The Word was made flesh

In the beginning was the Word:

the Word was with God

and the Word was God.

He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things came to be,

not one thing had its being but through him.

All that came to be had life in him

and that life was the light of men,

a light that shines in the dark,

a light that darkness could not overpower.

The Word was the true light

that enlightens all men;

and he was coming into the world.

He was in the world

that had its being through him,

and the world did not know him.

He came to his own domain

and his own people did not accept him.

But to all who did accept him

he gave power to become children of God,

to all who believe in the name of him

who was born not out of human stock

or urge of the flesh

or will of man

but of God himself.

The Word was made flesh,

he lived among us.

And we saw his glory,

the glory that is his as the only Son of the Father,

full of grace and truth.

John 1:1 - 5, 9 -14

Dear all

Santa never brought us presents at Christmas, every present was clearly labelled, 'Love Mum and Dad' or whomever the gift-giver was. Santa was an adjunct to Christmas and certainly not the advocate of big business. Our Christmas tree was like everyone else's, it was inevitably 'borrowed' from the side of the road or off the back of someone's truck. Our lounge room was decked in twisted crepe paper, Chinese lanterns and a small nativity scene.

The house smelled of baking and cooking. No presents appeared under the tree until Christmas morning and we were up with the larks, desperate for Mum and Dad to get up and give their permission for the opening of gifts. Mass soon followed with all eleven children smartly dressed and led by our proud and wonderful parents. Rarely did chicken make the table except for Easter and Christmas, there might be pipis, cockles and crayfish too.

Afternoons were spent lazying, singing, relatives calling in, playing with cousins. They were very happy times, perhaps idyllic. And it's not that I have attempted to relive or emulate those Christmases, but it was with absolute certainty that the focus was on Jesus, his birth, church and family, being grateful and generous.

Like any popular celebration, Christmas means something different to everyone. Its associations and memories define it, despite its origins. It certainly isn't owned by churches - any more than it is owned by department stores or by rows of decorated and lit houses.

I reckon I have 'over read' on articles about the real meaning of Christmas - from deeply theological, righteously evangelical, socially responsible, ecologically appropriate to developing psychological wellness and good manners. There are even a couple of comparative religious studies articles I looked at to remind me of our Saturnalian links. And I have read and re-read the infancy narratives and John's introductory chapter and Paul's letter to the Colossians (1:15 - 20), but my conclusions are no less sacred than yours or my neighbours.

Undoubtedly Christmas is a time to:

    be generous in giving and receiving

    gather as family

    celebrate the ones we love

    enjoy the anticipation that builds the closer we get to the day

    remember loved ones who are no longer with us

    connect by card, letter, Facebook, phone or Skype/Facetime with old friends

    enjoy supporting local businesses

    make time to read that novel or biography you've waited all year to do

    clean out the spare room

    support those less fortunate

    give to your favourite charity

    clean out the toy cupboard

    reflect on the year past

So whatever Christmas means to you, I wish you great joy and happiness, rest and relaxation, good food, fine wine and excellent company, and thank you for allowing me to journey with you this year.

Kindest Christmas greetings

Peter Douglas

THINGS YOU SHOULDN'T SAY AT YOUR NEXT CHRISTMAS BASH

Gina Barreca

Given the season, you'll probably be invited to events that will force you to come into contact with people and, horribly enough, make conversation.

Even for those of us who never stop talking, making conversation with strangers or near strangers is fraught with peril.

There are things you stop asking, things you should never say and things which - if said to you - give you instant and automatic permission to leave the conversation, the event and quite possibly the state.

The first category is "Stop Asking."

Stop asking single people when they're going to "find somebody".

Stop asking people who found somebody when they're going to "move in together".

Stop asking people who have moved in together when they're going to "get hitched".

Stop asking people who got married when they're going to "start a family".

Stop asking people who had a child when they're going to "give their baby a sibling".

Stop asking people who have had two children how on earth they're going to "manage the pressure of continuing their careers while raising a family".

Stop asking people who don't have a job when they're going to get a job.

Stop asking the people who have a job when they're going to get a better job.

Stop asking people who have the good job when they're going to start taking some time off work to have a balanced life.

The second category is "Don't Ever Say", as in don't ever say, "I can't even imagine having another serving of that rich food - I'm stuffed!" as seconds are being passed.

Don't ever say, "Let me show you this video really quick" when actual adult people are having an actual conversation with words.

