From the Rector

Dear Friends in Christ,

Whenever we approach these cardinal feasts, the big ones as it were, every year I find myself go into a kind of hyper-rationality with regard to their claims. I hear the old voices of my long-thought dormant agnosticism rear up and ask, “Is it true?”

I think it’s because so much is built up around these days now. Two millennia of practice and piety have swirled around Christmas and Easter making of them a kind of religious bazaar within which it is easy to lose one’s path.

This is when I remember the final three stanzas from Sir John Betjeman’s “Christmas,” which were shared with me sixteen years ago by Fr Tony Jarvis at Yale (who has since gone on to his reward).

“And is it true? And is it true,
This most tremendous tale of all,
Seen in a stained-glass window's hue,
A Baby in an ox's stall?
The Maker of the stars and sea
Become a Child on earth for me?
And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things,
Bath salts and inexpensive scent
And hideous tie so kindly meant,
No love that in a family dwells,
No carolling in frosty air,
Nor all the steeple-shaking bells
Can with this single Truth compare—
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.”

It doesn’t take much imagination with this poem to substitute bunnies for sweet and silly Christmas things. It’s easy to put Easter baskets and egg hunts with the Yuletide fripperies.

But the real question is the same: And is it true?

The poem focuses on the beginning of the story that continues to unfold in the week ahead. The reason we mark Christmas with such joy is not just that a baby was born in that first resting place on a lonely hill in Palestine. We mark what cataclysm, what breaking open of history, will be wrought by his second resting place, the Cross and Tomb.

And is it true?

I’ll close with another quote that always comes back to me. It is from Australian writer and musician, Nick Cave. He was asked to reflect on his own faith after Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion from atheism.

“My religiousness is softly spoken, both sorrowful and joyful, broadening and deepening, imagined and true. It is worship and prayer. It is resilient yet doubting, and forever wrestles with the forces of rationality, armed with little other than the merest hunch or whispered intuition. The defining characteristic of my belief, and which I consider to be a fundamental imperative in my life, is uncertainty. This questioning impulse is the essence of freedom and the creative catalyst that keeps the wheels rotating irrevocably toward God.”

May the questioning impulse which always drives us to ask, “Is it true?” inspire us to hear God ask it of us, too. May we hear a challenge to go deeper and wrestle with life’s opacity not that we might conquer uncertainty but so that we might live with its earnest challenge to live with truth.

And is it true?

—Fr Robert