December Letter
“Going Home for Christmas”
Many people who live away from their original family home will be returning at Christmas, students coming back home, newly weds returning to mum and dad; it’s a time when scattered families tend to get together. There is something of this in the Christmas story. Joseph and his pregnant fiancée Mary leave their home in Nazareth to travel to Joseph’s ancestral home, Bethlehem. However the reason for this journey is not that they were draw by family ties, rather it is brought about by the harsh reality of politics and finance, for the Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus, had issued a decree for a census for presumably for tax purposes. So Joseph and Mary are caught up in a mass migration and Jesus ends up being born in a stable because there is “no room in the inn”.
I am very aware whilst writing this years Christmas letter that many of you may well find yourselves caught up in the increasingly harsh economic climate which seems to be descending upon the world. For years we have been encouraged to live on credit and spend money we do not in fact have and now, like a house built of a pack of cards, the edifice seems to be collapsing. There are gloomy predictions of recession next year and apparently little hope that things will get better quickly. I wonder what will come out of all this. I know what I hope will come out of it – a return to a more honest and just society, one that has learned that in the end materialism and greed do not actually satisfy the deepest longings of the human heart.
Peter Joyce, one of our Readers, told an amusing but poignant story in his sermon last Sunday which I would like to quote – “An English teach asked her class to write an essay on what they would do if they had a million pounds. John, one of the children, handed in a blank sheet of paper. ‘John!’ yelled the teacher, ‘you’ve done nothing, why?’ ‘Because if I had a million pounds, that’s exactly what I would do’, replied John”. Doing nothing is not good for us there needs to be an element of struggle if we are to develop as human beings. It starts when as very small children we survive the appalling disappointment that mum is not available to deal with our needs and demands at the instant they arise. Tragically the financial systems have encouraged fiscal immaturity by telling us we can have what ever we want when we want it.
The Christmas story is of a journey away from home and the birth of hope in adversity. The other day I was talking to a young woman from Australia who moved to England last year. I asked her what had brought her to this country. She told me that in Australia she was under enormous pressure from her parents to succeed academically, they had come from difficult circumstance and moved to a new country in the hope of a better life; they wanted her to have the opportunities denied to them. “I came to England to get away from my parents. I have spent all my life allowing other people to define who I am and I really need to find my own identity. When I was a teenager I could have rebelled but I didn’t I became anxious instead”. She told me of a recent phone call to her mother back in Australia where mother had become very angry because she was not intending to go home for Christmas. “I didn’t do what I normally do”, she told me, “that is capitulate; I told her that her anger was unreasonable”.
Jesus told Nicodemus a leading Jew who visited him one night, “you must be born again”. Jesus was telling him that natural birth and domination by others however well meaning they may think they are being just will not do; your soul, your true identity is something between you and God not something you inherit from you parents. I think the young woman I was talking to was discovering the pain of that new birth. We journey into a New Year and it might well prove to be a tough year through circumstances we have little or no control over, so let’s keep in mind the journey of Joseph and Mary and the hope and redemption that was born in a bleak stable and then live in the good of that hope for it just might be part of the process of us being born again.
Happy Christmas – Fr Mick
November 2008
Back in Harness
It is a little while now since I have sat down to write a letter for the Church website. The reason for this, as regular readers will know, is that during the months of July, August and September I was away on Sabbatical Leave. Every fifteen years the Church of England gives its priests the opportunity of taking three months off duty in order to pursue a Sabbatical Project. Fifteen years ago on my last Sabbatical I engaged in a great deal of research into the writings of Carl Jung the Analytical Psychologist and then wrote an analysis of the Gospels looked at through Jungian eyes. This time I attempted something related but at the same time rather different. I have for many years now kept a dream diary and in my recent Sabbatical I attempted to paint some dream images and to write reflections on the paintings. Dreams are a kind of “mirror of the soul”; their sometimes bizarre images show us the inner world of our fantasies, hopes and fears. The outcome of this project in material terms was seven completed canvases, three of which form a triptych, and fifty four and a half thousand words of reflection. When the canvases are fully dried, varnished and framed I hope to use them as meditative aid during some of our evening services and also display them as part of an art exhibition (I will be inviting local art groups to take part in this) in the church sometime next year.
Now I am back in harness, so to speak, the period of my Sabbatical (which seemed to fly by in no time at all) is fast receding into history but this is giving me the opportunity of looking back on it with some sense of objectivity. Some of the dream images I painted came from a very difficult period of my life, a time I would describe as a “mid life crisis”, what I found very interesting was the fact that when I painted them they came out rather differently to the original mental pictures. This fascinated me and I wondered why it was. One image in particular, which in the dream was a sinister and frightening figure, in the painting seemed to have been transformed into something much less extreme. The conclusion I came to was that something had shifted in my psyche and that an aspect of my personality which I once feared had now become more benign.
Yesterday (I am writing this on 16th October) was the feast day of St Teresa of Avila who was a medieval mystic. St Teresa was a very energetic character who set about reforming the Carmelite Order which she joined in her late teens. Her brother was a Conquistador who went on adventures in South America. I think St Teresa would rather liked to have gone with him but the society of her day forbad this and so this extroverted and energetic individual was forced to look inwards and find adventure in her inner life rather than in the external world. She wrote extensively about this experience which was both rewarding but also intensely painful. Turning aside from our everyday tasks can give us the opportunity to do something similar and if we are to get to know ourselves well it is a necessary business. Very often we deny ourselves access to our own inner reality by manic activity, almost as if we fear that if we stop moving then we will cease to exist. The church gave me the opportunity to stop and to spend a considerable amount of time reflecting and seeking to externalise my inner experience in painted images and also in words. I found this extremely rewarding but at the same time more than a little intimidating.
I would like to end by thanking those who helped make my Sabbatical possible, Brede Carr (a psychotherapist and ex Roman Catholic nun) who supervised the project, Revd Sharon Blain, Mike Foster and Elaine Simons the Church Wardens, and the Readers and SPA (Mike Shaw, John Allison, Peter Joyce and Jenny Shaw), all of whom took extra duties and covered my absence. Above all I would like to thank my wife Julia who fielded things at the vicarage and who thus ensured that I had the time and space to complete my Sabbatical Project and with whom I was able to discuss the material I was working on. Thanks to you all.
With every good wish – Fr Mick Elfred
