1st November, 2020.
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My dear friends,

As I type these words, we are waiting for details from the government about the forthcoming second Coronavirus ‘lockdown.’

            I expect we shall also soon receive instructions from the Church of England about holding church services. Assuming that public worship is still permitted, I shall hold a simple Requiem on Monday 2nd November at 10.30am for All Souls Day. If you would like to e-mail me ([email protected]) the names of anyone from St John who has died in the past twelve months, I will see they are included in the prayers.

            We have had a few ‘Zoom’ meetings of clergy and I am sorry to say that some of my priest colleagues are getting a bit down in the dumps about their arrangements for Christmas 2020. Christmas is a busy time in a parish, with a wide array of special services: school services, nativity plays, crib services, nine lessons and carols, christingle services, services in care homes, midnight mass and services on Christmas Day. It all takes an awful lot of planning and preparation. Covid-19 looks as though it is probably going to put a stop to much of this. Reading between the lines, some of my clergy colleagues seem to feel that if they cannot hold their full range of Christmas services, they are somehow not serving God properly and are also letting down their parishioners. Don’t underestimate how much your clergy want to do their best for you.

            There is, I suspect, another layer to all this. Being a priest is the best job in the world – but it is also incredibly tough at times. One sees people when the bottom has fallen out of their world and things can only get worse, not better. One sees much pain and suffering, and also quite a lot of the seamy side of the world. One muddles through, saying one’s prayers and doing one’s best to help people with the love of Christ. You might be surprised to learn how little support your parish clergy receive from the institutional Church of England. For your Vicar, if Christmas can be exhausting, it also supports and strengthens him: if he goes into his church for a carol service or on Christmas morning and finds the place is packed, he gets a little thrill: he feels all his pastoral work in the past twelve months has been worth it, and he is also pleased to think that his many hours of preparation for Christmas have paid off. Conversely, if the Vicar goes into church and the place is half empty, he feels a flop and a failure, and that he has somehow let his people down.

            This isn’t a very wise or logical attitude, and it is certainly not a healthy one, but it is a common one. As one of my churchwardens pointed out once after we had not had particularly large Christmas congregations, it was rather more significant that our church was very full one wet Sunday morning in February.

            I think we all have a challenging Winter ahead of us. What my some of my priest colleagues need to discover – especially those who haven’t been ordained very long – is that in parish life one has to make the best of what opportunities are available, and that if all one can do this year is to hold a few, simple Christmas services, it does not follow that one loves one’s parishioners any the less, and one is certainly not somehow letting God down.

            Much the same applies to family celebrations of Christmas, which will also have to be scaled back this year. I confess I am left puzzled by the comments of some people, who insist that full family Christmas festivities must go ahead and be as near to ‘normal’ as possible. It strikes me that there is little point in going to a Christmas party or large family Christmas dinner if one is going to become infected with Covid-19, end up in hospital or possibly die. Nor would one want to think that one had inadvertently been responsible for passing on Covid-19 to someone else. As with Christmas church services, we perhaps have to learn the lesson that if we can only manage a very simple family Christmas celebration and not see all of the relatives we would normally see, it does not follow that we love them any the less.

            Indeed, it strikes me that 2020 might turn out to be the year when we review and perhaps amend the way we hold family social gatherings at Christmas. Christmas as we know it today is largely a Victorian invention, with a large dose of twentieth-century commercialism. If we went back in time two centuries to Christmas 1820, we should find that things were much simpler. There would have been a church service on Christmas Day (no midnight mass or carol services – they came later), and a particularly nice dinner with Christmas pudding and mince pies. Employers would have given a small present or gift of money (the ‘Christmas box’) to their employees, and that would be all. North of the Border in Scotland, where traditions were different still, Christmas Day tended to be a normal day.

            Many people find our modern Christmases rather a trial. There is pressure to spend lots of money, which we might not all have available. All families – and indeed all men and women – have difficulties, bad memories, etc, which we can cope with during most the year. At Christmas, when we and our families are all supposed to be perfect, our problems can feel much more pressing. Christmas can sometimes be a stressful time, and many people have told me they are jolly glad to go back to work afterwards.

Perhaps – without turning into a lot of Scrooges (another Victorian Christmas image, thanks to Charles Dickens) we might want to give the way we keep family Christmas some careful reflection. As with Christmas church services, doing things more simply does not mean we love our families any the less. And as the saying has it, we might find at Christmas that less is more.

