Family treasures

In the midst of a busy weekend we had a visit from our grand daughter Rhiannon and her lovely parents Kath and Anto. The experience of the light of joy in a child's face at this time of year so captures something of the real Advent spirit. Clare and Rhiannon decorated the Christmas tree together and assembled the crib scene, made of painted clay figurines modelled in a Bristol Junior school classroom over 25 years ago, and added to with various visiting animals and angels ever since. Our children, even as adults, have always been happy to share in these tasks. Having the child of one's own child to initiate into a family tradition is a priceless treasure of a blessing.

It was also lovely to receive an email from a friend in Sweden relating her experience with two step children, her infant daughter and husband at church and St Lucy festivities together, and reflecting how, all over the world families bond around their handed down rituals, recipes and small seasonal pilgrimages.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks last week spoke about how Hanukkah had started life as the commemoration of an important Jewish victory which returned them to freedom autonomy, but with the passage of time, and the reversal of those gains, the festival became instead a festival of the freedom to practice one's faith, something which has left the Jewish community passionate about everyone's religious freedoms, not just their own, and rejoicing in the marvellous diversity of faiths openly and freely practised in Britain today. In a way our contemporary society now much more resembles the way things were before Christianity predominated. The way things are and have been for millennia in many corners of the earth.

It isn't people of faith who find this a problem, but those who live by suspicion and distrust. Such a pity that so often they seem so loud and predominant in public. It's as if they received nothing much handed down in their family tradition worthy of treasuring.

Advent

The arrival of Advent is always a special time for me, charged with many memories of new beginnings.

My first ever retreat when I was just eighteen took place this weekend forty four years ago. A moment of wonder and mystery that set me on my journey towards ministry.

I started work as Team Rector of the St Paul's Area in Bristol, my first incumbency aged thirty, on Advent Sunday 1975.

I started work as Chaplain of Holy Trinity Geneva , after travelling to Switzerland overland alone two days beforehand, aged forty seven, on Advent Sunday 1992.

At that time it was no more expensive to go by train than to fly. I booked to travel via Paris and take the TGV for the second leg from Gare de Lyon to Genève, just to have a first experience of the legendary train. However, storms delayed the ferry crossing and the last TGV to Geneva had left long before I got to Gare de Lyon, so I had a wonderful sleepless night on an ordinary train, absorbing the sights and sounds of a ralway by night, arriving just as dawn was breaking. An unforgettable way to make a new start.

Memories and emotions connected of all these experiences have flitted through my mind today, though the emotion isn't nostalgia. It's the sense of new beginnings, horizons opening afresh, adventures and stories unfolding anew. Advent Sunday is usually like this for me, although not New Year, which is too much associated with post-festive exhaustion and depression.

Although Advent is a season to think about divine judgement, and this is associated commonly with dread and foreboding, there is an alternative angle. The divine judge looks at all that is good or ill , all that is wholesome or broken about our human endeavour, not only as the judge, but as the healer, who looks at the mess as a diagnostician assessing the situation and saying : "Hmm, let's see ... I can fix this this."

Well, that's one way to read that marvellous saying of Jesus : Behold, I make all things new." We look honestly at the way things are, and trust that by letting God come, not keeping him out of our affairs, there can and will be transformation, rather than loss or annihilation. This is what makes Advent for me a special season of renewal in my journey of faith.

It means that the run-up to Christmas, although always an endurance test, is still an enjoyable time, looking forward inwardly to all the heart desires most, with God, all in all.