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A couple of years ago, in the middle of the night, my dog started barking furiously. I saw underneath the door of my bedroom, a torchlight moving and so I called the police. A man had broken in to the vicarage and was going systematically through the rooms, stuffing whatever he could find into a rucksack. When the police came, they found him in the house, hiding in a spare bedroom. He was tried and convicted of burglary. It’s safe to say that I haven’t found it quite so easy to sleep well since. Later this morning, I will pray, along with the rest of the church, the ancient prayer for today, just a few days before Christmas. “O Come Key of David. Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house, those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death”. All this struck a chord, as this week, two threads of public debate brought those very prisoners into sharp relief. David Lammy’s report about what he has identified as race bias in the criminal justice system, and the damning inspection of Liverpool prison, said to be the worst cockroach-infested conditions that the inspection team had ever seen. I’ve often been in prisons around Christmas time: last year I was in a women’s prison and it’s clear that this time of year is especially bleak not only for the people in prison themselves, but for their families and especially their children. And so the prayers leading up to Christmas are very challenging. Not least because quite a lot of us will have been in one way or another victims of crime, small or serious. We also know as human beings how much we value our own freedom to do what we want, and so we can identify with the profound consequences of having it taken away. So it’s a subject that touches us. The poet William Blake commented brilliantly about our own connection with this. He wrote about what he called “mind-forg’d manacles” – that is, that we’re perfectly capable of building our own mental, spiritual, emotional prisons. We can become our own jailers, putting bars across our own windows, living by self-limiting beliefs about who we are, what we can do, how we can live. Christmas celebrates a transgressive, creative moment Christians call incarnation: when the presence of God breaks into the “small worlds” that we’ve made, that reveal to us the unlimited possibilities of living. This doesn’t depend in the end on our own identity as either perpetrator or victim. Prepare, says the prayer, to have your own prison doors burst open by the vulnerability of the baby who is God, to whom I will pray today as one who has come to set me free.