Fancy city boy
gets religion bad— surprise!
even to himself

Child cry, mother weeps,
Old king rages from his throne—
What difference now?

We have such a strange relationship with Christmas in this country. Everyone (I mean everyone!) complains about Christmas: the noise, the expense, the crowds, the way the decorations are up by September, and the way in which the TV, the radio, the magazines, the cookbooks, pile on the guilt and pressure, until by Christmas Eve we feel as if we are about to explode ourselves, like Christmas pudding in the pressure cooker! Everyone complains, but no one resists. Everyone feels the need to be out there, shopping and hustling, and planning and preparing, and I bet you a penny to a half-eaten mince pie, that there is someone in your family who isn’t here tonight because they have “just another couple of presents to wrap”.

And the incessant noise! Every shop and every radio station feels the necessity to outgun each other in playing “Now that’s what I call Christmas Music 38!” Battering down upon us is Noddy Holder’s insistent scream “It’s CHRISTTTTTTT-MASSS!!!!!”, until we think that King Herod probably killed the infants of Bethlehem while suffering from diminished responsibility brought on by too much Wizzard

No wonder the Christmas Number 1 seven years ago was this cheerful little ditty:

All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places – worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere – going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression – no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow – no tomorrow.

Not exactly White Christmas is it?

But what about two years ago? What song did the great British public decided to make the soundtrack to celebrating the Nativity of Christ? It’s not a Christmas Carol, but at least it was a song with a religious word: Hallelujah:

Unfortunately, it’s not that version of Hallelujah:

(Oh, dear God, make it stop!)

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew ya
It’s not a cry that you hear at night
It’s not somebody who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah

But that wasn’t the original ending of the song. It was written by Leonard Cohen, the Canadian poet and song writer, almost 30 years ago. It took him more than two years to write, and some of the writing was agony: 80 verses were written, with the pain and confusion of being a human being a world of suffering pouring out of the songwriter. But Cohen, whose religion is deep and real and curious (he is a Jew who has lived the last ten years as a Buddhist monk), finished the outpouring with a kind of defiant gesture of faith and hope:

And even though
It all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah.

There is nothing left to say, Cohen tells us, but hallelujah. It doesn’t matter how bad it gets, there is always “hallelujah” to hold onto, a profound sense that the Lord of Song is always there to hear us in our mistakes and to lift us up from our wrongs.

This was realised by that other profound Jewish theologian Bob Dylan. He said, when the album Various Positions was released in 1984, and the world first heard Cohen’s Hallelujah: “Cohen’s songs were becoming more like prayers”. But these are prayers that begin in brokenness, in recognising what it means to be human.

To be human isn’t to be perfect. To be human isn’t to be shiney, like tinsel and Christmas tat. To be human is to be broken, and cracked, and sorrowing and worried about the future. We can hear this is in another song Cohen wrote at the same time as Hallelujah,

If it be your will.
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

And this is where we get to Christmas Day. There is only one solution to human brokenness and human despair, and that is the Light of God. It is the Light of God, the Light which came into the world in the birth of a child in Bethlehem two thousand years ago, which is the Light of eternity, the promise of healing and the joy of heaven.

A very few years after the execution of a Jewish preacher in a backwater Roman province, a man sat quietly in his room in Jerusalem and wrestled with the question “who was that man?”. At the time, the story of the man’s life and death (and life again) was spreading through the Roman Empire like wild-fire, shocking governors and priests and emperors. There were many theories about who the preacher was, and what he meant, and what difference he made to being human. Our quiet thinker in the room in Jerusalem was called John, and he came up with the best answer anyone has ever offered. John realised that the meaning of the preacher, of Jesus, could only be understood as a breaking through into this world of stuff, a world of things, and earth and matter, a breaking through of the life and force and power which made the whole of the world and the whole of creation, the life and force and power which was the Light of God and the Word of God. There was no other way of understanding who Jesus was: the baby in Bethlehem, the refugee in Egypt, the child in Nazareth, the man who was a carpenter, and who walked with us, and ate with us, and laughed and cried and celebrated with us: this man was the Word and Light of God. But not a light like the sun, so far away from us, and inaccessible to us except by its light and warmth: rather, a light that is closer to us than we our to ourselves, a light that is so entwined with us and our lives, that it is shining upon us and from us.

There is darkness in the world, John says, his world, and our world, but this light shines all the more brightly for it. There is sadness, and lies, and pain, but in the midst of all these sorrows is the Word of God himself, dwelling among us, full of grace and truth, a grace and truth which is held out to us this Christmastide, and every day of our lives.

