Quirinius Lives: the Home Office Says “Register!”

Someone in high places wasn't paying attention when their Home Office video was launched on the Third Day of Christmas. It was early in the morning of the 27 December, the first tweet out of the Home Office after wishing everyone a happy Christmas. If you haven't heard, this is the video that tells citizens from the 27 overseas EU countries who want to go on living in the UK after Brexit how to set about applying. "EU citizens and their families will need to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to continue living in the UK after 31 December 2020" it says. It takes 55 seconds to watch.

It's deeply ironic that this video should have been released during the twelve days of Christmas. Only a few days earlier, more than half the nation must have heard St Luke's account of the birth of Jesus read at thousands of nativity plays, crib blessings, Christingles and carol services. In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. In the ancient world you had to fit in with the requirements of a process-driven bureaucracy. Plus ca change. So Joseph and Mary have to make the arduous journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem, she nine months pregnant. They get there only to find there is no room at the inn. You know how the story continues.

So around 3.2 million people will need to register before 2021. That's a lot more form-filling than even dreary Quirinius could have dreamed of. Who doesn't love a good registration? What better excuse for a public holiday? Better still if you can anticipate government coffers swelling with unbudgeted income from it, for many of our EU27 friends will have to pay for the privilege of registering. I don't know if this was entirely clear to them before.

Predictably the video has been greeted with responses ranging from eye-rolling boredom (what did you expect from the Home Office?) through mockery and sarcasm to outright fury. Most striking has been the outrage of many people from EU27 countries who have lived in Britain for decades and thought this was their home. The Guardian quotes one: "You absolute s***! I've lived here 35 years, got a stamp in my passport for indefinite leave to remain in 1985 and now you want me to apply to stay in my own home." This from a Danish citizen who lives in the UK. And this which came up on my own Twitter feed: "Wow. This is making me feel so welcome, after 28 years of life here, making friends, paying taxes, bringing up two wonderful British citizens. Thank you so much for this slap in the face, UK Home Office. Absolutely sickening".

But I've also been struck by the responses of British citizens. "Seeing the impact of this policy on people I know and work with is a wake up call. I feel angry and ashamed" writes one. "I too am ashamed. I feel that I don’t belong here. We are not a civilised nation and the government does not represent anything I believe in" writes another. And this: "Making those who share a citizenship with us register as if they were aliens is quite shocking. Now we describe a few hundred refugees arriving at Dover as a national crisis and debate whether or not we should be rescuing them".

That last remark gets to the heart of the matter. The point about registration, which will not have been lost on Mary and Joseph, is that you are made to feel that your homeland isn't your own any more. It's been taken over by others, occupied by people who think they can control you by insisting that you comply with their requirements. My Jewish mother and her family knew all about this in Germany in the 1930s under the Nazis, and the creeping subjugation of the Jewish community by what might have seemed at first to be harmless bureaucratic processes of "registration". In Roman-occupied Judea, registration was a device to keep a potentially restless population in its place. (Never mind that there's some historical difficulty about Luke's account of this event - what we do know about Quirinius is that he was appointed as Imperial legate early in the first century precisely to oversee an exercise of this kind, even though the dates don't fit Luke's chronology. The nativity story still makes a powerful point about the two kinds of authority that are always at work in the world and confronting each other - human and divine, or we might say, the politics of God and the politics of human beings. Or maybe justification by faith or registration.)

I tweeted about this yesterday: "Like the registration when Quirinius was governor of Syria. It reminded the Holy Family that they lived in an occupied land. Precisely how Brexit Britain now is for all true Europeans, whether from the UK or an EU27country". That didn't please one of my followers who wanted to know in what sense the UK today is like first century Roman-occupied Judea. Who is doing the occupying he asked? "Our worst selves" I replied. We are doing this to ourselves and one another. Somewhere, out of the shadow side of our nation has come this self-destructive instinct to "take back control" in ways that distance us, even cut us off from the neighbour we are commanded to love. For reasons I don't pretend to understand, we have come to a time in our history when demons of suspicion, resentment and hostility are being unleashed in our “othering” of those who only wish us well. In terms of our collective national psyche, a spirit is abroad that threatens a healthy sense of our identity, who we are and who we aspire to be as good human beings. This is the occupying power. And it seems to have us in its thrall.

