Happy New Year to everyone, and everything of the best for 2022! Writing this letter in the middle of December, 2021 I have absolutely no idea what we might all be facing and having to deal with in January, 2022! Whatever it is we’ve probably all “been there and done that” before in some way, notwithstanding what letter of the Greek alphabet is in front of it!
Last month I led my first Assemblies in Great Budworth and Antrobus Schools since the first lockdown in March, 2020 – and it was wonderful to be back in the Schools and to be meeting old and new pupils, as well as to be interacting with staff once again in a more than perfunctory way. The Schools theme for the autumn term was “trust” and this seemed so very appropriate both for the seasons of Advent and Christmas and for what we are all still going through in terms of the Pandemic. Trust is very much a part of what it’s all about – from the characters who inhabit the Advent and Christmas stories (Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and wise men, Elizabeth and Zechariah) to the people we all rely on in these still uncertain and potentially life threatening times (scientists and epidemiologists, NHS and Social Care sector workers, friends, family and neighbours....).
At some point during Advent I was asked to spell out, in no more than a few sentences, what was at “the heart of Christmas” for me – what did my understanding of Christmas really come down to? Without hesitation (slightly unusually for me!) I turned to trust in God, and in His promises made millennia ago and to the people of Israel and handed down to us through the words of the Prophets in the pages of Scripture, in both the Old and the New Testaments. It really is, I believe, as simple and yet as incredibly profound, as that – belief and trust.
We have all learnt a great deal about trust in our fellow human beings over the course of the last two years and have, I’m sure, emerged stronger and more resilient in the wake of the on-going Pandemic, both as individuals and as members of our different communities, including our faith community of course. We have all endured, in differing degrees of course, pain and loss and suffering but we have, as individuals and communities, risen to the many and varied challenges of the Pandemic and its associated side effects, and no doubt we all have our own stories of this to tell. <span style="font-size: 1rem;">I finished last year’s January letter with these words: “May God bless each one of us in this coming month and in this New Year, whatever it brings!” and I could just as easily finish this letter in the same way. As I write now the Omicron variant seems to have claimed its first victim in this country, and we are certainly not out of the pandemic woods yet – but God’s grace and love are always with us and in the Christ Child, whose birth we celebrated once again last month at Christmas, is our alpha and omega, our beginning and our end, and nothing, not even the omicron variant, can take that from us.</span>
And so may God bless each one of us in this coming month and in this New Year, whatever it brings!
The Revd Alec Brown.