Dear All

One of my favourite songs on our Christmas playlist is Mud’s ‘Lonely this Christmas’, which topped the UK charts in 1974. I have to confess I like it for the wrong reasons though: I find it very funny. The final ‘Merry Christmas, darling, wherever you are’ sounds so entertainingly passive-aggressive I struggle to contain my amusement. I understand if you seriously like this song though – it is a good song! And it does address something really important: facing Christmas, the season of joy, love and family time, alone and with an aching heart.

Whether as a result of a bereavement, other changes in life or feeling not quite right emotionally, approaching Christmas in a cheerful mood or maintaining it throughout the season may be a challenge. Celebrating a birth seems wrong when our minds are preoccupied with loss.

But here is a twist: Jesus was born exactly for those who are preoccupied with loss. He was born into a world of oppression and poverty. The first people who were told about his birth were the local shepherds, who must have had a rough life. Anna, the daughter of Penuel, who greeted Jesus in the temple, had spent decades there – widowed, bereaved, waiting for the Messiah. All of those Jesus went on to encounter throughout his earthly ministry were lost, bereaved, scared or in any other kind of need.

He was born for all people, but, above all, he came to comfort those who could not find earthly comfort, for those who were hurting and could not be healed, for those who were lost and did not know how to find the right way.

I believe that at big Christian festivals like Christmas and Easter we do not merely remember some distant events to do with Christ but we are invited to really live through them. We do not celebrate Christ’s 2025^th Birthday but instead we welcome the baby again and again, because every year this baby is born into our sorrows, into our loneliness and into our pain. And every year He offers us the living water, the healing spirit, the peace and the comfort that are not available to us through any other means but through Him. Let us greet Him again this year, just as we are, with nothing to hide, in the knowledge that He, yet again, will be born for us.

Ana