This may seem strong language. Perhaps I'm more coloured than I should be by my family's experience of the 1930s. But how could I not be? But for Britain's welcome to Jewish refugees at that time, my mother would not have survived the Holocaust and I wouldn't be here now. I can feel viscerally the effect of becoming like an exile in my own country, ill at ease, sorry, ashamed. This is not the kind, just, generous, fair-minded nation I thought I lived in. At least, not in this respect. I think many of the Windrush generation will say the same. It's not easy to sing the Lord's song in this strange land.

It's still Christmas. We are still celebrating the wonderful events that followed Quirinius' (or whoever's) registration. Incarnation, God's coming among us as a vulnerable holy human Child is wisdom's answer to the follies of mortals. The Infant of Bethlehem brings hope to our world and promises to deliver us from this occupation we are experiencing by our worst selves. I was heartened by a positive reply to my despondent Quirinius tweet. "I too sometimes feel that it isn’t my country any longer. Then I speak to one or more of the many wonderful people I know, and I am reminded that recovery is both possible and necessary."

We look into one another's faces and glimpse reflected there what we see when we look into the face of God’s Incarnate Son. What we see is nothing less than grace and truth. So my prayer is that we shall all be guided by divine grace and truth into better days in the new year that is dawning. And that grace and truth may free us from all that demeans human life by teaching us to look on our neighbours not as strangers but as friends whom we love with something like the love with which God loves each of us.

On Not Feeling God: thoughts on a saying of Sister Wendy Beckett

Sister Wendy Beckett has died. She was a remarkable woman. Her obituary in the Guardian paid tribute to her insight into great art and her ability to excite and inspire a television audience. Perhaps no one was more surprised than she was that a catholic nun could become such a TV success.

The obituarist ends with a striking reference to her understanding of religious experience. Her views on God were challenging. When asked once what she felt about God, she replied, sharply: “I don’t think anyone can feel God. Those who believe in him most are most aware of his non-feelability, as it were. God is such a total mystery. My heart sinks when the word God is bandied around glibly.”

I put that quote out on social media and was surprised how much interest it aroused. A lot of people endorsed it and recirculated it. Clearly Sister Wendy spoke for them in some important way. And the more I thought about it, the more I sensed that she was articulating my own thoughts too. I can’t speak for anyone else. But let me try to think aloud about why her words seem not only accurate but important.

I’m one of those people who is easily moved to tears, whether it’s a film I’m watching, a poem I’m reading or a piece of music I’m listening to. And yes, by singing carols at Christmas and gazing into the crib. I’m grateful for the capacity to feel and to be moved: I understand what the desert fathers meant when they spoke about “the gift of tears”. 

And yet, I don’t altogether trust my emotional responses. I don’t mean the fact of them, rather, what they mean. Just because I feel a lump in the throat during the final scene of my favourite film Brief Encounter, it doesn’t follow that my response is especially deep or life-changing. It could be sentimental or nostalgic, none the worse for that perhaps but not to be invested with profound significance. Feelings and moods are very transient. We shouldn’t assign more meaning to them than they deserve. The actor Simon Callow once said, “the important thing is not to feel deeply but to feel accurately”. 

In particular, I’m wary of assigning divine significance to my emotions. Of course, God is as present in my emotional life as he is to every other aspect of my being: he is in my thoughts, my memories, my actions, my instincts and my emotions. He is as much in my heart as in my head, as much in my feeling as in my thinking and doing. How could it be otherwise if God truly is the ground of all our being? 

But I’m increasingly reticent about claiming to experience “the divine” in some direct, extraordinary way. It’s true that numinous places can move me profoundly, places that seem to speak of the Mysterium Tremens et Fascinans, as Rudolph Otto described it in his famous book The Idea of the Holy. In the past few months I’ve been touched in that way by the Ancient Greek site at Delphi, by praying quietly in Hexham Abbey one morning, by listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, hearing my wife read a poem by R.S. Thomas, and by singing “Away in a Manger” with my grandchildren at the Christingle Service. These have all been, for me, religious experiences. Each has been a gift in its own way. You will I’m sure be able to speak in a similar way about the experiences that you will want to describe as “religious”. 

