A Christmas Reflection

I remember as a child that when our favourite great-aunt came to visit, there was one moment we looked forward to most of all. When the table was cleared after the meal, she would pick up her big brown handbag and rummage around for the loose barley sugars she always carried. She would snap the bag shut with a loud, satisfying click, hand us a sweetie… and then tell us a story.

About how she met her husband when she answered an advertisement to become his housekeeper. About learning the Charleston in the 1920s. Or, best of all, stories about our mother when she was our age and the naughty things she did.

Each family has its stories. At the Christmas gatherings, families of all kinds will come together over Christmas. We will re-tell our old, happy and sad stories and create new ones. The people we’ve lost will come back to us when we tell their story. The hurts we thought we’d forgotten will bite again; we’ll laugh at the remembered comic chaos of living. Every moment of every day, our stories will multiply and tell us more about who we are and what our lives mean.

In Luke’s Gospel, there’s this line: ‘Mary treasured up all these things and pondered over them’ – all the life-changing, frightening, wonderful things that had happened to her; the words people spoke to her, the visitations and dreams, the strangers who told her extraordinary things. So extraordinary that Mary’s Story has outlasted the people in it and the ones who wrote it down for us. As we ponder the wonder of the Incarnation and the Christmas Story, it has become our story to treasure.

A prayer for Christmas

Light of the world, in the darkness of the winter days, the story of God among us, Emmanuel, burns bright.
We pray that it may live always in our hearts.
Amen.

I wish you all a joyful, peaceful Christmas and New Year, and I warmly invite you to our Christmas Services or step into the Church out of the busyness of the Christmas preparations and in the peace and tranquillity ponder the beautiful mystery of the babe in the manger, ‘the Word made flesh.’

The Revd Canon Sue Binks
Tel: 01439 770523
Email: binksharome@btinternet.com

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