The Word Cloud

Forty five years ago, or thereabouts, I used to start each Christmas with Midnight Mass at Ilkley Monastery. A small band of us would be selected each year from our school, St Thomas Aquinas in Leeds, to give dramatic readings between the liturgy and carols. We would gather in the upstairs area at the back of the church whilst our families swelled the small congregation below, and as our turns came along we would speak up in the youthful pride of doing something both skilful and meaningful. 

It was a resonant way to start the great day, so much so that ever since I have felt a sense of anti-climax to Christmas. Why? After all, the subsequent delight of babies and children and Christmas trees and presents should fill any heart with cheer. But something was missing. What? 

Perhaps I found it this morning. I was at York Minster and the hour was the more sedate one of ten o’clock. Browsing through the booklet for the ‘Solemn Eucharist of Christmas Day’ I was struck afresh, as can often happen, by familiar words: ‘Those who live in darkness are seeing a great light.’ 

Well, there’s no lack of darkness to dispel in our world: collapsing ecology, collapsing financial system, collapsing family system, unemployment, homelessness, riots on the streets, alienated underclass, insane consumerism, blinkered materialism, wilful ignorance, inconsequential greed, and so on. 

An intrusion of light into all this would be welcome. 

I cannot claim any notable quantities of world-saving light intruded into Ilkley Monastery forty five years ago. But in our readings and liturgy we helped dramatise the idea of such an intrusion. We were at the darkest point of the twelve-month year, the darkest point of the twenty-four hour day. We were in the wilds of the North, perched on a moor, crammed in a small monastery, a tiny outpost of light. And our words were swords of light, and our hearts were spears of light, and our souls were shields of light. 

And just at that time, just in that place, we were cosmic warriors even if we did not know it. We were fighting for the light, and that is what I have done – inexpertly and ineffectively – ever since. Not at Christmas, though. My post-Ilkley Christmases have been entirely conformist. And that, perhaps, is where the anti-climax comes from.