But far from leading me to claim that I’m somehow “feeling the presence of God”, I think I want to acknowledge how much more mysterious God seems to be precisely on account of these experiences and others like them. If God is, as theologians say, immanent within our world of experience, then I’d be wrong to privilege one kind of experience as somehow more religious than any other. The real test of how authentic my faith is has to be how far I’m able to speak about God as present within my ordinary, everyday experience, and especially  within those experiences that are difficult or baffling or painful. For if I can’t give some account of where God is to be found in the shadow side of my life, then it’s questionable whether I’ve come to understand God as embracing the whole of who I am, the dark, the light and all the greyscale in between. To “feel after God and find him” is indeed the goal of human existence as St Paul said on the Areopagus (Acts 17). But for me, that’s a rather different thing from “feeling him” directly. 

As a Christian, I was shaped in my teenage years by evangelicalism. I owe it a tremendous amount and am glad to acknowledge that debt. But as I look back, I realise that it was too definite about God’s presence and how a born-again soul should expect to experience it, too black-and-white about the endless complexities of human life. I’m learning - and I think this is wisdom - that trusting my experience is important, and that the essence of a healthy spirituality is to be able to reflect on it in wholesome ways. But I’m also learning that when we are in the presence, as we always are, of the profoundest mystery of life, which is what God ultimately is, then my experience is only an indicator of my personal response at the time, not some clue to the riddle of the universe. I might once have claimed such a thing in the face of goodness, truth or beauty. But I’m more reticent now. Practising “reserve” feels important.

Someone asked me today what I made of the Incarnation and whether beholding God’s grace and truth in the face of the Word made flesh didn’t open a door to “feeling God” in our own  sensory experience. I replied: For me, what I *feel* when beholding God’s grace & truth in the Incarnation is adoration, gladness, contrition & love. That’s a more reliable (& humble) statement than anything I could say about “feeling God”, though it’s incontestably true to say we believe he is fully present. That may seem a trifle tentative. But I think it’s important only to speak of what we know. The thing about Mystery is that it’s essentially unknowable in its fullness. Which is why, when Moses found himself in its presence at the burning bush, he could only be silent and adore. Could it be that learn this best from art, poetry and literature with their capacity to help us grasp symbolism and metaphor, “tell it slant” as Emily Dickinson said in one of her poems? 

Which is why Wendy Beckett speaks for me. And yes, my heart sinks too when the word God is bandied about glibly as I’m afraid it so often is by people who should know better. I’m ill at ease with the kind of talk that pretends to know what God is doing in the world and in the church when my experience tells me that the truth is altogether more mysterious, and more wonderful, than I can ever glimpse. This God who “plants his footsteps on the sea and rides upon the storm” is not one who is susceptible to being described or understood by my feeble sense. As C.S. Lewis put it, Aslan is not a tame lion. 

What I must learn to do is trust him for his grace. That means walking by faith, not by sight and not by feeling. Religion is a journey “towards the unknown region” in Walt Whitman’s phrase. Let’s not tame it by speaking too glibly about our experience of God, and thereby rob it of all that makes it infinitely beautiful, adventuresome and life-giving. Let’s give ourselves to this Mystery in which we live and move and have our being, and to the life of contemplation and action to which Love Incarnate calls us.

Something The Queen Said: Thoughts on Christmas Faith and Life

As I listened to The Queen on Christmas Day, a couple of sentences stood out for me. The Christmas story retains its appeal since it doesn’t provide theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life. Instead it’s about the birth of a child and the hope that birth two thousand years ago brought to the world.

In old age, Her Majesty has been increasingly clear with us all about the central place Christianity occupies in her life. It’s heartening to hear her speak about the power her Christian faith has had throughout her long life to motivate, inspire and give meaning. 

But this statement I’ve highlighted goes beyond personal testimony to offer a really important insight about how religious faith does and doesn’t function in human life. The temptation is to look to faith to explain things, probe the complex mysteries of existence, come up with answers to all that baffles and bewilders us in our human experience. 

