This picture has shaped my thoughts and prayers these past few weeks of Advent. Before you read on, dwell on it for a moment: I wonder if and how it speaks to you?

It was a very simple brief that Bishop Andrew and I proposed for our Christmas card this year - 'a refugee mother and child’ - and we had no idea what would come back! But we were agreed this was a good risk to take, not least given that the art class which runs weekly at HMP Send (thanks to the Michael Varah Foundation and Watts Gallery) seemed to welcome our commission. It was Deborah who stepped up, researched the Afghan crisis and then painted this, inspired by and adapted from one particular photograph she found.

Covid has thus far prevented the chance to meet Deborah, though we have exchanged messages. I declare her a theologian, instinctively even if unconsciously so! This Madonna captures the burden of responsibility, the marvel at a gift and the fragility of new life all at once - much as I recall for myself as a new parent. But this image then stretches me further, to relate to some of the dangers and horrors of the (Afghan) context: and even there, to glimpse beauty and to risk hope.

‘So who is God? And what is God like?’ I'm sometimes asked. The incarnation offers a particular ‘photograph’ of God, that is utterly definitive yet as shocking to people today as 2000 years ago. Surprising expectation, God came as a child - powerless, dependent and vulnerable. There were the pains of child birth, the threats of abused power, and the dangers of red-zone travel. How come that the everlasting peace (of which the angels sang) could rest on so many uncertainties - today as 2000 years ago?

Glimpsing beauty and risking hope are choices we take, not only in worship at Christmas, but in the struggles of our world today. But the uncertainty is over: God is with us in the birth of Emmanuel. Happy Christmas!

Bishop Jo