Richard Allinson sits in

From Rev Ruth Scott, Anglican Vicar in Richmond:

This time last week I was working with a group of women in reclaimed desert between Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. Think dates palms, orange groves, bougainvillea, cool waterways, and desert sand getting into everything. Imagine tree frogs and wild dogs competing to be the loudest through black, star-spangled nights lit only by candles. Add to this days filled with the laughter, creativity and deep sharing of amazing Egyptian women learning to stand tall together often despite great personal pain. They belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church so they won’t be celebrating Christmas until January 7th when all our Christmas decorations will have come down. While many of us will have had a lovely Christmas Day, others will be relieved to put it behind us because for all kinds of reasons comfort and joy couldn’t be ours. It may be the first Christmas after the loss of a loved one, or an acute annual reminder that longed-for children have not been part of our life, or the accentuation of on-going loneliness that stands out stark against the seasonal get-togethers of others, or that life now is tough for other reasons. Today I am thinking particularly of you if recognise something of your own story in what I’ve just said. Behind the commercialisation and sometimes over-the-top celebrations of this time I think another reality reaches out to be recognised: the image of the baby born in a stable to an inconsequential woman struggling to survive under foreign dictatorship reminds us that when people for whom life is a struggle, against the odds bring love to birth among the messiness and pain of human experience, light breaks out in human darkness, and the barriers between rich and poor, neighbour and stranger, in-crowd and outcast are broken down. Bringing about this kind of change is not the task of an annual day, but the challenge for each of us, every day. Most particularly, it includes all of us who may feel excluded from the usual trappings of Christmas.