麻豆约拍

A spiritual comment and prayer to begin the day with Canon Steve Williams

Good morning.

You can sometimes tidy things up too well. I know that my preparations for Christmas 2022 really begin this evening with Twelfth Night. Put everything away, clearly labelled and in the right place, tonight - and I'll be able to put my hands on it easily when I look for it again in eleven months' time. I once lost baby Jesus, made out of beautiful polished sandalwood - the night he was due to be placed in our church's crib to mark his birth at the beginning of Christmas Day.

I'd begun the great Christmas Tidy-Up in our church with baby Jesus in the palm of my hand - but, as I was throwing away gleefully all the old cards and papers that should have been chucked months ago, inexplicably he'd vanished. Had I put him absent-mindedly in one of my safe spaces for him - the choir stall, the book-case? I stretched my hand into the bottom of the paper bin, and there, beside a two-day old fruit sweet and a broken pencil, lay the familiar shape of the small wooden baby Jesus. I'd found him, after throwing him away by complete accident.

This prompts me to ask where I really might find him today without the decorations to remind me. Howard Thurman was a civil rights activist who inspired Martin Luther King - and he prayed:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

Amen.