A Message From The Dean
Dear Friends,
I think we were all hoping for a more definite Christmas this year. In 2020 we mumbled our way through a highly restricted Christmas hoping that things would never be quite as grim again. And now, behold! The virus mutates and sends out new waves of nervousness and self-imposed social restriction. I led a corporate moan in the Cathedral on the third Sunday of Advent, urging the congregation to voice our weariness with the plague. I have to say the community responded magnificently and we sounded a rich and resonant “Ugh!” There’s a certain sense of release and relief when we can all voice our fed-upness and irritation together: therapeutic even.
For all that, Christmas comes to shed its own light on us, the people we love, live with and share our planet with too. We have family and religious customs and ceremonies that mark it out as “the most wonderful time of the year”. I’ve always been a wholehearted devotee. Yes, it’s busy, there’s a lot to do and, in the attempt to reach out, we can exhaust ourselves, eat and drink more than is good for us and spend more than is wise. Yet, at its heart is the story of God coming among us in the humility and vulnerability of a baby. A child born to a family being pushed round by the authorities and soon forced into exile and migration by the cruelty of a genocidal King, one Herod. (Herod’s megalomania is still in evidence in Israel/Palestine today. You can see his tomb, fortresses, and extravagant building works. He wasn’t a pantomime villain – he was the real, paranoid, and delusional thing).
The light shines in the darkness – gathering us together in love, celebration and festivity but also lights up and brings into view the cruelties and fear we inflict on one another: our failure to live as one human family.
This Christmas I invite you again to join the Cathedral for worship either in person or on-line. Let your own sense of safety and wellbeing guide your decision about how you participate. Whatever way you choose, I assure you of a sincere and warm welcome. I always like to say at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve that when we remember that God has made the earth his living place, his place to be, calling us all to see him in Jesus. There can be no strangers among those drawn to the manger.
Perhaps we need that sense of being together more than ever this Christmas. I love Karl Barth’s absolute insistence that everyone is called to relationship with God “there is no theological justification for setting any limits on our side to the friendliness of God towards humanity which appeared in Jesus Christ”. (K Barth: “The Humanity of God. London: Colins 1961 p63f). Because God becomes human in Jesus, because he is neighbour, companion and brother, therefore, to be human means first and foremost to live in this companionship with God. It is sociable existence with God and sociable existence with the whole human family near and far.
When we look back over the last 21 months we will be lamenting the loss of so many, the acute strains many have had to bear, and the economic damage to individuals, businesses and industry. What’s been more insidious and undermining is that wedge of uncertainty and separation that has cast a depressing and unsettling shadow over everything. It has been the very opposite of social existence.
However, at Christmas we remember that the light of Jesus Christ shines in the darkness and the darkness has not quenched it. As a reality check on my own sense of Christmas excitement I try and read each Christmas an account of a person of faith who has had to spend Christmas confronted by the very worst evil or personal suffering. I do so to enter imaginatively into another person’s experience but also not to gloss over the times when life has been tough and is harsh and unpromising for many. Let me share part of a letter written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brilliant German theologian and leader of the Confessing Church in the 1930s which opposed Hitler and criticised the mainstream churches for their subservience to the Nazi regime. Bonhoeffer was arrested and imprisoned in 1943 for his part in a high-level plot to overthrow Hitler. He was executed in 1945.
“From the Christian point of view there is no special problem about Christmas in a prison cell. For many people in this building, it will probably be a more genuine occasion than in places where nothing but the name is kept. That misery, suffering, poverty, loneliness, helplessness and guilt mean something quite different in the eyes of God from what they mean in human judgement, that God will approach where we turn away, that Christ was born in a stable because there was no room in the inn – these are things that a prisoner can understand better than other people; for him they really are glad tidings”. (D Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, London: SCM Press).
Bonhoeffer’s witness shed a principled Christian light on a great evil, and although it cost him his life, his continuing example of living a Christ-like life helps us see the dimensions of Christian faith. We can be glad because all this world’s evil, pain and limitation has been taken into God’s life, transformed, and redeemed. After all, Jesus’s birth and infancy are but the beginning of a story that will unfold the depths to which God’s love has to go, and the profound generosity of his self-giving.
I hope your Christmas, however you keep it, will bring you joy and even if some of the arrangements and celebrations have to be a little curtailed, I hope you’ll have time to catch up with family, friends, and neighbours and appreciate the warmth of human interaction and sociable existence.
Just to let you know what the Cathedral has planned, here’s a list of our services:
Thursday 23 December
18.00 Festival of Lessons & Carols
Friday 24 December, Christmas Eve
08:00 Morning Prayer
12:30 Holy Eucharist
15.00 Crib & Christingle Service
17:00 Evening Prayer
18.00 Festival of Lessons & Carols
22.00 Midnight Mass, First Eucharist of Christmas
Saturday 25 December, Christmas Day
07.40 Morning Prayer
08:00 Holy Eucharist
10.30 Choral Eucharist
16.00 Evening Prayer with Carols around the Crib
Sunday 26 December 2021, St Stephen’s Day
07.40 Morning Prayer
08:00 Holy Eucharist (Traditional Language)
10:30 Choral Eucharist
16:00 Evening Prayer
Like you, I look forward to the containment of Covid-19 in 2022, and I hope that after all we’ve been through, we’ll find ways of caring for and upholding one another in a more intentional and systematic way that only a crisis can perhaps shock us into.
With my love, prayers and blessings
Adrian Dorber
Dean of Lichfield