We may be dressed in rags, in Cohen’s words, but those rags are the light of heaven. As he said in an interview “All human activity is flawed… it is by intimacy with the flaw that we discern our real humanity and our real connection with divine inspiration.” Or, as he put it in another song, Anthem:

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

So if this Christmas night you feel close to cracking, then don’t worry. That’s how the light of heaven, and the birth of the Christ child, will come into your life.

“In Winter Light” was a composition for St Stephen’s Church Choir written last year by me (words) and Steve Barker (music). It seems much more appropriate this year!

In Winter Light : The Choir of St Stephens Church, Canterbury; dir Stephen Barker [ 5:42 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (74)

In winter light the frost will fall
Upon the shadowed moors,
And lie in quiet slumbered shawl
As milk-cold springs outpour
Through field and fen, to waterfall
By sorrowed trees, entwined
Above the rough-roofed stable stall
Cuts a child’s cry through time.

A rose is stripped of all its thorns,
And trees of all their leaves,
While spiralled stars spin all forlorn
In galaxies of ease.
A mother’s sigh, an old king’s scorn,
For wonder come apace
As history and time are torn
By a child’s cry through space.

Darkness as soft as fun’ral dight,
And deathly as the grave
Is pulled apart by heaven’s light,
The Word who came to save.
But wood and nails and Satan’s spite,
The naked bloody tree,
Are rooted in my poor soul’s slight
’Gainst the child’s cry in me.

As the man in treehouse has already said, I am off to see Ian Anderson and Friends play a concert in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral tonight: “The Christmas Jethro Tull”.

It is a long held ambition of mine to see the incomparable Anderson live: Jethro Tull was the creator of the first LP (remember them?) I ever bought using my student grant (remember them?). It was “Living in the Past“: a suitably ambivalent title for the way my life has turned out. It might seem that the supernaturalist and ethical-religious dogma to which I have committed myself would be harshly condemned by Anderson as living in the past, and a past that was oppressive and violent. After all, this is the man who wrote “Aqualung“! Then again, there is a pastoral yearning in much of Anderson’s work, looking back and harking to some earlier, Arcadian, time in which the greenwood rang with the songs of people who knew who they were and who they would become. After all, this is the man who wrote “Jack in the Green“.

The concert is part of Canterbury Cathedral’s fund-raising for £50 million to secure its building and endowments for the music and mission of the community. The appeal was launched by ROy Hattersley, a famous atheist, and is being supported by Ian Anderson, a man who wrote a song that condemned the “bloody Church of England / In chains of history / Requests your earthly presence / At the vicarage for tea” (“My God”). But then again, this is the man who wrote, in the same song, “don’t call on him to save you / From your social graces / And the sins you used to waive”. Ian Anderson’s God was too serious to be the domestic deity of the English gentry, the blesser and appeaser of all that is injust and genteel. For Anderson, God is not, as someone else once said, “not a tame lion”. And He is all the closer to the God of the Scriptures and Jesus Christ for that!

Because of that, if Anderson doesn’t sing “Christmas Song”, and the audience doesn’t feel uncomfortable (“convicted” in the old vocabulary), I’ll be very disappointed!

As Stanley Hauerwas says, when you meet a church in paroxysms about “the family”, you have met a church which no longer believes in God. What about the Church agonising about its ministry to the individual?

Not long ago there was a report in the newspapers that church agencies in Berlin had established a mobile unit, an automobile equipped with short-wave radio, in which a priest, a physician and a psychologist could be summoned immediately at any hour of the day or night. That sounds very up to date: the church, in a sense, at the front, modern technology in service of the reign of God. But in reality this ecclesiastical mobile unit is a highly questionable symbol of what the church has largely become in our society: a church which takes care of the individual, an institution which offers its wares to a group of individuals.¹

Is our concern for the individual a sign of our idolatry, the first-falling away from the path of discipleship? “Forgive me, Lord, I would come to the banquet, but first I have to have some quality ‘me-time’”?

1. Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community : the social dimension of Christian faith, trans. John P. Galvin (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), p. 4 [↩]

In a letter to Eberhard Bethge, written from Tegel Prison on 8 June 1944, Dietrich Bonhoeffer explored the roots of individualism, personal autonomy and its expression in twentieth century European culture. It is very much an improvised excursus (look at the way Bonhoeffer refuses to get into the question of historical data— principally, and reasonably, for the reason that he was excluded from a research library in prison), but it builds on themes that were present in his earliest published work¹, and which were part of his entire professional and pastoral life. The “movement” he refers to in the opening sentence is the so-called ‘autonomy of man’; the “question” he defines later as “Christ and the world come of age”.

