The first Christmas … a window in Saint Mary’s Church, St Neots, Cambridgeshire (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Patrick Comerford
The Advent waiting and watching has reached its climax, and this is Christmas Day.
I sang with the choir in All Saints’ Church, Calverton, last night, singing carols and then at the ‘Midnight Mass’ . Later this morning, I hope to be part of the choir at the Christmas Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford.
For the first time in 19 years, Christmas Day and the first day of Hanukkah also fall on the same day this year.
Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
The first Christmas … a window in the Chapel of Westminster College, Cambridge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
John 1: 1-14 (NRSVA):
1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
6 There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. 9 The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.
10 He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. 11 He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. 12 But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, 13 who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.
14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.
The statue of Franz Kafka beside the Spanish Synagogue in Prague … his story is a reminder of incarnation, redemption and resurrection, a story of unconditional love, and reminds me that ‘love came down at Christmas’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)
Today’s Reflection:
The lectionary for Christmas today provides three Gospel readings for today: Luke 2: 1-14 (15-20), Luke 2: (1-7) 8-20, and John 1: 1-14. This provides for separate readings of the Nativity narrative in Saint Luke’s Gospel on Christmas Night and on Christmas Day, but there is also a strong recommendation that the Prologue to Saint John’s Gospel ‘should be used at some service during the celebration’.
This year has marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka near Vienna on 3 June 1924. Earlier this year, I visited an exhibition at the Bodleian’s Weston Library in Oxford, ‘Kafka: Making of Icon’, that ran from 30 May until 27 October 2024, marking this centenary.
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is one of towering literary figures of the 20th century. He was born in Prague, and when he died near Vienna he was buried in Prague. His best-known novels were published after he died, and include his novella,
The Metamorphosis, first published in German as
Die Verwandlung (1915),
The Trial (1925),
The Castle (1926), and
America (1927).
In Prague, Kafka’s statue in Dusni Street stands beside the ‘Spanish Synagogue,’ there are streets named after him, and I have visited a collection of items associated with Kafka in the ‘Spanish Synagogue,’ close to where he was born.
The Catalan children’s writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra has written the story, ‘Kafka and the Travelling Doll,’ based on a real-life event in Kafka’s life and on the memoirs of Dora Diamant – she had lived with Kafka in Berlin, and he died in her arms.
It may not immediately strike readers as a Christian or Christmas story. But it is a story of incarnation, redemption and resurrection, a story of unconditional love, a story that reminds me of how ‘love came down at Christmas,’ and a story that reminds me why children should take centre stage during our Christmas celebrations.
There are many versions of this story of Kafka, including an adaptation for RTÉ read some years ago by Caitríona Ní Mhurchú:
One year before his death, Franz Kafka sees in one of Berlin’s parks, Steglitz City Park, a girl who is crying because she has lost her doll.
The writer calms her down by telling her that her doll had gone on a trip and that he, a doll postman, would take her a letter the next day.
Over 13 days, he brought a letter to the park every day in which the doll tells of her adventures, which he himself had written the night before.
‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he said. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks.
‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says.
The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you have it on you?’ she asks.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’
He’s so convincing, the girl doesn’t know what to think anymore. Can it be possible that this mysterious man is telling the truth?
The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her.
The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write to the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.
‘Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.
After a few days, the girl had forgotten about the real toy that she’d lost, and she was only thinking about the fiction that she’d been offered as a replacement.
Kafka wrote every sentence of this story in such detail, and with such humorous precision, that it made the doll’s situation completely understandable: the doll had grown up, gone to school, met other people.
She always reassured the child of her love, but made reference to the complications of her life, her other obligations and interests that prevented her from returning to their shared life right now. She asked the little girl to think about this, and in doing so she prepared her for the inevitable, for doing without her.
By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those two weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear.
For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.
One day the girl got her doll back. It was a different doll of course, bought by Kafka as a last gift for her.
An attached letter explained, ‘My travels have changed me.’
Many years later, long after Kafka’s death, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll.
In summary it said:
‘Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.’
In the end, love will return.
But, there are so many differences … Christ’s love for us is not fiction, but is true; and he is with us, not just at Christmas, but always. And, in the end, he will return.
In the deep mid-winter, Love came down at Christmas. Have a happy and a holy Christmas.
Pages from Saint John’s Gospel, the first complete hand-written and illuminated Bible since the Renaissance, in the Holy Writ exhibition in Lichfield Cathedral (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)
Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 25 December 2024, Christmas Day):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘Love – Advent’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with Reflections by the Revd Lopa Mudra Mistry, Presbyter in the Diocese of Calcutta, the Church of North India (CNI).
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Wednesday 25 December 2024, Christmas Day) invites us to pray:
Loving God who has come to dwell among us, we celebrate with joy that with the coming of Jesus you have made a way for us to become like you. We give thanks that you chose to make yourself known in the birth of a child. Help us to receive the Son with childlike faith.
The Collect:
Almighty God,
you have given us your only-begotten Son
to take our nature upon him
and as at this time to be born of a pure virgin:
grant that we, who have been born again
and made your children by adoption and grace,
may daily be renewed by your Holy Spirit;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our Father,
whose Word has come among us
in the Holy Child of Bethlehem:
may the light of faith illumine our hearts
and shine in our words and deeds;
through him who is Christ the Lord.
Additional Collect:
Lord Jesus Christ,
your birth at Bethlehem
draws us to kneel in wonder at heaven touching earth:
accept our heartfelt praise
as we worship you,
our Saviour and our eternal God.
Yesterday’s Reflection
Continued Tomorrow
The first Christmas … a window in Saint Mary’s Church, Bletchley (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Scripture quotations are from the
New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
http://nrsvbibles.org
