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A spiritual comment and prayer to start the day with Right Reverend Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York

Good morning

Few of us experience much real darkness nowadays. Streetlights have stopped that. However, a few years ago on a moonless, starless night, I remember walking home along a stretch of country road with no streetlights at all.

Every so often a car would approach. As it did, the darkness disappeared and the path ahead was brilliantly illuminated. From stumbling in darkness I was now shielding my eyes against a blinding light.

Our telling of the Christmas story from Advent through to Epiphany begins (and often returns) to Isaiah’s use of this same image: the people walking in darkness seeing a great light.

He was writing for the people of Israel when they were lost in the circumstances of their particular darkness. But what he is saying applies to every person and every time; for in different ways we are all lost or stumbling in the dark: the darkness of unbelief, cynicism, oppression, inequality, and our insatiable desire for revenge threatens to overwhelm us. At Christmas, for some of us, it can feel more hopeless than ever. The darkness only seems to deepen.

The light that banishes this darkness is Christ. It is his birth in the bleak midwinter of the world that is the dawning of a new age of light and hope. This light – like the first rays of the morning sun, or the headlights of an approaching car on a dark night - brings great joy, for now we can see where we are going and where we are going wrong.

And so I pray, Lord Jesus dispel the darkness. Be a light to my path and a lantern to my feet.

Amen.

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