Letter from the Master – December 2009

Friday, December 4th, 2009 | Letter from the Master

I remember my first Christmas in my four country parishes in 1986.  We had recently moved from Southampton, where my young daughters had spent their early years. In contrast our home parish was very rural, deep in the north Hampshire countryside.  I took the girls for a walk across a field just after a morning snowstorm.  The earth had mingled with the whiteness to give a dirty, mottled appearance. My youngest daughter, thinking aloud, said ‘Daddy, what’s all this brown stuff?’ She was too young to realise we were walking on the ploughed earth, covered in fallen snow.

For several years this incident came to mind, because it reminded me of something so simple, yet so profound, about Christmas. God, the Church, can feel remote (and irrelevant) to many people, but God was telling us through the first Christmas that he is deeply in touch with us. Jesus was born homeless, in a dirty stable, and soon learnt the hurts and sadness of life. The white purity of God mingled with messy human lives.

As you celebrate Christmas, remember that God in Jesus came to share the difficulties of our lives. But that his own death on the cross was not the end, for he became the Risen Lord, and is alongside you and me in all that we have to face now.

Happy Christmas!

Michael