Dear Friends

I owe a great debt of gratitude to a very talented group of adult students I taught many years ago for a remark that startled and impressed me, and to which I often find myself returning. Deep into their end of year revision, they told me that once the exam was over they planned to meet up again, to get to grips with what the course was really about. (I did ask them, somewhat facetiously, whether that was not leaving it a bit late!) The demands of the course, on top of those of their already busy lives, left little time for the deeper reflection of which they knew themselves capable, and for which they longed. As they had rightly grasped, there was more at stake here than mere academic achievement. The material they had studied held important potential for their own lives.

I feel about Christmas rather as those students did about the exam. I love the traditional celebrations, in the church and in the home: the turkey and the Christmas pudding, the cards, the decorations, the carol-singing by candlelight. I love it all! We all know - or if we don’t, it’s not for the lack of people telling us – that Christmas was not really about  food and drink and presents, or even about gatherings of family and friends (happy or stressful).  But once it is over there are plenty of more urgent things to think of; New Year is upon us, and it’s back to work, back to school, back to normal. We’ve ‘done’ Christmas, till next year!

Or have we? When, in fact is Christmas ‘over’? In the Church the Christmas season does not come to an abrupt end on Boxing Day, but continues right through to Candlemas, on 2 February. This gives us just that space and time we need to consider at leisure the astonishing implications of the Christmas story. By Epiphany, the 12^th day of Christmas, having taken down the cards and decorations, dismantled the tree and demolished the cake, we are free to celebrate the visit of the Wise Men to the infant Jesus, undistracted by culinary, domestic or commercial preoccupations. These amazing men – magi, men of science, seekers after truth - saw in the skies (their own familiar field of work) something that inspired them to set off on a journey of discovery which led them to Bethlehem. What they found was not at all what they had expected. The King they had travelled so far to honour turned out to be the child of humble parents, living in simple surroundings. And yet these wise and learned men, far from being disappointed, were ‘overjoyed’, we are told, by what they found, and offered without hesitation the costly gifts they had brought with them. As true seekers, they were not blinded by preconceived ideas about what they would find; and their humility was rewarded, not with mere knowledge, but with life-changing joy.

The word epiphany means manifestation, or revelation; an insight; an awakening to the truth; a breakthrough. The breakthrough for these wise yet humble men was, in part, the astounding experience of finding the holy manifested in the ‘ordinary’, the everyday – and recognising it as holy. This is one of the great revelations of the Christmas story. Not only did God once come to earth in the form of a weak and vulnerable baby, but He is incarnate, made human, in all His children. In us, in fact, if we will allow Him, taking our ‘ordinariness’ and  drawing out of us what we were born to be. ‘Where meek souls still receive him, still the Lord Christ enters in’. Not just for Christmas; not just till Candlemas; but now, in this New Year, in all the years left to us on earth, and even beyond. May you, like those wise men, discover this to be true. This is what it is really about.

Happy New Year!

Yours in Christ