Reflections About Christmas
Direction Magazine|December 2019
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby asked some of his friends to share their thoughts about Christmas in a new book
Justin Welby
Reflections About Christmas

JUSTIN WELBY
Archbishop of Canterbury

In many households, expectations around Christmas are high. Not in mine. “When will dad be ill?” is a fairly frequent comment from the children, who are used to the fact that by Christmas Day vicars get to the point where they run out of resistance to any disease going. Or, “So what’s going to be the drama this year?” It always seems there is some sort of drama.

There was the year of the dog. Bramble and I went for a run in the local woods at 6.30pm on Christmas Eve: she smelled something interesting, disappeared and did not come back. The atmosphere in the house during the day was one of deep depression. Christmas was ruined.

Thirteen long hours later, I was standing on an open-top bus in front of 5,000 people (one of Canterbury’s great Christmas gatherings); my phone buzzed and – very rudely – I answered. Bramble had been found; Christmas was saved and I, and the head of the cathedral, jumped up and down for joy!

There was the year of pneumonia. Feverish coughing and feeling generally awful, I had to cancel preaching in Canterbury Cathedral on Christmas Day. Unusually, the diagnosis of pneumonia was a huge relief – 36 hours before I had been visiting an Ebola clinic in Sierra Leone. The precautions that wonderful clinic took meant I was much more fortunate than those I had visited. I quickly recovered.

It is quite easy to assume Christmas is to be survived, rather than enjoyed. But I am not in the least cynical, because every year there is something, as I look back over the previous twelve months, which speaks to me of the miracle of God coming to be with us.

Let’s be clear. Christmas is not really about babies and mangers. Jesus is Emmanuel – God with us. God came to live among us; to be born and live and have his flesh crucified by others, all so he could be with us.

This story is from the December 2019 edition of Direction Magazine.

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This story is from the December 2019 edition of Direction Magazine.

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