Preparing for Advent There is still, very slightly, some sense of Lent within our culture; one occasionally still hears the unchurched talking about having to give something up ‘for Lent’, although for what reason is rarely enunciated. Advent, however, is a different matter. It is entirely overshadowed by Advent Calendars (always commencing on December 1<sup>st</sup>, regardless of the actual date of Advent Sunday, Christmas preparations, lights (I saw lights appearing in houses in late October this year!) and the constant insistence on the need to celebrate Christmas, although there seems now to be almost no awareness of the reason why it should be celebrated. The reduction of the second-most important Christian festival to a phantasm of the jolly fat man in a strange red outfit (weird, given that St Nicholas traditionally wears green, the heraldic colour of a bishop and, coming from Myra in Turkey, the last thing he would wish to wear would be a hideously heavy outfit trimmed with thick fur), reindeer and the giving – and especially receiving – of ever more inordinately priced presents. In the present economic climate, particularly in the light of the financial tsunami to come imminently, this is particularly concerning. It is almost as if, after a year of panic and seemingly warmly embraced unprecedented restrictions on our accustomed freedoms we are, as a nation, desperate to participate in a whirlwind of festivities to counter what many have found to be the truly dreadful ‘Year of the Virus’. It is almost a case of, ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’. In this increasingly absurd situation, which is compounded by the usual pagan Christmas festivities, the meaning and purpose of Advent is getting lost, even for most Christians. To keep it simple, Advent has a dual purpose. On the one hand, it is a season of preparation for the joyous event of the commemoration of the birth of Christ at that first Christmas in Bethlehem. To those of us who have been privileged to be physically present in the cave where Jesus was born, this is an intensely exciting season, filled with anticipation of the moment when we keep festival to celebrate the birth of the Son of God on the very spot at which we have been honoured to kneel! It is a season of excitement and promise, and rightly so. On the other hand, it is traditionally a season of repentance and fasting, for the Christ who was born in Bethlehem to a poor Jewish family ‘will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’, as the Creed tells us. There is therefore a focus on ‘the Four Last Things’: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell. These things are real and we shall be confronted with them, not as a vague promise or threat but as a very real certainty in our lives. Yes, we know that we shall die, but at St John Henry Newman observed, there is an enormous difference between acknowledging, in a sort of academic fashion, that I will die and knowing as an absolute personal certainty that I will die. In time past, death was a very visible, everyday occurrence. Life expectancy was limited, and a great many people did die young. A walk around gravestones in a Victorian, or older, graveyard is a very salutary experience. Our ancestors, having as much dread of death as we do, nevertheless faced its reality in a different way than our culture tends to. Preparation for death throughout life was considered the norm, at least in theory and manuals to assist one in this task were always best-sellers. Reflection on this ultimate fact was the central point of a great many sermons and mourning and funeral customs made the presence of death a very public matter indeed. In our society, to the contrary, it tends to be hushed up as an embarrassment – don’t talk about it and it might go away! Advent recalls us to a Christian understanding of death and dying. Our faith in Jesus reminds us that, as an historical fact, Jesus was put to death in a very grisly manner but has been restored to life. Not merely human life, but Resurrection life, his divine life. Moreover, we have the absolute certainty that we shall rise from the dead with him. He has given us his promise that the fullness of life for all eternity is ours, if only we will trust and follow him. This is joy beyond telling! Yes, we still have our own physical death to face and it is scary but now it can be properly understood not as a final ending, the total dissolution of who and what we are, but rather as what it is – the doorway to eternal life! Advent reminds us of this and of the certainty of our judgement and hence the absolute need of repentance. Do not focus on the necessity of being perfect enough to win a place in God’s kingdom, for you never will be on your own merits. Focus, rather, on obeying the commandments and doing the work God has given you to perform – and above all, on repentance, for all of us have fallen short of God’s glory and stand in need of his mercy. That mercy, be assured, will be granted us, if only we have contrition, however imperfect, for our sins and try to follow Christ more surely. Christ has given his word and we must never despair, for he is faithful and lovingly merciful to all who cast themselves on his care. This coming Advent by all means let us prepare for the celebration of the birth of Christ at Christmas. After such a dreadfully depressing and stressful year, we certainly need a time – and a cause – for celebration. Let us, though, use these few weeks as an opportunity to reflect on our mortality and let that inspire us to examine ourselves more thoroughly and focus on repenting of those things which have come between us and God’s commandments, safe in the knowledge that, in doing so, we will receive his merciful forgiveness and be enabled to enter into his Kingdom, where all tears are wiped away and where we shall rejoice with all the saints, who are God’s good friends and our, for ever and ever. May the Lord grant you rich blessings as you prepare, through this Advent season, to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, our Saviour. Father David
