My story, his story, your story, our story

Sunday 13th December, 2020

I attended my first Carol Service today. The local university had a candle lit one...it was done in the new surreal way....looking at each other and listening to each other via YouTube and the world of the electron. Being an old curmudgeon I will say that I would have preferred to have been in the Cathedral with the noise and presence of other human beings. A YouTube experience is different but it was still beautiful and mind lifting in to another dimension. This is a Christmas like no other. As a child I would get so excited by it all from dressing the tree to waiting for Santa. As I grew older so I awaited the toys and gifts. Later in life it was the company and the shared excitement with children and people of all ages taking from it differing experiences. Now as I grow older so I appreciate the spiritual side more. I am still pleased for others but my grousey nature is not so fond of the razzmatazz but rather of the hope and beauty the whole festival can contain and indicate. Through it all from the age of 21 and not before I have enjoyed the pudding and brandy butter and cream. Before then it was the chocolate Yule log. We change.

Today I watched a documentary of the remarkable story of a KKK member coming to terms with the awfulness of racism and violence and hatred through falling in love. The love of a woman who loved her son and his friends who were black. The love of a black preacher who cared for the man when he was cast out by his own. Yet the change is not total. Racism, hatred and violence continue but so also does love. We change and we need to change. It does not mean that change of itself is necessary but it means we have always an opportunity to improve, to be better and kinder and more loving people.

I also read today the part autobiography of a doctor who chose to go in to palliative care. Her realisation that dying is a time when people need as she noted the greatest human and medical attention. She noted also how death and near death and loss make one appreciate life.

Certainly the Christmas story is a remarkable one. A child born in a strange place in a strange time. A child who would grow and change. A child who would become a man and preach love. Turn the other cheek. Love your enemy. The same preaching the black preacher in the documentary was preaching and enacting. The child who became a man was crucified. The KKK symbol of the cross seems a mockery.

Part of having a quiet Christmas may be that one has time to reflect, to study the whole purpose and reality of the story of which a birth was the beginning. Whether or not one believes the child was the Son of God is almost irrelevant for the story is our story, a story of becoming an adult who would die for love.