Christmas is a reason for hope in these bleak times

Sentiment and tack are fine, says Aidan Bellenger, as long as we recall the feast's true meaning
The tacky side of the Christmas season can be strangely appealing. In one of my local villages, one of the least attractive in the area, there is an annual unofficial competition to see who can produce the most spectacular and implicitly vulgar public Christmas display. Father Christmas, enthroned on his sleigh, flies across the fronts of the houses among flashing lights accomplished by a confusing array of angels and deer. The imagery may be disturbing and confusing as well as energy-wasting but it has an element of innocent fun which always gives me a smile.
We live in an age when we perhaps need to get all the smiles we can. The press is full of dire reports of moral decline and international strife. Terror stalks our society, climate change threatens environmental disaster, and our sense of material security is undermined even in the developed world by the implications of a credit crunch which seems set to become a full-blown recession. Encircling gloom pervades us. The instant gratification of the secular Christmas remains but seems under threat through lack of money. Life itself, at this time of year, can itself be a problem.
The voice of experience tells us that Christmas is always a difficult time. Family tensions explode into rows. Television disappoints. Loneliness becomes more acute. Sore heads soon follow even the most enjoyable Christmas party. In all of us there lurks the spirit of Scrooge, the hard capitalist who sees all things in financial terms and ultimately can see no future and no hope.
Yet, for me, it is the voice of innocence which calls me each Christmas. In the gloom I see the light which comes into the world with the birth of the Saviour. Life is a very cheap commodity sometimes in our world, shadowed by the destruction of new life, the murder of the innocents on a scale unimaginable to Herod. Assisted suicide and easy abortion have become uncomfortable facts of death. Yet the glory of God's love is underlined at Christmas by the birth of Jesus and the image of the Christ child, powerless and almighty at the same time. is or should be at the centre of our thoughts.
Christmas is much more than a mood. even if it is a good mood. It should not be a time that makes us glow merely with sentiment or nostalgia, although they are not in themselves bad things. Christmas is about more than optimism. Hope is what encourages me most at this time, a hope which makes sense in a time of desperation, a hope which sees light in the darkness. One of my most moving experiences this year was assisting at a commemoration in Westminster Abbey of the 450th anniversary of the death of Mary Tudor and the accession of Elizabeth, the sad sisters who had the misfortune to inherit the throne of their father Henry V1II. Buried together, divided by faith, nevertheless they sleep in spe resurrectionis, in hope of the resurrection. Things were pretty grim in the England of the Reformation but hope abided. That hope, made possible by the Incarnation, gives me comfort and joy.
Christmas is a time when, in hope, we reflect on the selfless fatherhood of God and of a mother whose care was only for her son. In place of despair. God has offered us a new beginning. Christmas is not a looking back but a looking forward to a world in which all life and all creation will be seen as sacred, and where the culture of death is overwhelmed by the triumph of life.
If the Word was made truly flesh then we can live in gladness, hope and a true of sense of what it means to have a merry Christmas.
The Rt Rev Aidan Bellenger is the Abbot of Downside