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Reflections on the Christmas story
Arcadia is a glittery fairy grotto of a shop close to The Oxford Union. Full of beguiling frippery and purveyors of the prettiest Christmas cards in town, I always go there first when I'm looking for cards. This year the very nice man who owns it allowed me into his stockroom to choose my cards even before he'd had a chance to put them out on display. Picking my way between rickety shelves and teetering boxes of baubles, lights, garlands and angels, I sifted through the cellophane packs by the thin gleam of a naked bulb. Meanwhile, that very day, the pundits were predicting the end of the Christmas card - the as yet unresolved postal strikes would, they were sure, consign to history those festive greetings involving cardboard, envelopes, ink and stamps.
I try to choose my cards with love and care. Until this year, the pictures have always reflected what gloomy commentators are apt to call the real meaning of Christmas, while upbraiding us for forgetting it: cribs, angels and stars; shepherds, wise men and, at a stretch, doves of peace. Until this year, I've chosen my cards out of loyalty to the traditional telling of the Christmas story. But in the shadows of the Arcadia stockroom the traditional images now provoked questions and indecision.
In her book A Story to Live By, the leader of the Iona Community, Kathy Galloway, asks herself: Is Christian faith still a story to live by on the cusp of a new millennium? It's a question I've been reflecting on all year, in part in preparation for the Gathering in October, but more because it's a question I've needed to re-consider for myself. And how do I answer? If I can understand the Christian story as one which develops and grows, rather than one which is caught for all time in the amber of traditional images and beliefs, then I answer Yes. Quietly, but emphatically, Yes.
One of the questions at the Gathering which went un-addressed because we ran out of time, was directed specifically to me. If I was suggesting that we need a new Christian story for the 21st century, what would be the key elements in that new story? If I'd answered the question when it was asked, I would have said that the new Christian story would reflect new, and for many people, more meaningful understandings of the nature of Creation, of God, of Jesus and of Humanity. I'd say the same today, but with one change - I'd use the word chapter rather than story. For I'm not talking about a new story to overturn the old story, but a new chapter in an unfolding story: a new chapter which recognises, loves and respects what has gone before, but which is written in faithfulness to a new vision for what is to come.
For me, Ann Weems puts it perfectly in her poem Kneeling in Bethlehem:
It's not over, this birthing, she writes:
There are always newer skies
Into which God can throw stars.
When we begin to think
That we can predict the Advent of God,
That we can box the Christ
In a stable in Bethlehem,
That's just the time that God will be born
In a place that we can't imagine and won't believe.*
And the cards I chose? A variety of exquisitely shot winter images: a frosted fern, bright berries, a snow-laden fir tree in the mist - images of a Creation miraculous in its complexity and beauty, produced, I am assured, in a carbon-neutral process by a company called Eden.
With warmest good wishes for Advent, Christmas, and the coming year.
Go well
Eley
*From Kneeling in Bethlehem. (c) 1987 Ann Weems.
Used by permission of Westminster John Knox Press.
