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.