Once upon a time we spoke of a “God of the gaps”, the deity whose existence provided accounts of phenomena that had so far eluded human explanation. Literal readings of the Bible provided ready resources for explaining the nature of the cosmos, the origins of life, the phenomenon of humanity, and the fact of suffering and pain. For many people, they still do, as we can see in the conservative evangelical right of North America for whom the scriptures provide the infallible answer to every question posed by science, ethics and faith.

The urge to explain extended to the arguments for the existence of God himself. I was taught philosophy at Oxford by Anthony Kenny who later became Master of Balliol which was my college. Kenny had trained and practised as a catholic priest but left the priesthood on account of his questioning the intellectual basis of dogmatic religion. His lectures on the arguments for the existence of God comprehensively dismantled one by one the philosophical bases of the classical “Five Ways”. Yet he was careful to say that this didn’t mean that God did not exist. You could no more prove his non-existence than his existence. Whatever affirmation you made about God essentially came down to faith, not logic or evidence. To speak of “explanation”, you could say, was to commit a “category mistake”. Rational explanation and religious faith belong to different “language games”.

I’ve spent a lifetime getting to know the wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible. I’ve taught it to theology students and preached it to Sunday morning congregations. Above all, I’ve found that it’s immeasurably enriched my personal understanding of faith and the human condition. I’ve learned how agnostic books like Job and Ecclesiastes are when it comes to explaining the riddles of the world and of my own self. Whereas conventional religion likes binaries and causal explanations: right and wrong, good and evil, light and dark, reward and punishment, these writings probe deeper beneath the surface of things. They seem to discern that complexity will not be reduced to a simplistic “yes” or “no”. On the contrary. It takes faith to live with the reality of suffering (Job) or with a sense of ennui or meaninglessness (Ecclesiastes). These texts do not offer “solutions”, “theoretical explanations for the puzzles of life” to quote Her Majesty. It’s faith, not rational thought, that enables us to live with these great unanswered questions. “The fear of the Lord, that is wisdom” says Job.

Theologians calls the exploration of faith in the light of the problems of suffering and meaning theodicy. Theodicy can’t offer watertight explanations, and doesn’t try - at least, not any more. What it does is to explore ways in which faith can be understood and presented intelligently in precisely the kind of world we all know we live in, full of paradox and contradiction. This is necessary because for many, it’s questions of suffering and meaning that are a major obstacle to belief. “How can a God of love exist in a world that is so cruel and pain-ridden?” We aren’t being true to our own faith if we don’t feel the force of this question. Theodicy can help sensitise our faith to such questioning, help us articulate it in ways that place suffering and questions about meaning at the centre where they belong, rather than at the margins. 

Christmas gives us a glimpse of this way of believing. We hear afresh the story of the Holy Child of Bethlehem, we sing carols of love and praise, we gaze with wonder into his crib and are perhaps surprised to find ourselves profoundly moved by this image of a birth that brings such a joy and such a hope. This is to say that the the instinct of Christmas faith is contemplative. We look as if through an open door into a world that for a brief moment grants a vision of what life could become. We find ourselves gazing on a transformed world and a transfigured life. “Peace on earth, good will to all people!” we sing in tune with the angels. If only it were true! we say longingly to ourselves. 

The Christmas story itself embraces this longing for a world healed of its wrongs. “No room at the inn” speaks of exclusion and hardship. The flight into Egypt presents the Holy Family as exiles seeking asylum in a strange land. Herod’s massacre of the innocent children depicts the suffering of innocent victims in the most terrible way possible. “The holly bears a berry as red as any blood”, indeed. Theodicy is at the very heart of our Christmas story and the carols we love to sing.

And yet contemplative faith intuits that the greatest mystery in the universe is not suffering but love. It’s love that defies all explanation, other than that this is simply how God is in himself. This is what we understand in a life-changing way is the deepest truth of Christmas. St Francis understood this, which is why he set up the first Christmas Crib and invited people to bring to it their heart’s love. Christmas becomes real for each of us as we give ourselves to this rapturous vision, and it becomes real for our world, by anticipation, as we each live out the hope that is set before us in ways that make a difference to the lives of others, whether it’s in politics, peace-making or the pursuit of social justice. As the medieval spiritual guides understood so well, holy contemplation always leads to good action. And that’s what changes things. 

