The re-birth of the Season

Just when you thought it was all over for Advent, a German newspaper has been carrying an advert from Ricoh: 'Ricoh wishes you a happy Advent'. Not in England, surely? But Die Welt and The Guardian have both run their own versions of an Advent calendar, even if in the form (at least d .W.) of a daily prize-competition.

Some sense appears to be returning to a proper celebration of Christmas too. The Telegraph has a useful article by Baroness Sayeeda Warsi ('the Shadow Minister for Community Cohesion and Social Action'!), entitled 'Christmas is for everyone to celebrate', rejecting secularists' frostiness, and emphasising that Muslims have no objections to Christians celebrating Christmas at all. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=Y14LVDZM3THQXQFIQMFSFGGAVCBQ0IV0?xml=/opinion/2007/12/23/do2311.xml;

The Guardian, too, celebrates 'the Magic of Carols', with contributions from A N Wilson, Trevor Phillips and Alain de Botton, and makes the really interesting observation that 'Carol singing doesn't just cheer up a bleak midwinter - it's the nearest thing we've go to a shared folk-music'. Precisely: Christmas, which has shaped the Western year for much of its history, is also the national annual mid-winter folk-festival of the Family, and of the Child. So perhaps, when children are being re-enslaved around the world - to bonded or forced labour, and to military service elsewhere, to the consumerism of State and nurseries here - it is critical to encourage a re-naissance of celebration of the birth of the Holy Child Jesus: in Bethlehem, and everywhere.

At the same time, Die Welt reminds its readers that the French philosopher Robert Redeker was issued with a fatwa [death-threat] a year ago for calling Mohammed 'the master of hate' in Le Figaro in September 2006; and the final issue of Der Spiegel for 2007, just out, is entitled 'The Koran: the most powerful book in the world'.

Philip S

'Christ is born' - a musical meditation

Apart from Messiaen's incomparable La Nativite du Seigneur, two of the most extraordinary Christmas chords I know of are found at the end of Sir JohnTavener's 'God is with us' (to be found at least on Choral Music of John Tavener, Naxos 8.555256, LC 05537 (2000); and on Sacred Music by John Tavener, Hyperion CDA 66464 (1991)). This is our Christmas morning music at home.

The text is: "God is with us. Hear ye people, even to the uttermost end of the earth. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light..." (Isa 9:2, 6), ending with 'Christ is born!'

I have not seen the score, but, taking it to be in C major, after the first triumphant 'Christ is born!' sung in a great C major chord, there follows a huge C# minor organ chord - a completely unrelated musical key, minor instead of major, and a semitone up, but linked to the previous chord by the E which is common to both C major and C# minor. The voices continue up a further semitone to D minor, modulating then through F major to another strong (E minor) chord, which is also immediately followed by another massive clashing organ chord of E major, with the mediant sharpened third of the scale of E (G# - also the dominant 5th of the earlier C# minor chord, and where the E is the tonic note of the E major and minor scales). The single note of E thus links all the chords: E major and E minor, C major and C# minor. Extraordinary intrusions, there is still a logical harmonic link between all the apparently incompatible keys.

So, in the Incarnation, the apparently impossible and incompatible chords of divinity and humanity are reconciled. The God who is made human, the Word who is made flesh-and-blood, makes possible what takes place because there are pre-given 'true relations' of Creator and creature. Now, in the beginning of the work of the New Creation, the single linking note of God's extraordinary humility sounds a new - certainly clashing and seemingly contradictory, but in reality related and compatible - symphony of hope and love. In Messiaen's Dieu Parmi nous, the foot-pedal's loud opening descending ladder, in no known or single key, portrays God's descent to rest in 'the low degree'of our humanity. The clashes and alternations, the daring flexible fluidity of chords inTavener's 'God with us' offers the same truth: logic cannot defy God; God descends.

In the wonderful words of Gregory of Nyssa, quoted by Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev (The Mystery of Faith, p. 64), 'Man is more precious than all the rest of the cosmos. Man, completed and perfected, is wondrous, even as God is wondrous. He is more than a microcosm - he is a micro-theos... Between God and man there is and must be commensurability in spite of all that is non-commensurable.' There is correlation as well as broken relationship.

In Jesus, God enters and embraces the frail and glorious vessel of our humanity in order to reveal his own glory. Through the Holy Spirit, God enables there to take place a similar and unique transformation of our individually and infinitely variable created humanity, so that each life, called, converted, polished, broken, hewn, held, shaped, riven and re-made may reveal both our source and our destiny. No other life will reveal what our own will. We are not made to be anyone else. Our celebration of the Feast of the Nativity is the focal point of initiation of that mysterious, hidden, quiet, secret, 'sweet exchange' between God and humanity, which takes place in a life offered without reserve and without understanding, and in the common location of a feeding-trough, where alone all our spirits are fed, as God makes himself as hungry as we are.

Lucy and John

One of the lovely things about the shortening of the days in December is the Saints' Days that illuminate them. For those to whom this form of delighting in time is foreign, please be patient! These two days match one another.