With my prayers and all good and warm wishes,

The Rev. Dr ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
SUNDAY 1st NOVEMBER 2020 – ALL SAINTS
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Gospel: St Matthew, chapter 5, verses 1-12
Today we keep the feast of All Saints, when we celebrate all of God’s saints – not just the well known ones, such as the Blessed Virgin Mary, St Peter, St Benedict and so on, but all the saints throughout the ages, including those many men and women whose sanctity is known to God alone.
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            I tried the other day to compose a little list of characteristics common to saints. It is far from easy, because all sorts of people have been saints: single people, married people, divorced people, parents, children, monarchs, martyrs, clergy, monks and nuns, and so on.

            There are some features, though, which seem to crop up quite often, so I mention them, in no particular order.

            Firstly, there is often something unusual about the births of saints. Perhaps they were very sickly, or their births took place in difficult circumstances. It is almost as if, with the benefit of hindsight, they are marked out from the start for a special purpose.

            Then again, saints were not uncommonly unwell or injured. I suppose the point is that God sometimes chooses the weak and poorly to help Him in His purposes, and not always the strong and healthy. Every now and then God turns the values of the world upside down, and shows that the weak and poorly still matter.

            What marks the saints out from everyone else is their deep faith in Jesus Christ. For the saints, faith is not something to be added-on to an already busy life, and perhaps just as easily dropped. Rather, faith is an integral part of one’s character, running through everything like Eastbourne through a stick of rock. Sharing things with Jesus is as natural as breathing.

            From the lives of the saints, we may also observe that Christian faith is seldom a smooth progression. Some saints have the gift of faith from their earliest years. Others have to be converted to it later on, sometimes after leading rather a rackety life. However faith comes about, all are on a journey or pilgrimage through life to God.

Sometimes, we see saints take a sudden leap forward in the journey of faith: they go somewhere, meet someone, or read something, and this deepens their love and commitment to Jesus Christ. At other times, it can feel as though they are doing the spiritual equivalent of treading water. Both experiences are fine in the Christian life, so long as we have invited God to be in charge.

We often find that saints have been devoted to Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. Saints have greatly valued receiving their Lord in Holy Communion, and the place where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved in church – the tabernacle or aumbry – has come to be very special to them as a place where they can be still and receive help and strength from the Lord.

            Saints are not perfect. They say, think and do bad things, all the time, just like the rest of us. They know all about their sins and failings, and are not afraid to confess them. They neither minimize sin, nor exaggerate it. Sin is a consequence of the Fall and of Original Sin, and is part of the human condition. We have to get by as best we can, and that means slipping our hand into the hand of God, repenting, and carrying on.

            Saints frequently suffer during their lives on earth. In fact, I’d say that suffering is a nearly universal experience amongst all the saints. They are badly treated by their fellow Christians, who can be jealous, petty-minded, and vindictive. They can be badly treated by the society in which they live. “It’s no surprise that you have so few friends, Lord,” St Teresa of Avila is said to have grumbled one day, “when you treat them so badly!” And yet, when we look back, we frequently see that it is in the moments of suffering that we have grown, as Christians and as human beings.

            Despite all this, another characteristic of saints is their cheerfulness. Yes, saints have gloomy moments, as we all do, but they bounce back, because they know that in the end God is in charge and He loves them. I mentioned St Teresa of Avila. When she was in charge of her little community of nuns – and she was well on into her middle age – if she saw that they were getting downhearted, she would get out her tambourine – you couldn’t make this up! – start playing and singing a jolly tune, begin to dance, making a bit of a fool of herself, so the other nuns began to smile, and then she would get them all up, dancing and singing with her, until their worries were put in context. You couldn’t help but love and trust such a person.

            You will have noticed that we usually celebrate the feast days of saints on the dates of their deaths. The death of each saint is unique, as indeed that of every human being. Some saints have sometimes undergone awful death by martyrdom. Some have died worn out by their long labours for the Gospel. Others have died peacefully in their beds. A common denominator, I suppose, is that they have not run away from death, or spent their lives in great fear of it. They have realised that death has many layers of meaning, and that one of them is that death is a holy thing, made so by Christ. Death is our entry into the fullness of life with God.

            Behind all this, there is an understanding that Heaven is our destination and our eternal home. The values of the kingdom of heaven are the true ones – not the values of the kingdoms of this earth.  Our task is to be guided by the values of heaven as we live our lives upon earth.

            Saints, then, are all sorts of people. They vary a good deal. The common denominator is their love of Jesus. And here’s the important bit for us this morning: God wants each of us to be saints. We make a start by letting God’s love and grace work in us and our lives now.

            So today, All Saints Day, we thank God for all His saints, great figures from the Bible and history, people we have never heard of, monarchs and professors, shepherds from the Andes and mothers from Ethiopia. All men and women who have tried to do God’s will, from whom we can learn something.

And do you know one of the strangest things of all? During their time on earth, whatever other people may have thought, none of them ever knew they were a saint.