ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

Good morning. Although I baulked at the price of stamps this year I still sent over a hundred Christmas cards. In return, along with cards, I’ve been getting email letters with pictures of holidays and graduations, new jobs and new babies. Whether we are card senders or not the season awakens in many of us a sense of home. The home we grew up in. Where we feel at home. Or there’s the loss of home, the estrangement that comes from childhood unhappiness or uprootedness or bereavement. For myself I’m glad to have one time in the year when I consciously remember the people I grew up with, neighbours, schoolfriends, those I worked with and then lost touch with. The etiquette of Christmas cards can be complicated. I sent a card the year before last. You didn’t. So I don’t send one this year, and you having received mine last year sent me one which arrived yesterday. And so we go on. Everyone senses somehow that Christmas is about belonging, who we are and whose we are, where we are from. ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½.

Which is why there is such an emphasis at this time of year on the charities, for those caring for the homeless and friendless. We can all write a cheque of course, and many do. Those of us who have much will try at this time of year to do something for those who have little.

For most of us home is a real place where we either are or wish to be. But in another sense home is a metaphor. Christmas imagery often presents us with snowy landscapes, paths through dark forests, lanterns swinging in the darkness. I was fascinated some months ago by the circulation of a video on social media, an endless seeming tracking shot through a dark forest as the snow swirled around. Somewhere, ahead, somewhere would be home, welcome, laughter and togetherness.

And that instinct for home is the hope that remains for the hopeless, the source of the astonishing resilience often displayed by those who have lost everything. Think of those rejoicing in Syria that their country might be a home again, and think of the rubble in Gaza and In southern Lebanon, and all those made homeless who are longing for home, a longing which can’t be repressed. The Old Testament prophets speak of home in a phrase which always delights me: everyone sitting under their vine and fig tree with children playing safely in the streets. Meanwhile the human pilgrimage continues through this life. All our homes are in the end temporary, as we are. And we long and long for that peace which the world so desires but cannot give.

Show less