Don't ever say, "I can't believe you haven't read that book."

Don't ever say, "I already heard that story but it went like this ... "

Don't ever say, "I was just teasing. You know I love you just the way you are. Lighten up."

Don't ever say, "I'm sure he only did that because he likes you. Lighten up."

Don't ever say, "Lighten up."

The final category is what I consider the fulcrum lines, the ones that permit you not only to leave the conversation but to eject yourself from it as if from a military aircraft under fire.

"There are only two types of people in the world ..."

"Want my fat clothes? I don't need them anymore."

"She's worked for me for eight years and I still can't pronounce her name."

"Trench mouth is not actually contagious."

"If you'd read the 'Artist's Way,' you'd understand."

"Polyps are no laughing matter."

"I have a great idea for a book and, if you write it, we can split the profits."

"People like you just don't understand."

"In my humble opinion ..."

"My 12-year-old's screenplay is just the beginning of a trilogy of films."

"Calm down."

"Can you believe how those (insert minority group here) are (insert any form of behaviour here) and ruining the country?"

"Plants feel pain too."

Hartford Courant

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/the-things-you-shouldnt-say-at-your-next-christmas-bash-20171215-h056tp.html

THE STRANGE DEATH OF PROTESTANT BRITAIN: THE NEAR-LOSS OF RELIGIOUS SENSIBILITIES

Ian Bradley

In St Andrews, my home town, the Presbyterian church built to commemorate the four Protestants burned to death here during the Reformation was recently turned into a university research library. Next door there was for many years a Salvation Army Citadel, a testament to the virtues of teetotalism and evangelical assurance championed by General William Booth. It is now a “Beer Kitchen”.

A similar fate has befallen much of the rest of the Protestant landscape of Britain. In the South Wales Valleys Nonconformist chapels have all but disappeared, languishing, rotting and deserted where they have not been turned into second-hand furniture depositories. In 1901 the city of Hull, long known as “pure and Protestant Hull”, had one of the highest churchgoing populations in the country and 115 places of Christian worship, most of them Nonconformist chapels. Now just 11 remain in use and Hull has the lowest level of churchgoing of any British local authority.

It is those denominations that have been the bedrock of British Protestant identity that have declined most spectacularly in the last 60 years. The two national denominations, the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, have each lost 75 per cent of their membership over this period. Other historic traditional Protestant Churches that formed the backbone of the hugely important Nonconformist conscience – Methodists, Presbyterians and Congregationalists – have declined even more catastrophically.

By contrast, newer independent, evangelical and charismatic churches, post- denominational in outlook, twentieth century in origin and not tracing their roots from the Reformation, are enjoying spectacular growth. Catholicism has also proved resilient; there are almost certainly more Catholics than Anglicans in England, and more Catholics than Presbyterians in Scotland, attending church on a Sunday morning.

Protestantism has become an anachronistic if not a dirty word. Archbishop Justin Welby, a figure on the Evangelical wing of the Church of England, has said that he would prefer not to describe himself as a “Protestant”.

How different it all was in times gone by. For around 400 years, from the mid sixteenth until the mid twentieth century, Protestantism largely defined British identity, culture and self-awareness. In fact, “Britishness” was essentially a Protestant construct, as is the United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland – with these disparate nations having been forged together, as Linda Colley and others have shown, by a shared anti-Catholic sentiment.

The monarchy is an avowedly Protestant institution and it is no coincidence that the first act required of a new British sovereign is solemnly to profess his or her own Protestant faith and resolve to secure the Protestant succession to the throne. Alongside its fundamental constitutional importance, Protestantism has, of course, long been a dominant influence in British culture, politics and collective consciousness: the main party of the Left was born out of Methodism rather than Marxism, and such national characteristics as the stiff upper lip and a natural reserve have a Protestant quality.

There used to be few better places to get a sense of the celebration of Protestant British identity than in Kensington Palace, designed by Christopher Wren for the Protestant dual monarchs William and Mary on their assumption of the throne after the deposition of the Catholic James II. Before reorganisation of the public rooms three years ago, visitors could examine 44 wooden boxes each containing a cut-out figure of the various European royals who were passed over in the search to find a Protestant heir to the throne to succeed Queen Anne after she died without surviving issue. All had a stronger claim to the throne than George, Elector of Hanover, who succeeded as George I in 1714, but all were rejected because of their Catholic faith.

