To be read out at all Masses
Sunday 28 December 2003
My dear brothers and sisters in the diocese,
I was at a meeting in London the other day about the Church's communications and the conversation turned to advertising - should we be doing it as a Church or not? I don't propose to talk to you about that today, or indeed any other day. One of the group was a female lecturer from Trinity and All Saints College in Leeds. She was saying that her six-year-old granddaughter was looking at adverts on television, and turned away from the television and said, in response to one of the adverts, "Yes, but thats only what they want you to think." We have that ambiguous attitude to adverts. We know deep down that they're trying to fool us (we know that most breakfast cereals are fat-free, but why don't you tell us about the sugar in them?) and at the same time they do have a serious effect on the way we see the world. A lot of our approach to Christmas was probably formed by the advertising industry. Christmas is the best opportunity they have all year. The images of Christmas are bright, shiny, happy, comfortable and reassuring. Buy it.
But the promise and the reality are quite different for many people, especially those who aren't able to celebrate Christmas in a family or indeed have neither the money nor the friends to celebrate with. And now we're in that time of anti-climax after what is probably the greatest contrast between time spent in preparation and time actually spent celebrating. We spend months getting ready and spending and then it's all over in 24 hours. For the rest of our society, 26 December is Boxing Day, the day after Christmas.
For ourselves as Christians and Catholics, however, the celebration of the birth of Christ deserves a bit more than a brief and hectic assault from food, drink and presents. The days after Christmas may seem quite a random collection of feasts, indeed if we're aware of them at all. December 26 is the feast of the first martyr, St Stephen, December 27 is St John the Apostle and Evangelist or gospel-writer and December 28 is (usually) the Feast of the Holy Innocents. January 1 was initially a feast of Mary, the Mother of God, and it went through a few changes until it became the Feast of Mary the Mother of God again, and the Feast of the Holy Family was moved to today, the Sunday after Christmas only in 1969.
But the feasts arent random. They are all feasts of what were called the Companions or Family of Jesus - Stephen as the first martyr takes a special place close to Jesus as the first one who chooses to die for him. The children of Bethlehem had no choice but died nonetheless, and so they have a special place close to Jesus, too. Likewise, John is not only a friend of Jesus as an apostle, but he is chosen as one of those by whom we know Jesus - how did we hear about Jesus if not from the gospels? Then a week after Christmas we celebrate Mary, the most intimate and close member of Jesus' family
As well as companions or family of Jesus, Stephen, the Holy Innocents, the gospel writer and Mary are all witnesses to Jesus. They speak of faith in Jesus as the Son of God, risen from the dead with the power to save us from our sins.
And on Monday we celebrate another great saint. 29 December is the feast of St Thomas Becket, one of our best known and loved saints, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was murdered by four of Henry II's knights in 1170 and canonised by Pope Alexander III within three years.
Becket's life and death became the subject of a play by T S Eliot, his Murder in the Cathedral. The play was written at an important time in Eliots life. He was in the process of becoming a Catholic, and we must assume that some of Thomas's reflections in the play were also personal questions for Eliot himself as he questioned his commitment and motives.
But alongside Thomas in the play there is another very important group of people. They form what is called the Chorus, a tradition taken from Greek drama, where a group of people took the role of observers and commentators on the action. Here in Eliot's play the chorus is formed of the women of Canterbury: they become witnesses to Becket's martyrdom, just as Becket's martyrdom becomes witness to Christ. And I suspect that the role of the women is not only based on the role of the women who witness to Christ in the gospel - the women at the foot of the cross and the women who come to the tomb on Easter morning - but I think it may be a reflection on Eliot's Catholicism and indeed what it means to be a Catholic.
What are we called on to do as Catholics? We are called to witness to Christ, to be heralds of the gospel. That sounds fine and is all very inspiring, but it doesn't really answer the question, yes, but what are we expected to do?
The women of Canterbury find that they can do nothing. They can only watch and wait. They watch as part of what is going on, not as distant spectators uninvolved in the action. And they watch patiently and faithfully. That may be as much as we feel we can do, like the women at the foot of the cross, who stayed there even though it all seems to have been lost - until they went to visit the tomb. And of course that is where Christmas takes us in the end, to the foot of the cross and to the empty tomb.
So in these quiet days after the birth of Christ we can set ourselves to watch and wait. Watch as the life of Christ grows within us, as it will, and wait for the fulfilment of the Lord's plan. Because the Lord's plan is his, not ours, and we must be patient and confident as we watch in love and wait in hope.
With my very best wishes and prayers for you all for the year ahead.
Rt. Rev. Kieran Conry
Bishop of Arundel and Brighton
