Head's Blog | The why of Christmas | Embley School, Hampshire

If you could have anything instead of traditional Christmas dinner, what would it be? Again, reader, perhaps an odd way to begin the last note for this calendar year and the sign off before Christmas. During assembly with the children, I try hard to think of what sort of message to send them off with. I returned to a reading we heard at our Carol Service in Romsey Abbey on Tuesday. The narrative of the service traces the origin of the Christmas story in the wider economy of salvation which Christians believe prefigures the coming of Jesus and makes sense of his life, death and resurrection.I suspect the birth of a child to itinerant homeless parents in transit will ring bells with much of what our televisions bring to our homes each evening. What transpired changed the world and continues to shape our thinking and challenge our decisions. If conscience makes cowards of us all, that conscience is informed - at least in some part - by a zeitgeist formed from experience and a culture conditioned by that event two thousand years ago. The Gospel of St John which formed the final lesson of our Senior School Carol Service on Tuesday goes on to speak of Christ’s purpose; ‘that all may have life and have it to the full’. I wonder how we reflect on this over Christmas? Miller’s character Biff in ‘Death of a Salesman’ might have screamed out that he ‘just can’t grab hold of some kind of a life’. In so doing, he acts as a representation of an existential angst which the 19th Century prefigured. Through the post-industrial experience of the early 20th Century, a world was created where humanity sought meaning as the conventional means of production changed to a process that increasingly alienated humanity from their lived experience. Fritz Lang plays this out in ‘Metropolis’ with more than a finger of blame pointing to the attendant rise of totalitarianism and the destruction of global conflict.
 
Not sounding so cheery as you might have thought so far, eh? Well that’s as maybe, but as a community gathered in one space, we offered a collective positive response to the doomsayers. The Christian message ‘that all may have life and have it to the full’ takes two positions at least. It is a universal message; it is for ‘all’. This is not a note to an exclusive club of the ‘in-crowd’. It is a message intended for the collective. But what kind of life is hinted at and what does it mean to ‘have it to the full’? 
 
In an Abbey bursting at the seams, the Embley community represented the diversity both of the call and the intention of the Johannine message. I am sure like me there are many who don’t care for stuffing and pigs in blankets. Who cares? What does it matter? We gathered as a community united because we are all different not united in spite of that difference. Indeed this ‘difference’ is better described as ‘uniqueness’. The word matters; one is ‘different’ if there is a point of contrast to a standard or norm. It suggests a tension against something, whereas uniqueness celebrates value. The homogeneity celebrated in dairy products is antithetical to what we do with and for the children and the community. Our reason to exist is the formation of all of those who gather in this space. As such it is universal, diverse and essentially inclusive. Our call is not to have them all conform, to be like each other, this is the opposite to the call to life and to have it to the full. Instead, our call is through our systems and process to liberate each child to be the best version of themselves, our job is to facilitate them ‘to have life’. 
 
The challenge of the world, particularly at this time, is to have that ‘life to the full’. The world today rejoices in the rhetoric of inclusion and individuality while at the same time pressing a conformity to lifestyle and choice. Do this, eat that, wear such and such - the settling down to a numbing sameness is worrying and a source of ennui. The messaging pumped out has an Orwellian overture, wherein the still quiet unique voice of the individual struggles to be heard. 
 
But it is exactly this still quite voice that is the most precious, the most significant because it is unique. It has always been my view that the quintessential uniqueness of each of us makes us intrinsically lovable; it is what we are, it is when we are most ourselves and flourishes when we have the courage to be. Is it this that is the most precious gift at Christmas? One that we give to others by liberating ourselves to give it to ourselves first? It is our soul, our spirit, the animus, the thing that animates us, gives us life and allows us to live life to the full. It is why the nativity story is two thousand years old, it is why a child was born in a manger. It is the light in the darkness and darkness cannot overcome it. 
 
It is the why of Christmas.