Sunday 4th January 2009

We are now well into the Christmas season. People are asking me ‘Have you survived’ Christmas?

It is an interesting question, because it did make me think about how stressful a time Christmas is. I make an effort each year to ‘pace myself’ so that I am well prepared for the feast, and that works, more or less, but the truth of the matter for me too is that there are lots of extra things to do when there are invitations to respond to and presents to buy and services to prepare for and so on.

But at the emotional level, Christmas is also pretty stressful. christians are luckier than most at Christmas because we can actually go to Church, and we believe in Jesus, whose coming we celebrate. So the cognitive dissonance associated with having to be happy without knowing why does not plague us. But at another level, Christmas asks me some questions.

The emphasis during Advent on the last judgement and the coming of Christ as king and judge in power makes me necessarily examine my life and ask ‘Well, how am I doing as a Christian?’ Those places where I do not think I’m doing so well then come up to bight me! So this knowledge is one of the strains of Christmas.

Then, as a vicar it is a very strange feeling to have gone through the year with a congregation and done all the Advent Wreath preparation with them, to find that most of the people who attend at Christmas are not the regulars, but visitors who are away from their regular congregations!

I remember being incensed at the suggestion from a mega-church in the US one year that people really do not want to be going out at Christmas, but want to be with their families. so they cancelled the Christmas services and made a DVD for them all to watch at home. Now that was a response that dissolved the tension.

But this year I am pleased with myself. I tend to be a bit of a ‘glass half empty’ kind of bloke, and I have to consciously fight it. But this year at the Christmas services, I felt as if God was with me to help in a special way about the ‘glass half empty’ thing. I was standing behind the altar at one of the pauses in the prayer of thanksgiving. I remember thinking ‘Well isn’t this a great Christmas. We have done everything that we can, to the best of our ability. There are members of the Body who are here, serving, reading, being communion minister who have faithfully come. This year there have been a number of people who have appreciated my ministry, and have said so at Christmas. We did great stuff at the Carols in the Park. So the glass is full!

The other thing that added to the anxiety of this Christmas was that I did the ‘family’ thing, only with someone else's family! numbers of people asked me over Christmas ‘Oh, are you going up to Bendigo for Boxing Day’ ‘Bendigo’ is code for where Robyn's parents live! I did go and met the whole clan. As I do when I go to Germany and meet new people, I sat near the wall, very flat, and hoped that I could sort of sink into it! I also had an escape plan so that I know when I could leave!

So my Christmas day lunch was filled with old friends in Melbourne (I’ve been having lunch with David since 1979 and there has been a lot of water under the bridge since then on Christmas day!). But Boxing Day was the day for meeting new people.
to ‘meet the family’ is a big deal in any new relationship.

The town has a very interesting feel about it too. I went for a ‘turn’ around the town today. It feels lovely to drop in and wave to the traders to see how they are going, and to swap banter with them. The place is very busy, and full of people who have come to go camping, or to holiday at Eildon. The sense that ‘we belong’ can be affirmed because of the more than usually large number of visitors.

This year in Eildon we have had a boating tragedy too. I’ve been in touch with one or two people to let them know that we were keeping them in our prayers. We know the people who are involved in serving the community at times of accident and death. It must take a great toll on them to be involved in such events. The heart of the Christmas story is that it is right next to them in these events that God wants to be.

It must be terrible to have every Christmas from now on associated with such a loss. For the young man who was driving and his family, the question will come sooner or later ‘how do we go on?’ I am reminded of the question that Cain asks after he kills Abel: ‘My punishment is more than I can bear. How can I keep living?’ I hope that for this family, there will be people to show God’s continued unconditional love for them. The same goes for the family of the young woman who was killed. Such losses can never be made up or recovered from. I pray that they will find a way to honour their daughter, to grieve fully and to rebuild their lives in due course. The fragility of human life is made real to me when death comes close.

So that was Christmas. Full of everything that is human, and some steps in the right direction.

Your Companion on the Way and Priest

 

 

Paul Dalzell.