St George and St Gabriel, Stockport

Christmas and New Year are often a time of recollection, reflection, and a bit of nostalgia. Family stories re-told round the dinner table, or by the fire.  Re-lived in the telling.  Stories with a meaning for those involved.  Family myths subtly changing, but with a core that connects.

We receive Christmas cards, open them, glance at the picture and see who they are from.  Each card will generate some reaction – a thought, a memory, a smile perhaps.  Even a mild panic if we have forgotten to send them one. 

This year I have looked more closely at the scenes depicted on the cards we have received.  Like the family stories, they too are mythical, often presenting an idealised, even nostalgic, Christmas.  A warmly lit church, choir boys outside in procession through the snow, carrying lit candles.  A vintage post van bringing greetings in the snow.

Even the Nativity scenes are idealised.  One might even say sanitised.  The Holy Family posed in a brightly lit stable with the animals strategically placed.  The Shepherds,though rough and ready outsiders in their society, beautifully dressed.  Not to mention the Magi in their finery, in spite of their arduous travels.

We live by stories and important stories stay around and become myths.  Stories with powerful messages about ourselves and our relationships.  And at Christmas, those myths contain central messages about our relationship to God.

Chris Dawson

How will you your Christmas keep?

With a family of four in two rooms.  No space, no privacy, no room to breathe.  Or in a tent in the derelict doorway of the once upon a time John Lewis store. Or in a doorway without a tent, on cardboard, wrapped in blankets with your dog for company.

In a prison cell with a hole in the window where a drug carrying drone crashed through.  No seat on the toilet and a broken flush.  A bucket of water instead.  Banged up for twenty three hours out of twenty four.  Surviving on two meals a day. 

Struggling to put food on the table, counting the pennies and turning off the heat, with the wet and cold outside.  Damp and mould on the walls.  Unsafe.  Landlord knocking on the door, threatening to evict.

Discriminated against for disability, colour, gender identity or ethnicity.  Or as a refugee,   tortured for daring to speak out.  Leaving family, fleeing country.  Knowing no-one in a foreign land.  Isolated.  Just hoping………

“How will you your Christmas keep?

Feasting, fasting, or asleep?”

Eleanor Farjeon

Chris Dawson

We had a Congregational chapel in our village, but in all my 25 years living there I never saw inside it.  We were C. of E.  In my teenage years I had a Quaker girlfriend.  There was never a word of disapproval, but I always felt I was coming close to a line. 

Chatting up the Greci girls would have been a step too far.  They were the only Roman Catholic family in the village and went to a convent boarding school.  Their father had been an Italian prisoner of war and he had stayed and married a local girl.

As students in a fiercely Catholic country in the 1960s, we were used to the annual sermon by Archbishop McQuaid.  In it he condemned Dublin University as a Protestant abomination founded by Queen Elizabeth 1^st and forbade any young Catholics tempted to attend it, from do so.

In August of this year the Parliament of the World Religions, first convened in 1893, was called in Chicago.  Over seven thousand participants attended, representing more than two hundred faith traditions in ninety-five countries.  So many people from diverse backgrounds coming together, exploring, sharing, praying and responding to the Call to Action on the final Day.

On Saturday morning I shall be joining the Churches Together carol singing on Davenport Green.  This week I could go a step further and join our Jewish brethren in celebrating Hanukkah.

Chris Dawson

Words can be enlightening.  They can also limit our deeper understanding.  It’s natural for us to explain, to solve, to work things out through words.  But this keeps us in our head and in the realm of ideas and some things are beyond the realm of ideas.

As John says in his first Epistle, no-one has ever seen God.  But plenty of people feel that they have encountered God.  And that takes us into the realm of experience.  Experiences change us and affect our actions and our relationships. 

The most profound experiences come when we are paying attention – to ourselves, to another, to the world around us.  It is then that we may get glimpses of peace as an experience, wholeness as an experience, God as an experience.  These glimpses may be brief, but they are there because, at some level, we have let go the urge to analyse and explain and just to be.

Words and ideas are very attractive, because they help us to keep a grip on ourselves and the world.  We can explore what is right and wrong, we can explain how things work, we can express ourselves.  Perhaps, above all, it is through them that we maintain our separateness and our individuality.  But as the 13^th century Sufi mystic Rumi puts it:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing

there is a field.  I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other

doesn’t make any sense.”

Chris Dawson

What we focus on expands and grows and any emotion attached to it increases and intensifies.  It’s easy to overload ourselves with negative input by what we notice around us, by what we watch, what we listen to and by what we read. 

It’s not a question of burying our heads in the sand.  It’s good to be aware of the challenges in society and the world.  But also to check the balance occasionally by asking the question, “Why am I watching/reading/listening to this?” 

We’ve just received the Countryfile calendar for 2024.  Like the 2023 calendar it has wonderful wildlife pictures chosen from hundreds sent in by ordinary people.  Like the programme itself, it rejoices in our beautiful countryside.  Profits from the sale of it go towards the BBC Children in Need Appeal – £26 million has been raised by the calendar since 1998.

Like the Children in Need Appeal – which last year helped nearly 460,000 children and young people to overcome the challenges of poverty, family crisis, bereavement and injustice – Countryfile and the calendar are examples of the light shining in the darkness. 