The traditional Gospel reading on Christmas Day says it all. “And we beheld his glory, glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1.14). We beheld. This is what the Incarnation invites us to do: to look, to see, to behold. For as we gaze into the face of the Love that makes its dwelling among us, as we are drawn into the grace and truth we see there, we instinctively understand that here is the source of all that is life-changing. Those sterile causal explanations we once hankered after don’t belong here, have no relevance to this vision of God. The Queen was right about that. What matters is leaning to become contemplatively wise, discovering how this way of life becomes a source of inspiration and strength as we try to do God’s work in the world.

When religious faith comes of age and renounces its need to explain, turns instead to contemplation, and then acts on what it has glimpsed, it achieves a state of wisdom which is both life-changing and brings hope to the world.

No Crying He Makes

Was ever a Christmas carol so maligned?

I'm thinking of Away in a Manger. At this time of year there's always a steady stream of people, mostly carolled-out clergy, who share their grumpiness about this sweet, innocent and much-loved carol. Special opprobrium is reserved for the middle stanza:

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes.

Here, for example, is a blog I read over the weekend. What a load of nonsense is written in some Christmas carols. Of course, many are excellent. But along with the gold there is a lot of dross. Take the line in 'Away in a manger' which asserts boldly: 'Little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes'. Really? On what basis is that stated? It's certainly not in the Bible. The author then turns his wrath on I Saw Three Ships before majoring on We Three Kings of Orient Are. What have they done to deserve it?

It's a depressing take on a familiar aspect of Christmas, this proscribing of what generations of children and adults have loved singing and found to be strangely heartwarming. So let's think about no crying he makes. The usual criticism is that the infant Jesus would hardly be a normal (or "real") human child if he did not cry. So the line questions (it's alleged) whether this nativity would be a true taking of our humanity into God. Moreover, it hints that goodness consists in being seen but not heard, as in another popular and sometimes maligned hymn Once in Royal David's City where the author writes: Christian children all must be, mild, obedient, good as he.

I find this logic faintly absurd. For one thing, every parent knows that all but the most distressed children do, from time to time, wake up but do not cry. Especially is this likely when his or her mother is at hand to offer comfort, reassurance and nourishment. So in the picture language of the carol, the Holy Child lying in tranquility is emtirely consistent with what we know about the behaviour of our own children in their infancy. But the image takes us beyond this. It seems to say to us that this Child knows himself to be in a completely safe place. He is in loving communion with his parents, with his guests, with the animals. His little world is one where the song of the angels is already being fulfilled, because here, in this intimate circle of the nativity scene, there is “peace on earth, goodwill to all people”.

Let’s pursue what this no crying represents in the way the Christmas story has been told down the centuries. It echoes a very long "apophatic" tradition that sees in the incarnation a mystery so profound that silence is the only way of doing it justice. So almost universally, the old master paintings of the Nativity depict a scene full of a peaceful, restful, quietness. Angels and shepherds, and often magi as well, revere the new-born King in a carefully composed atmosphere of stillness. Often, the Child is depicted as asleep, but if he is awake, he is gazing peacefully on his parents, or the shepherds, or the animals among whom he is born. “No crying he makes!” And even when shepherds journey and angels hover, their movements are gentle as befits this great mystery. There is no dissonant commotion or harsh noise to shatter the restfulness, the serenity of the scene. At the crib, human hearts are stilled. We are silenced because no words could do justice to the glory we behold.

In terms of visual art, these nativity scenes probably go back to St Francis who is credited as having created the first Christmas crib as a kind of icon to inspire the devotion of the faithful. But the tradition that links incarnation with silence goes back even further. The key text is in the Wisdom of Solomon (18.14-15): For while gentle silence enveloped all things, and night in its swift course was now half-gone, your all-powerful word leaped from heaven, from the royal throne into the midst of a land that was doomed. The early fathers loved that saying. In the development of the liturgy, it was quoted, almost word for word, in one of the antiphons for Christmas morning. In wisdom literature, the "word" was the logos or mind of God, so it was only a short step to read back into it the Christian meaning of incarnation, the "word" or "wisdom" of God becoming enfleshed in the person of the Child born at Bethlehem.