The movement that began about the thirteenth century (I’m not going to get involved in any argument about the exact date) towards the autonomy of man (in which I should include the discovery of the laws by which the world lives and deals with itself in science, social and political matters, art, ethics, and religion) has in our time reached an undoubted completion. Man has learnt to deal with himself in all questions of importance without recourse to the ‘working hypothesis’ called ‘God’. In questions of science, art, and ethics this has become an understood thing at which one now hardly dares to tilt. But for the last hundred years or so it has also become increasingly true of religious questions; it is becoming evident that everything gets along without ‘God’— and, in fact, just as well as before. As in the scientific field, so in human affairs generally, ‘God’ is being pushed more and more out of life, losing more and more ground.

Roman Catholic and Protestant historians agree that it is in this development that the great defection from God, from Christ, is to be seen; and the more they claim and play off God and Christ against it, the more the development considers itself to be anti-Christian. The world that has become conscious of itself and the laws that govern its own existence has grown self-confident in what seems to us to be an uncanny way. False developments and failures do not make the world doubt the necessity of the course that it is taking, or of its development; they are accepted with fortitude and detachment as part of the bargain, and even an event like the present war is no exception. Christian apologetic has taken the most varied forms of opposition to this self-assurance. Efforts are made to prove to a world thus come of age that it cannot live without the tutelage of ‘God’. Even though there has been surrender on all secular problems, there still remain the so-called ‘ultimate questions’— death, guilt— to which only ‘God’ can give an answer, and because of which we need God and the church and the pastor. So we live, in some degree, on these so-called ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered ‘without God’? Of course, we now have the secularized offshoots of Christian theology, namely existentialist philosophy and psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, and happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate and simply unwilling to admit that it is in a predicament about which it knows nothing, and from which only they can rescue it. Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they scent luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They set themselves to drive people to inward despair, and then the game is in their hands. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world, and who therefore like to busy themselves with themselves. The ordinary man, who spends his everyday life at work and with his family, and of course with all kinds of diversions, is not affected. He has neither the time nor the inclination to concern himself with his existential despair, or to regard his perhaps modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble, or a calamity.²

“People who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world, and who therefore like to busy themselves with themselves.” What a fabulous description of the triumph of Western solipsism!

1. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Sanctorum Communio: a theological study of the sociology of the church, ed. Clifford J. Green and Joachim von Soosten, trans. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, DBWE 1 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998). [↩]
2. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, 3rd ed. (London: S.C.M. Press, 1967), pp. 325-7 [↩]

The new issue of Private Eye is out, with the usual incisive examination of the publishing world, published under “Literary Review” (pp. 26-27). There we find a curious bottom-of-the-column filler, “How bestsellers are made”:

Take one chunky Victorian thriller. Add a mysterious gent in long coat and top hat with his back turned to the reader. Add a generous drizzle of sepia. And voilà — three of this summer’s top-selling beach reads. Are their designers by any chance related?

A good point, well made, and with  interesting cultural and social implications. Almost as interesting and well-made when 3 Minute Theologian considered the same phenomenon in January 2009 under the title “Literature and Lone Wolf“.

As Private Eye usually asks: “I have just noticed the resemblance between … and wonder if by any chance they are related?”

Today is the feast of Holy Cross, commemorating the “Invention” of the Cross by the Empress Helena in Jerusalem in AD 335 (the feast marks the anniversary of the dedication of the basilica built to house the true relic of the cross).

Usually preachers will, and I’ve done it myself, will concentrate on the meaning of the lections set for the day: the poisonous serpent of Numbers 21.4-9; the humbling and exalting of Christ in Philippians 2.6-11; the Stainer’s Crucifixion of John 3.13-17. All good and necessary things to set in front of the people of God on this day and every day of our pilgrimage.

But today I’m thinking of something slightly different. Perhaps because today is also the Opening Service for the branch of the Mothers’ Union which meets in St Stephen’s Church, the MU being “an international Christian charity that seeks to support families worldwide”, I wondered about the other event which took place on the cross:

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home. [John 19:25-27]

Christ’s agony in Calvary, his exaltation on a cross, also marked the beginning of a new kind of family, a non-nuclear family, a family which cut across both the ancient near east’s ideas of kinship and tribe, and the modern world’s ideas of blood relations and romantic love. John and Mary were to become a new family, and a new model of what family could be. This new family was born in both grief and endurance: grief at the pain seen in Jesus’s death agonies, and endurance in being strong enough to remain standing at the foot of the cross.

There is an example for those of us who adhere to the ecclesial community, the “family of the church”. Perhaps we should date the foundation of the Church not to Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost, when the tribes of the world heard the promise of the resurrection, and the ministry was a great success, but rather to Good Friday afternoon, when the ministry and promise of Christ failed under the weight of military, political and religious oppression? Perhaps the Church came into being in grief and endurance? Perhaps we should think of ourselves as a new kind of family, one which overturns the expectations of the world, and one which can only be understood when looking at the world from the point of view of the crucified Messiah?