BISHOP GREGOR’S CHRISTMAS 2016 MESSAGE
As I write, the clocks have gone back and things are getting darker. People
now talk of light deprivation as a medical condition and it does seem that
some of us are susceptible to all of that.
But, now of the year, there’s a lot of
extra light around. Crowds of people out
shopping and enjoying themselves
among the brightly lit streets. Christmas
lights and Christmas attractions. And,
here in Glasgow, down at the St Enoch
Centre, the wooden booths of the
Christmas market, gluwein, bratwurst
and those wonderful German Christmas
robins, like the one I bought a couple of
years ago, on sale once more. Wet,
grey, dark there of course too, but
surrounded by light, colour, life, fun.
It’s easy enough, it’s fatally easy
enough, for Christian people like us, to dismiss all of this as so much tinselly
trivia, utterly unrelated to what we like to call the “true meaning of
Christmas”. Well, if you have thoughts like that, let me try to persuade you
this Christmastide to give them up, once and for all.
People like us who will gather at the Christmas Eucharist to welcome the
true light who lightens everyone coming into the world, have no business
being sniffy about people’s desire at a dark time of the year to enjoy light
and warmth and being together in that light and warmth. We should have the
imagination to sense that, however vaguely, this is a very natural, very
human, and so ultimately God-given reaching out for something better that
lies beyond the often dark and grim realities of the world we live in – and,
God knows, they are dark enough.
So, for us, far from being nowhere near the true meaning of Christmas, the
Christmas lights in streets, on countless trees, the reindeers and snowmen
plastered all over houses or wherever, should point us towards another light.
And here’s the difference - sometime in January all the Christmas and
seasonal lights and all the Christmas and seasonal attractions will
disappear, put away for another year. Like many people, I hate taking all my
own lights and cards and tree down – the house looks so bare – but I ought
to remember that the light we have been celebrating in the twelve days of
Christmas shines all the year round and can never be taken away or
extinguished.
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