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The Reverence Humming Inside 

19 December 2016

Extract from a note to friends over Christmas 2016…
 
… Letters like this are funny things. They appear out of nowhere, without so much as a ‘Hi, how are you doing…?’ for the rest of the year. The very nerve! However, having penned a couple now, there appears to be as much value in writing them as there is (hopefully) in reading them. The writing process is somewhat cathartic, allowing some perspective and distance from what – for many, are increasingly troubling times (Brexit or Trump or Syria or Orlando or Zika or Brussels or Nice or Panama to name a few…). We started the year with the acknowledgement that the busyness (and craziness) of life was something we’d finally accepted. However, we’re also learning that getting the most out of each day has as much to do with actively being in the moment as it does preparing for the next one. Contrary to everything in us that wants to ‘give out’, we’ve started protecting time to just be – to rest and catch up, to enjoy some of the stories above as they happened and to live in the tension between the ‘give’ and ‘receive’. The ‘breathe in’ and ‘breathe out’.

One of the deep truths of the Christmas story is in its ability to live-out this tension in very practical, raw and accessible terms. The ‘in all’ and ‘with all’ and ‘through all’ choosing to take off the blanket of heaven and experience life as we see it, in all its bloody, violent and often unjust ways – all held in tension with the knowledge of the ‘more’ that is pulling us forward into all that we will be. Sometimes language simply falls short of what is actually going on under the skin of the stars and angels and shepherds and kings and virgins and mangers, and we run the risk of missing the wonder and mystery wrapped up in it all. The great theologian, Jane Fonda was once asked about her faith in Jesus, and as something of an answer for her beliefs offered that it was the ‘reverence humming inside of her’ that ultimately drew her to accept the wider ‘story’ as profound ‘truth’.

We wish that this Christmas 2016, you will be able to rest, and be, and live in the moment, to sense something of the reverence and wonder and mystery humming under the surface, God in us and with us and through us, and encourage you to keep scratching the surface of this wonderful thing we call life – in all its complexities and trials and joys and hopes and surprises.

With all our love…