Isn’t that what Advent is about?  Encouraging us to look forward to the light coming into the world and encouraging each of us to shine our light in the darkness.

Chris Dawson

It’s hard to know how to respond to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the war between Russia and Ukraine, the climate crisis and all the other suffering that human beings inflict on each other. 

“Yes…and” is one of the golden rules of improvised drama.  You accept what the other person says and does – that’s the “yes” part of the equation – before you make your response.  Which may go along with, or counter, what has gone before. 

There is a danger that, in our anxiety about the state of the world, we fret about the situation and, perhaps, bury our heads because we feel powerless.  This is where “Yes…and” comes in.  First we can say “yes” to the reality in front of us – in all its brokenness and suffering.

Next comes the “and”.  It is not within our power to change all of this suffering, but we can – in a beautiful phrase I read recently –  “shape our presence before it”.  We can decide how we’ll face it.  And the way in which we face it will ripple out beyond us.

My “and” has been to look for those who seek justice, reconciliation and peace in the Israeli-Palestine conflict.  I recently came across these two groups: Jews for Justice for Palestinians (jfjfp.com) and the Parents Circle – Families Forum (theparentscircle.org) – Jewish and Palestinian families working together, all of whom have lost a family member to the ongoing conflict.  Both groups are impressive.

Chris Dawson

At the end of last week I was suspended from Facebook – for the second time!  I only joined so that I could watch the live-stream of the Sunday morning service.  This morning I appealed.   Having given them some details,  I received an apology and was re-instated .

Apparently I had transgressed “community values”.   Not sure how.  That set me wondering who sets these values – or are they rules?  We’ve seen the rules change, of course.  People banned for inflammatory speech and then allowed back again.

I started to wonder about where most people get their values from in the first place.  Particularly young people.  Family, yes, friends, mates, teachers even, but what about Social Media – X and the rest, not to mention the so-called “influencers” who get paid to tell people what is “in” and what is “out”? 

Then there are the “disruptors”, suggesting through their podcasts and social media an alternative truth.  Some of them attaining a guru like status. Even traditional Christian family values are pressed into service by politicians seeking power.  Whether practised or not.

All this is not new.  Jesus warned us to be wary of false prophets. The Old Testament prophet Micah spoke out when he saw values being distorted.  Of the houses of Jacob and Israel he said, “their heads give judgements for a bribe, its priests teach for hire, its prophets divine for money.”  He also predicted it would lead to disaster.  In their case it did.

Chris Dawson

Elon Musk has recently suggested that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will make work redundant.  That human beings will no longer have to work.  It will all be done for us by sophistically programmed machines.  

Quite some time ago it was predicted that machines would take away the drudgery of routine work and so all of us would have more leisure time.  Certainly, for example, digging holes, loading lorries, recording and storing information have all been made easier.  Communication too.  But I’m not sure that we are any less busy.

The poet Philip Larkin  wrote in his poem Toads, “Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?…. Six days a week it soils/With its sickening poison -/Just for paying a few bills!”    If you feel exploited and unappreciated, work might well feel like Larkin’s toad on your back.  But I’m not sure it needs to.

Work can give purpose, connection and an opportunity to be of help and service. It can give us opportunities to learn and grow.  Not only to learn knowledge and skills but to learn about ourselves and our relationships to other people – and, as priest and poet George Herbert suggests – our relationship to God.  We can even make “drudgery divine”.  And anyone “who sweeps a room, as for thy laws,/makes that and the action fine.”

Chris Dawson

I am the victim and you are the aggressor.

“A large group of us were crowded into the Gestapo hall, and at that moment the circumstances of all our lives were the same.  All of us occupied the same space, the men behind the desk no less than those about to be questioned.  What distinguished each of us was only our inner attitude.”  (Etty Hillesum, concentration camp victim, An Interrupted Life)

“As we are, so is the world.”  (Ramana Maharshi)

You are the aggressor and I am the victim. 

A settler in the Promised Land.  A refugee forced out of the Promised Land.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping.  Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not.” (Jeremiah 31:15)

“Much violence is based on the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not a gift to be shared.” (Henri Nouwen)

“If we could read the secret history of our ‘enemies’ we should find in each person’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding.  I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”  (Helen Keller)

Chris Dawson

“Are we nearly there yet?”  How often has this question come from the back seat of the car.  You’ve only just got on to the motorway and the children want to know if you are nearly at your holiday destination. 

As a fifteen year old I was on the train to London, on my way back to school.  It was one of those old fashioned carriages with a corridor, separate compartments and bench seats.  There were only two of us in the compartment.  A middle aged woman and me.  She suddenly said, “Are you saved?”

A question like that, out of the blue, from someone you don’t know, is a bit of a shock.  Not to mention embarrassing.  Especially to a teenager.  I told her that I went to church and that my father was a vicar.  She suggested that wasn’t enough for me to be saved and added, “Shall we pray about it?”  I think I said yes.

I’m not sure that “being saved” is a one off.  Any more than you can arrive at your holiday destination instantly.  Travel is needed in both cases.  The challenges of “Loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself”, come daily.  Jesus’ life and words are a gift to us.  Reflecting on them and putting them into practice is a lifelong process.

Chris Dawson