Tag: Journey

A journey justified

As the Omicron virus variant begins to bite, again the question lurks in our minds in this merry month of December: ‘Will journeys be curtailed to keep Christmas alive?’ As travel cancellations escalate and holidays are again delayed, there’s a growing fear that visiting relations and friends may be reduced to avoid the ‘Déjà voodoo’ of a hapless lockdown.

Journeys, however, feature strongly in that first Christmas story, and risks were taken – well beyond the realm of the sensible, sanitised, modern mind-set of the West. Firstly, through the demands of a Roman census, a heavily pregnant mother was forced to travel seventy miles by donkey through the dangerous Samarian countryside which would have taken four days at its smoothest – not quite the 1 hour 50 minutes that it takes today by car from Nazareth to Bethlehem. Joseph, who would naturally have wanted to protect his wife, might therefore have opted for a safer route, but this could have extended the journey to a week, despite knowing that she was ‘great with child.’

Then there was the epic journey of the Parthian magi from the borders of Afghanistan and Syria guided not by sat-nav but by the stars, or rather, one in particular. It had been their conviction after much soul and sky searching that a regal birth had been ushered in, and a sense of mystery and divine curiosity goaded them on to cover the 500 miles, taking them eighteen months or more.

For the shepherds out on the Judean hills, the journey was not nearly so long – but they were ‘under the influence’ of angels and bright lights, and this caused them irrationally to abandon their flocks, potentially to the ravages of wild animals.

For all the central figures that first Christmas journey was fraught with risk and danger, but they were put aside for greater purposes: the celebration of a new-born king who would ‘reign on David’s throne and over his kingdom, establishing and upholding it with justice and righteousness from that time on and for ever,’ as the prophet, Isaiah puts it.

It is a similar sense of daring and abandonment that the Christian message calls us all to make: to go with haste and inquire into what this story could mean for us in our hearts. Of course, it might mean disposing some of the excess baggage that we’re so tempted to carry at this festive time – an over-emphasis on self-indulgence, a preoccupation with consumerism and ‘stuff,’ and a scant regard for how the poor and marginalised might be coping as they languish in Yuletide shadows. Our travelling to meet the Saviour face to face, like the crib figures, is down to will power and a heart-felt conviction. Do we want to make that journey? For those who are making it now and have done for centuries it needs no justification. As Ralph Washington Sockman once said: ‘The hinge of history is on the door of a Bethlehem stable.’ History was changed by that journey, and ‘his-story’ for each one of us can begin there too… and transform us.

May each of us consider making that personal journey this year and keep Christmas alive– a very happy and joy-filled season to you all!

(With thanks to Revd Alex Aldous, chaplain of Prestfelde Prep School, Shrewsbury)

Where is home?

‘Home is where the heart is’. How often have we heard this expression when being reassured that our physical surroundings are not necessarily vital? Working for many years with TCKs (Third Culture Kids) whose passport identity hardly matched the reality of where they were born or where they had spent much of their life, I recall many a conversation about where home really was. (Tip: never ask a TCK ‘where are you from?’ unless you want to cause significant introspection!) I am a TCK – born in Nigeria, brought up in Ghana and schooled in Scotland – and I know something of what it is to wonder where home is.

Some of you will have seen the Oscar-winning film, ‘Nomadland’, and no doubt others hope to return soon to seeing it on the big screen in a cinema. Spoiler alert… The central character, Fern, wrestles with the idea of home. She has lost husband, job and house but insists she is not homeless, just house less. ‘Home, is it just a word? Or is it something you carry within you?’ is the refrain in the film.

For all the sense of community, generosity and beauty of nature experienced by the characters in the film (and many are real life modern nomads), there is little sense of the Hope Christians have of life after death – merely a vague sense of afterlife. Christians have confidence in a glorious homecoming to our real ‘passport country’, where a place has been prepared for us. Let’s do what we can to share this Hope with others as we journey through our nomadic life on earth.

(With thanks to an article by Rachel Smith for LICC)