Christmas is the season of patience and open doors - EXPRESS COMMENT
TODAY and tomorrow I will be in the cathedral in Oxford, Christ Church.
To get there, I have to pass through two doors.
The first is the great gateway under Tom Tower, where tens of thousands of people pass every year.
The second is the beautiful glazed door of the cathedral in a wide passageway that opens out into a magnificent ancient church, a place of Christian prayer for hundreds of years.
CS Lewis, the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, had a fascination with doors.
They open in unexpected places.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will knock on the doors of family and friends, sometimes after long journeys on dark evenings
There is often more on the inside than you can see on the outside.
Sometimes, in fiction, they allow you to pass between worlds and catch a glimpse of eternity. Christmas is a season when many of us go through an unusual number of doors.
Many people still open the doors on an Advent calendar each day in December even if we do nothing else to mark the season of waiting.
Over the next couple of weeks, we will knock on the doors of family and friends, sometimes after long journeys on dark evenings.
We open the doors of our own homes to guests and visitors, and close them again when they leave us (sometimes with sadness, sometimes with relief).
From Newlyn to Newcastle and Liverpool to Lowestoft, the Church of England will welcome millions of people across the threshold of churches in villages and cities and towns.
There will be children clutching Christingles, toddlers on Christmas morning with new toys, the family cooks arriving for the early service of Holy Communion, packed carol services, end-of-term school services and families worshipping together, singing familiar carols and coming together to wonder, to pray and to give thanks.
As well as services in more than 800 parish churches, there will be worship in hospitals and nursing homes, in RAF and Army bases in the UK and overseas, in school and college chapels, in town halls and shopping malls.
My favourite door in all of CS Lewis’s stories comes in The Last Battle, the final book of the Narnia Chronicles.
I still have the copy I was given as a child: it’s dog-eared and held together with Sellotape, and originally sold for three shillings and sixpence.
Royals and Meghan Markle leave church at Sandringham
The whole plot of The Last Battle turns around a rough stable door.
Initially, the door is a meeting place, then a place of refuge.
But it becomes the place to enter into a richer and deeper country; to come further up and further in, to enter life.
The original Christmas story only contains one line about the stable, in Luke: “And Mary gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn”.
It is this that gives us traditional crib scenes and carols, with animals, shepherds and visitors.
The stable door becomes the way to begin to see Jesus, the gateway to a deep, rich and eternal life.
Church doors come in all shapes and sizes. In this Christmas season they will all be ways to life.
People will come through them for all kinds of reasons. Some will be restless, some afraid and some not seeking anything at all.
Somehow in the quietness and stillness of the church building, or through the music, or through Bible readings we have heard since childhood, or the kindness of a stranger’s smile, or the preacher’s words, God will speak – nearly always very gently – and say to many different people: “Come and see!” Take a moment to be still, to rest, to reflect, to come home.
One of the buildings I love in Sheffield, my former diocese, is St Barts on the Langsett Estate. To get into one part of the church you have to pass through a very low and narrow door.
To come in you have to stoop to enter, a bit like coming into a stable.
At Christmas, God becomes a child and is born in a stable, to a poor family.
To understand that truth takes time and humility.
We need to stoop to enter – and then have our eyes drawn to Heaven.
A very happy Christmas to you and yours.