We could almost say, in the imagery of the carol, that the little Lord Jesus is awake yet silent in the face of the mystery of his own incarnation. It's the kind of thought you find in the poetry of Thomas Traherne who imagines a new-born child wondering with joy at the realisation of being alive and inheriting the world. Who's to say that new-born babies don't experience this kind of wonderment at suddenly finding themselves outside the womb and gazing at a loving mother's face? That at least is the direction taken by psychoanalytic writers who regard the bond of love established between a mother and her child as determinative for the whole of human life.  Or we could think of Thomas Hardy’s poem The Oxen where he imagines the ox and ass kneeling in front of the manger as midnight strikes on Christmas Eve. Are these poetic images "biblical"? Hardly, if you're looking for texts to justify them explicitly. But are they biblical in the more profound sense of being completely true to what the scriptures want us to hear, understand and cherish? Undoubtedly!

So it's not surprising that we find this gentle silence that enveloped all things referenced in our Christmas hymns and carols. Think of these well-known, oft-sung examples:

The world in solemn stillness lay
to hear the angels sing.

How silently, how silently
the wondrous gift is given!

Silent night, holy night...

Of course, silence is not the only Nativity motif. Just as important in the spirituality of Christmas are the themes of carolling, exultant celebration, joyous music-making, heaven and earth joined in praise of the God who comes among us. Nor should we neglect the "noise" and pain of the Nativity story: that it happened in a cave because there was no room at the inn; Herod's massacre of the innocent children, the Holy Family's flight into Egypt. These represent some of the realities of the suffering world into which Jesus was born. The Coventry Carol is just one medieval example that recognises the painful realities into which the Infant comes. It's important that we don't repesent the mystical silence of the Nativity as some kind of escape from the real world (a perennial Christmas temptation, whether in liturgy, consumerism or partying).

But it's also important not to worry away at the detail of the poetry and art that adorn the Christmas message. To read Away in a Manger and object to its imagery is to read poetry as if it were cold prose, and confuse symbolic language with material fact. That's the trouble with a lot of religion today: it has lost touched with the imagination because it has forgotten the kind of language it's handling. So what's required is not to demythologise our Christmas carols but to re-enchant them, or rather, allow them to re-enchant us. In this respect, children seem often to be closer to the truth of Christmas than adults, to grasping the essentially symbolic, metaphorical, poetic character of religious language. Is this one of the reasons that Jesus spoke about becoming like little children if we are to enter the kingdom of God? And could our children and grandchildren help us celebrate a more childlike Christmas if only we paid attention?

Maybe as we grow older, we become more relaxed with the symbolic register of Christmas language. Perhaps that's because our conception of "truth" is enlarged as we reflect on what life has meant for us, and we realise that "truth" is a far bigger thing than we once dreamed. Perhaps the memories of past Christmases become stronger with age, especially those of our own childhood or our children's. Once, decades ago, I sang Away in a Manger at a funeral on Christmas Eve. I've never forgotten how poignant it was, the contrast between infancy and old age, gift and loss, happiness and grief. Above all, the carol spoke of the Christian hope we glimpse in the Christ Child:

Be near me Lord Jesus; I ask thee to stay
close by me for ever, and love me I pray.
Bless all the dear children in thy tender care,
and fit us for heaven to live with thee there.

It was one of the most moving funerals I can remember. Even Victorian poetry can work miracles. So if I find myself on my deathbed one Christmas time, I'd love it if some little children could come and sing Away in a Manger for me. I would try to join in if I could. It would be immensely comforting. It would bring happiness and hope. But as for no crying he makes, I can't promise I myself would get through it without shedding a tear or two.

**Image: the east window of St Cuthbert's, Haydon Bridge by Charles Kempe (1837-1907), created at around the time "Away in a Manger" was written.

A Christmas Letter to my Grandchildren

Dear Isaac, dear Madeleine, dear Gabriel,

You won't understand this letter for a long time to come. But I wanted to write it for you on Christmas Eve as we gather once more to celebrate together. You have brought your parents and grandparents such joy. As Christmas comes, we feel that happiness in a special way. Thank you.

