessary it becomes to frame life’s defining moments through ritual. Ritual and the customs which surround death give voice to what cannot be spoken. They not only process grief, but make it possible for people to meet one another at a depth which is beyond language and find there a common love and a shared hope. It is the shared hope which is so pivotal about the passing of Nelson Mandela, expressed in the opposite of mourning, as joy in the midst of sadness, a celebration of gift in the context of loss. 

Joy transforms the nature of grief itself, but it takes courage to allow this to happen. South Africans are a courageous people blessed with an exceptionally courageous leader who took his nation from a place of darkness to a place of light. The suffering which he endured alongside his people has given an added dimension to the joy they experience now as they remember him. It has also given their grief a substance, meaning and purpose which will sustain their hope for the future. He gave purpose to their suffering, so the grief which they experience now adds, in a mysterious way, to the substance of the joy.

Grief and joy together make for shared hope and, if we will allow it, for enduring love. For love to endure and for a nation to continue to grow in that love, fear has to be continually confronted and overcome. Already, the sceptics are wondering if the Rainbow Nation will survive. Worse still, are those who are adding to the fear by speaking the language of paranoid violence. It takes courage for grief to be channelled in such a way as to allow its particular joy to overwhelm such fears and make hope a reality rather than wishful thinking.

All of these considerations give Christians and people of faith a focus for prayer. Focused prayer is not a matter of asking for specific things. It is more about placing ourselves before God in an attitude of supplication for the kind of enduring love which overcomes fear and transforms nations – and Churches. For Christians, and for the Church especially, praying for transformation faces us with the question of whether we ourselves know how to tap into the kind of joy which South Africans are manifesting in this time of mourning, and whether we are willing to do this. After all, the Church has much to mourn over, much to be thankful for and therefore much to hope for. In the past few months, a bill allowing women to be consecrated as bishops in the Church in Wales and in the Church of England has presented us with an opportunity, an absolute necessity, to allow joy to overwhelm fear, so as to generate real and substantial hope. We are not talking about indulging in a passing moment of happy celebration before we get down to the challenges which will inevitably come in the future. We are talking about holding on to joy and pain at the same time, so as to allow for hope. This can only be done through forgiveness and the re-establishment of trust. So we are talking about allowing unconditional love to reshape our Church.

As with South Africa, there has to be a reason for doing this, and there has to be conviction. Nelson Mandela was convinced that forgiveness and moving forward together in a spirit of joy was the only way to transform a nation. In the life of the Church, women and their supporters need to be convinced that the joy we all experienced as a result of the Governing Body and Synod votes belongs to the whole Church and that it is not only, or primarily, ours. We are not the only people with a right to be joyful. Mandela’s joy was for all his people and his victory through suffering was a victory won with all of them through forgiveness. If, as women, we persist in allowing overt triumphalism to define who we are and how we relate to the whole Church, it will diminish us and our victory will be a hollow one. The celebration of that victory will have little of real substance to bring to the ongoing life of the Church and little of the good news of the Gospel to bring to the world. The good news is about hope fulfilled and joy which endures through unconditional love, and through forgiveness made possible by grace.

From Darkness to Light

There is something totemic about comets. They are bearers of things. They hold in themselves something of the stuff of creation, assuming they survive their close encounter with the sun without being vapourised. They embody something of ourselves, the DNA of existence, perhaps. I have not yet seen the comet Ison and we are not sure when or where our household here in this beautiful valley in South Wales should be on the lookout for it, allowing for cloud cover. There is very little light pollution here, so we simply wait and hope for a sighting of this fiery beauty before it returns to the darkness of deep space. 

While thinking about the comet I thought about Syria and the devastation there, the wounded and tortured children, the complete absence of anything which could make it possible for a society to function with the normality most of us take for granted. Syria is darkness. I also thought about Iran and the talks which have taken place recently in Geneva where leaders have sat down and sought with determination a way out of the darkness of enmity, an enmity which has brought hardship and suffering to a great number of people in all the countries involved. Iranians have endured siege conditions of varying magnitude for over 30 years. Their neighbours, as well as the rest of us, have never grown used to living with the fear of nuclear terrorism.  Both of these situations pertain to the realm of darkness.

Enmity is darkness. It is a state of being in which we actively refuse to see or acknowledge others, as they exist and suffer in their own darkness. It is a situation without hope in which we are thrown back upon ourselves and back into ancient hatreds. The darkness of enmity is as near to hell as it is possible to imagine.

Darkness can engulf even the best of situations, where good is the overall objective, as when the lights go out in a room while a doctor is in the middle of a life saving operation on a battle field or in a disaster zone. There is no one to turn the lights on again, or no power available and no more anaesthetic with which to complete the operation without the patient suffering unbearable pain. Confusion, corruption and lawlessness. Another state of darkness. The world is in this kind of darkness. 

Last night I attended a very beautiful Advent service in one of our local parish churches. It began in darkness out of which came the sound of voices singing out the world’s longing for the coming of a Saviour, for light in our darkness. The sound of the voices embodied light, if such a thing is imaginable. It embodied the light of hope. Hope was made real, tangible and sacramental, or holy, in a community coming together in this ancient building, as others have done before them for thousands of years, to bear witness to the reality of the light which is Jesus come into the world. He has come, and will come again, not to magic away all suffering but to take away enmity and despair. Despair is the real darkness, but it has not overcome the light. Because of the coming of Christ, and his taking into himself our human nature, it never will.