A poignant display at the palace, projected on to the ceiling, imagined the dreams of Anne’s 11-year-old son and heir, Prince William, as he lay tossing and turning in a fatal fever. It was his death that precipitated the scramble to find a Protestant successor to the throne. Significantly, perhaps, both the wooden boxes and the projection have been removed in the latest rearrangement of the palace and the theme of the importance of the Protestant succession played down.

Today another Prince William lives in Kensington Palace. Not cast in the rather sombre Protestant mould of his Hanoverian and Windsor predecessors, he is the last heir to the throne whose choice of spouse was restricted by the abiding anti-Catholicism that has been such a feature of the British constitution. In 2011 the clause in the 1701 Act of Settlement that bars the heir to the throne from marrying a Catholic was repealed.

So ended a remarkable aspect of Protestant Britain that has long baffled foreigners and outraged human rights campaigners: the monarch could marry a Muslim, a Moonie or a militant atheist, but not a Roman Catholic. It is now surely only a matter of time before the 1701 Act as a whole is repealed and future British heirs to the throne may themselves be Catholics. Future monarchs may well not even have to swear to uphold and maintain the Protestant religion.

Kensington Palace also pays eloquent tribute to a member of the royal family who in both life and death perhaps did more than anyone else to epitomise the death of Protestant Britain. Diana, Princess of Wales, is remembered at the palace, where she lived from the time of her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981 until her death in 1997, in an exhibition that focuses on her as a glamorous style icon.

Diana broke the mould of British royalty, replacing the Protestant restraint and reserve of the Windsors with a touchy-feely warmth and telegenic charisma. The massive piles of flowers and other tributes that were piled against the gates of the palace in the week following her death, which resembled nothing more than medieval shrines, together with the emotional expressions of grief and mourning, were hailed by many commentators as marking both the feminisation and the Catholicisation of Britain, and the softening of the stiff upper lip.

In fact, the lip had been slackening for several decades before Diana’s death 20 years ago. The start of the strange death of Protestant Britain can be dated to the late 1950s. The peak year of membership for both the Church of Scotland and the Church of England was as late as 1955. It was also the year when commercial television started, breaking the monopoly of the BBC, the great cultural embodiment of Protestant British identity created by that craggy Presbyterian, John Reith, with its high-minded mission to inform, educate and entertain, its fierce loyalty to the Crown, strict sabbatarianism and firm commitment to public service.

If the late 1950s saw the beginning of the turning of the Protestant tide, the 1960s and subsequent decades saw it in clear retreat. The phrases used to describe Britain and British attitudes in this period – the Swinging Sixties, the New Morality, the “never never” – encapsulated an approach that could hardly have been more different from the classic Protestant values. A nation known for thrift, reserve and temperance acquired a reputation for mounting personal debt and binge drinking.

Without the glue of Protestantism to hold it together, the United Kingdom showed increasing signs of breaking up. The word-centred, rational, restrained culture that was so largely a Protestant legacy found itself challenged and swamped by a prevailing emphasis on image and instant gratification, a retreat from rationalism into New Age mumbo-jumbo or creationist fundamentalism and obscurantism.

Among the most enduring monuments to the hold of Protestantism on the British collective consciousness, that holy trinity of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), the authorised version of the Bible and Hymns Ancient & Modern, has all but disappeared. The BCP now seems a historic relic, lovingly championed by the Prayer Book Society in the way that wildlife charities seek to preserve near-extinct species. The authorised version has been overtaken by a host of new largely American-inspired Bible translations. And the latest edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern has removed the word “Hymns” from its title, to reflect the seemingly unstoppable march of worship songs and choruses.

There are gains as well as losses. Largely gone is that awful visceral anti-Catholicism – expressed by Lord Grantham’s remark in Downton Abbey that “there always seems to be something of Johnny Foreigner about the Catholics” – although I am haunted by the feeling that Brexit may be a ghastly final expression of that xenophobic, foreigner-hating, anti-Catholic British Protestant mentality.

The country is less censorious, po-faced, judgmental and hypocritical. There is more room for spirituality, the mystical and the visual, more joy, more eclecticism and more diversity. Yet something has gone with the demise of restraint, reserve, seriousness, thrift, temperance and rationalism. We are less tolerant, less committed to free speech and serious debate – and could the rise of false news and the post-truth era be consequences of the death of the Protestant mindset?

Ian Bradley is professor of cultural and spiritual history and principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews University. He is a minister in the Church of Scotland. Published The Tablet 13 December 2017.