Christmas is a time for children, they say. And so it is. Children of every age from nought to a hundred. As we celebrate the Birth Day of the Holy Child, how could our thoughts not turn to children everywhere? The light that shines out of the manger at Bethlehem lights up every human child. So the first thing to say is, Happy Christmas. And even if two out of the three of you are still too little to understand all this Christmas excitement, you are always right at the heart of our family celebrations. To have you in our midst at Christmas reminds us of the Holy Family, and the tenderness that touches us very deeply when young and old truly love one another. 

One of the Christmas carols you'll sing one day says: "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight". It's about Bethlehem, the place where Jesus was born. And more than ever this year, I think, we shall bring our hopes and fears to the Christmas crib where he lies, this little tiny Child who brings light into our world. Your parents have sometimes talked about the kind of world they have brought you into, how broken it is, how uncertain, how full of violence and hatred and fear. And yet they still chose to do this thing, take forward in you the next generation of the human family. Just like Mary. Even she could not love you more than your parents do. And for as long as we and they are alive, we shall do everything we possibly can to make sure that you grow up safely and are kept from harm. 

You will have to learn fear soon enough. We all do - it's part of being alive. But not too early, not before you are ready. Our hearts go out to children whose earliest memories are of being afraid, because they are born in places of terrible conflict, or go hungry, or have no secure home, or because other people whom they trusted to look after them turned out to be cruel and abusive instead. All three of you belong to loving families. You are lucky to live in a country that compared to many others is free and safe, where your life will be cherished and respected and honoured. 

At Christmas we long for our hopes to be realised - our hopes for a kinder, more peaceful world, our hopes for a society in which everyone is treated fairly, our hopes that we might live not out of fear but out of love. When we gaze at the light that shines out of the crib and the holy intimacy between Mary, Joseph and the Infant Jesus, we believe it could happen, we find ourselves imagining that it's not impossible that it might come true at last. And that's one of the gifts that children like you can bring to us grown ups. You can help us to be happy and to hope again, stop us from being cynical about life, show us to how Incarnation is always happening because God is always at work in the world that he loves so much. "O Holy Child of Bethlehem.....be born in us today."

As a child I used to think that Christmas Eve was the most magical day of the year. There was so much to look forward to, so much that would be revealed the next day. I was thinking mainly of unwrapping presents and enjoying lots of nice food and drink - in our family, we didn't go to church though we sang carols at school and took part in nativity plays so I had some inkling about this great Birth Day we were honouring. Whatever Christmas was about, I believed it had to matter. I used to imagine that there could be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Christmas tree in the window, all lit up with fairy lights for passers by outside to enjoy as much as us. I think it was on Christmas Eve as the sun began to sink in the western sky that I became aware at a very early age of how hope and expectancy can be very powerful forces for good in our lives. Indeed, maybe to have something to look forward to is what keeps us alive at all. What if every day of the year could be like Christmas Eve? 

On this Christmas Eve, our thoughts turn not just to tomorrow but all that lies beyond. "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." We think back to Christmasses past because having hope means being able to see how our lives have been shaped and formed from one year to the next. Two years ago there was only one of you. Last year there were two and this year there are three. How wonderful that is! Who knows what you will become as you grow up and find your own place in the world? 

But what I hope and pray for you all is that in your own way, each of you will make a difference in this world. It's hard to say this without sounding a bit grandiose, but I really do pray that you will come to stand up for what is right and true, come to love the good, the beautiful and the just. I pray that you will become people of integrity and honour. I pray that you will flourish in whatever you do, and that you will be happy and fulfilled. On days like this, I wish I could live for two hundred years so that I could walk with you on your life paths and know what will become of you. 

Such longings and dreams to have for little children! For now, you are innocent of all these big words. But I wouldn't be your real Opa if I didn't have those hopes and prayers for you. At the Christmas crib, all our longings are gathered up in this Child who is the everlasting sign of Love for us, for all who came before us and all who will come after us. So I write this out of my deepest love for you, and in thankfulness for the joy you bring to our family. Happy Christmas to all three of you, my beloved grandchildren. God bless you always.

With love

Opa