Are you dreading Christmas?
ByThis carol always brings me back to my childhood Christmas feelings – nostalgia for something that isn’t there any longer, yet the hope that it will come again. I love to listen to it whilst I’m baking the Christmas Cake or making mince pies.Yet I am only too aware that Christmas is a very difficult time of year for many people, and this year, it seems like it will be especially hard for some people. I know of several friends who have lost close family members too young, this year, and it is hard for them to have a sense of joy as they approach the festivities. Other people are suffering financially, having lost jobs or having pays cuts. Others have experienced relationship breakdown and are heartbroken or full of anger. Others are losing themselves in addiction, or watching the ones they love loose themselves. Others are suffering from ill-health, or nursing family members who are sick.
When I have been facing Christmases when I have been suffering in someway, I have found it hard to enter into the partying and the “festivities”, but what has deepened for me over the years, is the strength of the message of Christmas. The sense of birth, possibility , humility. Luckily, this has got stronger for me as my spiritual connection has deepened.
The priest in our Parish Church, “came out” 2 years ago and confessed that he had had a secret obsession for several years, in that he collects cribs! He has hundreds from all over the world – Africa, Asia, all parts of Europe, North and South America, everywhere. Since he made his confession, he now shares them with the community on the 3rd Sunday advent. People come from far and wide to see them. It really is an amazing and moving sight. There are very ornate ones, and very simple ones, one with regional differences, different facial features. The one common thing is the baby at the centre. The smallest, most vulnerable member of the group being the centre of all the adults, and the Kings.
The crib which always moves me the most is one from Peru, made from clay, by a prisoner. It is just of the Mary, Joseph and Jesus – with Jesus, held so tenderly by his mother and the two of them enveloped in the protection of his father.
My beliefs in terms of organised religion are not always clear to me!! I was raised a Methodist. For years I went either nowhere or to various meditation groups and for the last four years I have been going to Catholic Mass very regularly, which I love. I love the symbolism, the marking of the seasons, the sense of tradition and community. But mostly I love the simplicity at the core of the message. Christmas means much more to me now, even though I often spend it very quietly, and with less and less of the trappings that I used to associate with it.
The crib from Peru, I talked of above, really sums it up for me – the love and protection, which is there, even when we are at our most vulnerable, if only we can feel it. It is there if you sit with the peace of the crib. The hopes, the new life, the love.
How can you get to the simplicity of the crib this Christmas?
What will give your family and loved ones the sense of love and protection that the crib offers? It’s not through material things, it’s through your presence. Sit with your loved ones, talk to them, listen to them. Laugh with them, cry with them. Bring the ones who are missing there with you all in love. Talk about them. Lay a place for them at the dinner table. If everything around you seems so bleak, or you have no-one to share this with, do if for yourself. Feel yourself as the child, held in invisible hands and protected by invisible arms. Find the tiny spark in you , that gives you the hope of new life, and do whatever you can to fan the flame of that spark.
