Knitting the universe new

The nativity scene beside the fire is a present from our friend Gwen, knitted by her 74-year-old mum. Shepherds, wise men, Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, sheep – each stitch created with love. A lovely, lasting gift.

Our Celtic ancestors saw Christmas – God present in one particular child – as a symbol of God’s close involvement in the whole of creation. I imagine God, sitting in a fireside rocking chair like a contented grandmother, flying fingers knitting the cosmos.

Our nativity scene is undeniably cute, but we tend to overdo the cuteness at Christmas, with the cards and the bright-faced kids recreating Bethlehem in the school hall. Someone could quite legitimately point at our sentimentality and exclaim ‘What possible relevance has this kitsch cuteness in a broken world?’  A world where, entrusted with pins and wool, we too often knit chaos.

What does our sweet, knitted nativity have to say to people facing hardship, poverty, homelessness, exile, stigma, oppression?

But the story of the birth of Jesus concerns a child born in poverty, in an occupied state; born with the stigma of illegitimacy; born to be smuggled abroad by his parents, long migrant miles to Egypt to escape a massacre; born to be executed as a young man by those who felt threatened by his palpable goodness.

Christmas is not cute. Christmas reminds us of God’s presence with us not just in the joy of life, but also in its mis-knitted awfulness.

Each year we try to knit December 25^th, following the pattern for ‘The Perfect Christmas.’ We knit into our lives presents and cards, turkey and trimmings (or the vegetarian option), mulled wine and cake, family and church.

But what about people for whom Christmas is nothing but a sad agony of loneliness? And what about those (most of us, perhaps) for whom Christmas Day is an anti-climax, and fails to deliver our expectations?

What is at the heart of our Christmas? A fulfilling joy rising within us, or an emptiness which all our frantic knitting cannot fill?

But that’s another question: this story of a God who loves us, and comes among us in Jesus to bring us wholeness and healing – is it simply a story we have knitted over the generations, just as other cultures have knitted their stories, to give us meaning? Or do these stories – and particularly the Christian story – reflect something real?

I think we will never find the answer to that question unless we first of all discover what it is to be unravelled, unknitted, for only then are we open to God.

My friend Colin from Buckie was asked to read a Christmas poem at a concert this year. Someone suggested T. S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, a monologue put in the mouth of one of the Wise Men by the poet, describing the journey to the manger and its imagined aftermath.

‘I don’t think I’ll read that one,’ Colin decided. ‘The ending is too dark.’

The Magus describes the experience of being present at the birth in the stable. It ‘was  hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’ Afterwards, he adds, the Magi returned home, but were ‘no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods.’ And he finishes morosely ‘I should be glad of another death.’

The Wise Man found himself unravelling in the presence of the Christ child. He recognised that the birth was something so revolutionary, so game-changing that he could never look at life, pleasure, religion in the same way again.

And yet (perhaps reflecting a stage in the poet’s faith journey) he was not ready, or willing to commit to the implications of what he had seen, and so the only escape was death.

Did he, like Eliot, move on? Did he realise that the ‘death’ of bidding farewell to the old story which had hitherto sustained him was essential if he was to be born into a greater story?

‘Over again I feel thy finger and find thee,’ says another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins after his own unravelling.

That finger reaches into the manger as our soul lies content, conscious of new life and new purpose surging within us. We open our eyes and look up into the attentive faces of Mother Spirit and Father God.

And once again God hands us a pair of needles and we knit our futures, but this time we know that the pattern lives within us. We no longer attempt to knit a perfect Christmas, or success and fulfilment for self and family. Instead we knit as Jesus knitted, and we suddenly realise that in our hearts Christmas has come.

For we are partners with the Father, who is patiently knitting the universe new.

Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 24 December 2015

A rant about Christmas

Time for a rant about Christmas! I remember about 45 years ago taking part in a debate at school on the motion ‘that Christmas is over-commercialised.’ I can’t remember the details, but I think the motion was carried.

I still have concerns about the way we celebrate Christmas. Perhaps I’m a grumpy old curmudgeon, but it seems almost as if a collective insanity grips us at this time of year. The shops pile high their seasonal wares, cram their web-pages with alluring offers, run schmaltzy ads, calm us down and soften us up with seasonal music – and we’re off again, reaching for our plastic and spending money we can ill afford on things no-one really needs.

The advertisers know of our longing for the lost magic and wonder of childhood, and our feelings of love for others, and suggest that through ‘stuff’ we will rekindle the wonder and bring joy to those close to us.

And so we spend, despite the fact that we know perfectly well on our days of greatest clarity that ‘stuff’ alone doesn’t bring happiness, and will never create the ‘perfect Christmas.’ And despite our awareness that for the majority of old people and folk living alone, Christmas is the loneliest, most depressing time of year, since joy is found in love and in human contact.

So can I suggest that this year, we seek a simpler Christmas, focussed more on relationships, less on ‘things?’ 

I’m also aware of the disaster and death which has smitten the world this year as every year. If the world were a village, and we knew that the folk just down the road, in Syria Avenue, say, were facing torture and persecution, and that the folk over the fence in Egypt Crescent had been bereaved in a terrorist attack I hope that we would be standing with them in their pain, and that our celebrations would be muted.

But in fact though we nod in the direction of those who suffer at this time of year, too often the lights shine on, the music blares out, the partying continues. I imagine homeless people, standing numb and silent, watching through the windows at the festivities in the warm front room.

Yet none of us is an island. The whole universe exploded from a tiny speck of matter breathed on by God. We all united, we are all one. It is surely unseemly that a few of us should party, while the many suffer,

As Christians, we invite the whole world to celebrate Christmas – but a gentler, wiser, more wondrous Christmas as all of us, rich or poor, joyful or sorrowing turn to focus on the birth of Jesus Christ.

Supremely irrelevant to our fractured world, some would say. No! Because in Jesus God entered God’s universe to heal and transform it from the inside out, to restore the lost joy we glimpsed in our childhood, the joy we have been pursuing ever since.

We believe that it is when we welcome Jesus, the God-given Christmas gift that again we find (or are found by) that joy.

I believe Jesus heals our own inner dislocation. Jesus shows us that we are loved and lovely; that we have been deluded by our false expectations of ourselves, and by other people’s expectations of us; that we can abandon our frantic efforts to make ourselves worthy, esteemed and happy. Jesus Christ loves us. Jesus heals the brokenness within us and sets us free to discover and live out who we really are.

Where Jesus is welcomed, he heals our world’s divisions on grounds of race and gender, religion and politics and binds us together as God’s holy family.

Jesus was born to journey through death. And on the cross where he died, his arms stretched out wide enough to embrace all our personal pain (no darkness evades the reach of those fingers) and all the world’s brokenness, and in himself he redeemed and healed and made one what had been fractured in an infinity of broken pieces.

And now, as we trust God and seek to be agents of healing we experience true joy and freedom. Though pain still overshadows us at time, we believe that the ultimate fruit of Jesus’ death and resurrection will be a healed universe, at one, in peace.

This universe of healing is God’s gift in Jesus. It is quite simply the most wonderful gift in the world. We are changed from the inside out as we find the gift given in the manger of our hearts. I think if we understand that, our Christmas will be quieter, gentler, more loving more joyful.

And all of us who truly know this are God’s Christmas gift, ambassadors of the Healer in a broken world.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 19th November 2015)