Today is the f.d. of St Lucy (better known in Scandinavia and the Mediterranean as Santa Lucia), who was martyred for her faith in Christ in Syracuse, Sicily, in 303/4, in the particularly vicious persecution of Diocletian. You can find the rather gory details of her death, if you want, in e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Lucy or http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09414a.htm. In the early Julian Calendar, Dec 13th was the shortest day of the year (i.e. with the longest night), but her name means light (lux, lucis). So the remembrance is of her [light] in the darkness, of her being 'a burning and shining lamp' (like John the Baptist - John 5:35), in a deliberate reminiscence of the Light of Christ (John 1:5).

Tomorrow, 14th Dec., is the f.d. of St John of the Cross (1542-1591), the great 'mystical doctor' of the Roman Catholic Church (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/08480a.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_the_Cross), and lyrical Spanish poet. Some call him the 'Doctor of Nothingness [Nada]'; I call him the 'Doctor of Darkness', although the darkness he writes of ('The Dark Night') is in reality 'The Living Flame of [God's] Love' burning and en-flaming us. The Orthodox Church does not give the special status to darkness that the Western church does, since it is so coloured by the glory of the Resurrection. But for John, the darkness was proof of the night [of faith] and of our desire for God; the soul is held, cauterised and transfigured in the blinding brilliance of the glory of God: the darkness is held in the light.

Lucy (13th Dec.) points to the light of faith; John of the Cross (14th Dec.) to the night of faith.

Philip S

A Culture-Christian Christmas?

I know: it's still thirteen days to Christmas, but, thinking ahead just a little, a couple of articles at the weekend did revisit the issue of Christian and 'traditional' cultural Christmases.

You may ignore (or vent your fury or approbation on) the various comments following it, but 'I wish you a very Christian Christmas' does at least show how far Britain has lost its tradition of 'cultural-European' celebrations of the Feast of the Nativity. One writer below senses the kill-joy touch of 'The Party' [i.e. the Stasi spirit of former East Germany] in the UK, which, combined with a Taliban secularising spirit, is determined to put an end to all 'partying' and festivity. Shades of George Orwell; echoes of the White Witch - always winter and never Christmas.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2007/12/09/do0903.xml


Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, injects some sense:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3022311.ece, with Leading article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article3022121.ece

Philip S

Prayer in Advent

Traditionally, Advent is a time for waiting, in view of the Last Things. As it happens, this year, it is also a time for facing what comes to us in the form of illness.

Please remember in your prayers Peter Lawrence, Heather Waldsax's Training Minister, who has suffered a small stroke, which has affected his speech and his writing - which is very hard for an evangelist! Please also pray for his wife Carole.

Melanie Groundsell discovered two weeks ago that there was a tumour in the area of the bowel for which she had been successfully treated for cancer more than two years ago; she has begun a course of chemotherapy today. This is hard news; please pray for her, and for her father.

This Advent, please also pray for:

• the family of Claire Sankey, a former student of STETS, who died earlier in the year
• Val Hards' husband, Richard, who has been involved in a quite serious accident in Ghana;
• John Kellagher, whose father died in the autumn;
• Hannah Knight, in the Academic Office, whose grandfather died recently, aged 100;
• the families of the two teenage boys linked with the Fordingbridge school (where Jo Naish teaches) who both died in their sleep this term.

'Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ'.

Philip

first night of the proms

A very interesting thing happened at the end of the first night of the proms: the conductor, Jiri Belohlavek, bowed to the orchestra. (Parable.)

A great deal is often made of the role of the President at Communion, or the Bishop, as the focus of unity, as the one who gathers God's people. The direction is often accordingly mis-construed as 'from the people to the President'. It often feels as if the president is the one with the power or authority, rather than all the people.

The great conductor of a famous orchestra last Friday night, Jiri Belohlavek, re-dressed the balance more correctly: he bowed to the orchestra, acknowledged (as he said in an interval interview) that it was not he who produced the sound and the music, but the players in the orchestra. His task was to enable them to play the music, to draw the music out of them. So the direction of encouragement is 'from the conductor to the orchestra'; the direction of music is 'from the orchestra'. The direction of a revelatory theology is 'from God to us'; the direction of our referential practice is to point 'from us to God'.

In the concert for Diana a week or two back, some of you will have seen the clip where Princess Diana visited a home for the blind, and one of the men wanted to feel the contours of Diana's face to get a sense of what she looked (and felt) like. One shot showed Diana kneeling on the ground in her stockinged feet at his desk, next to one of the luckiest people in the world that day (as he said), with his hands stroking, and then cupping both sides of Diana's face.

What no eye has seen... God has revealed to us through the Spirit...
...the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ...
...then we shall see face to face...
...we will see him as he is.

He must increase, but I must decrease.
Jesus got up from the table, took off his jacket and shirt, and tied a towel around himself.
Though he was in the form of God, he emptied himself...he humbled himself..even [to] death on a cross
Philip