Lest We Forget?On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, one hundred and two years ago, the guns across the Western Front fell silent, largely bringing an end to a war which had cost millions of lives, devastated countless others and changed the map of Europe and the Middle East beyond recognition, whilst the peace treaty which followed the Armistice laid the seeds for an even more terrible war a generation later.There is now no one left alive who recalls the horrors of the first ‘modern’ war and those who fought in the second are now vanishingly few. Even those whose parents went off to fight in it are amongst the more elderly members of our society. The increasing vandalism of war memorials is, perhaps, a sign that as the last of those who recall the wars depart, those whose own memories of war are confined to video-game like television news reports from far-away countries feel that our military heritage is something of which to be ashamed, which has no place in our modern, often egocentric Britain. Certainly, society has changed beyond all recognition in the last century, and not always for the better!Of course, overly-simplistic accounts of the wars need to be avoided and perhaps rectified. A simple ‘My country, right or wrong’, approach needs to be challenged – especially from a Christian standpoint and there does need to be a realistic reappraisal of the motivations our nation had for going to war. This is especially true of World War I, which was in no real sense about fighting for ‘freedom’ for anyone and was more about preserving Britain’s hegemony on the European and world stage than about anything else – and making sure that our Empire remained robust.That having been said, we must also recognize that, especially as regards World War II, so many people gave their lives to prevent Europe being dominated by the dark wickedness lying at the heart of Nazi ideology and by the cruel rapaciousness of its eastern ally. People did lay down their lives for the freedom to live without being subjugated to a political ideology which tolerated no dissent. It is salutary to think that many of those who are most hostile to our traditions of Remembrance now are actually horrifyingly close to reflecting the values of those who would have stamped out the freedoms for which so many of our fellow Britons made the ultimate sacrifice!It is right and proper that we remember their sacrifice, although that does not preclude a critical awareness that, as people of their own age, in general they saw no great difficulty in reconciling freedom for our nation with its imperial status, in which many millions were subjugated to British rule! No generation is perfect, not least because human nature is fallen and we all therefore fall short of the glory of God – even our socially aware ‘woke’ generation!The act of ‘remembering’ though, has to be about more than merely calling to mind long-dead people who died in wars fought for reasons now largely forgotten and misunderstood. If it is not, Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day risk becoming increasingly irrelevant and those who died seen not as individuals but as part of an amorphous mass which once lived and died but who now can be forgotten – just as those who fought and died for their country in, say, the War of Jenkin’s Ear, have been forgotten – but whose lives were every bit as important and precious as were those who died in, for instance, Normandy, Flanders, Korea or the Falklands!As Christians, we have a huge contribution to make to any understanding of ‘remembrance’ as it is central to our faith.At the heart of the lived expression of Christianity are not vague feelings or acts of random kindness, important as these may be, but the sacramental participation in Christ’s death and self-offering to God as the all-sufficient sacrifice which alone is capable of taking away the entire sin of the world. We are enabled to join in this through the celebration of the Mass. Yet the Mass is not a mere commemoration of a past event. When Jesus commanded us to ‘do this in remembrance of me’, he was requiring us to do something else entirely. The Greek word used by the New Testament for ‘remembrance’ here is ‘anamnesis’, which has the force of not merely drawing into our memories what the Lord has done for us, but actively making present these saving events, so that we may participate in them, though separated from them by millennia. Through the Spirit, we are as much involved in them as were the very first disciples in that upper room. Moreover, we are actually lifted up into a participation in God’s Kingdom, where time itself is transcended and we are one together with all those faithful who have gone before us and those yet to be born, for to God all times are the same.Although remembrance in the sense of our remembering our war dead is not strictly the same – the dead remain dead to us – nevertheless we can ‘make present’ those we remember, so that they are ‘alive’ to us and thus their sacrifice is made all the more real. Photographs of the dead can be particularly useful and poignant in this regard. I am reminded of some of the lyrics of the popular song The Green Fields of France, which address a fallen soldier:And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behindIn some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?And though you died back in 1916To that loyal heart you're forever nineteenOr are you a stranger without even a name?Forever enshrined behind some old glass paneIn an old photograph torn, tattered, and stainedAnd faded to yellow in a brown leather frameIncreasingly, our war dead (pace the fact that small wars are still being fought) are indeed reduced to being perhaps nameless individuals in old photos. Yet photos have their uses. I often look at such photos and wonder about the men and women they were – what their lives were like, what their hopes and fears and worries were. It makes them more real, more alive, than ever only a name on a memorial can. It helps make them ‘remembered’, although I never knew them in this world. – though I may in the world to come!So, when we pause to remember our war dead today, let us try not to think of them as an anonymous mass of dead and largely forgotten people who once lived, but as real individuals, as real as we are, who are as alive as we are, for God is God of the living and the dead and he holds all of us in his eternal memory. And, as you remember them, pray for them – that their sins may be forgiven and that they continue their journey to our common destination – the fulness of life in God’s eternal Kingdom.Father David
The Benefice now has a YouTube channel where we hope to put up videos of services, courses, reflections and generally keep in touch whilst we are separated due to the pandemic and current lockdown.Just go to YouTube and search for Benefice of Meir Heath and Normacot
