This year has been truly unprecedented! There was a flu pandemic in 1918 when the “relentless needs of warfare justified {for some) the risk of infection but in 2020 we live in a truly global and connected world. A world which seemed never to stop until the pandemic grounded plains, stopped the 24/7 hospitality trade and our ability to meet or hug our nearest and dearest.
It has been a year of high emotion in which the 24-hour running media and social media tells us how bad it is and then goes on to predict how much worse it could be. Theories abound in all directions and it is difficult to know whether the person who promotes them is doing so, because they genuinely believe them or , wish to misinform and therefore destabilise. When 2020 first started there were a lot of jokes about how we will see clearer because we will now all have 2020 vision. These jokes and many others feel as if they are from a different “galaxy far faraway.”
This year has been relentless, particularly, for those who have lost loved ones, could not attend funerals or feel the smiling warmth of another. I count myself as one of the lucky ones; still working, have a garden and live in a household of loved one, who I am not responsible for or beholden too. I am human, however and like so many others have been on roller-coaster of emotions. These thought and emotions have, more than occasionally, been ‘quite contrary’ but ‘God bless our Contradictions’ as they stated in ‘Something Understand’ on BBC Radio 4 this week.
One of my many contradictions is that I love the fact that I am British and how Christmas forms a major part of our society and culture. I loved the nativity at school, the way total strangers can wish each other a merry Christmas, getting a Christmas card, from someone who I was convinced had forgotten me and how many charities just try to shine the Love and Light wherever they can. However, I am not Christian, male, white or born within the UK so I appreciate the increasing diversity and inclusion. So, conversations around ‘Black lives matter’, the ‘Me too movement’, the definition and appreciation of LGBTQI and sharing whatever we celebrate or commemorate is all for the Good. Then we have a year where Eid, Hanukkah, Diwali, Winter Solstice etc are shown to be unimportant. You cannot compare these festivals to Christmas because much of our society is centred around Christmas, but when the UKs Prime Minister says it would be ‘inhuman to ban Christmas’ but stopped people celebrating other festivals, sometimes with very little or no notice, it hurts. In addition, his definition of “truly inhuman” reminds us of his privilege.
To those who remind me of the importance of Christmas to our traditional way of like, I would like to remind that “On 19 December 1643, an ordinance was passed (by the British Government) encouraging subjects to treat the mid-winter period ‘with the more solemn humiliation because it may call to remembrance our sins, and the sins of our forefathers, who have turned this feast, pretending the memory of Christ, into an extreme forgetfulness of him, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights’. The rejection of Christmas as a joyful period was reiterated when a 1644 ordinance confirmed the abolition of the feasts of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun. From this point until the Restoration in 1660, Christmas was officially illegal.” So maybe not inhuman but an opportunity to reflect on its core message and the importance of other festival in our beautifully diverse world.
By whatever you accept as holy, By the dawn, by the passing night, By all our wonderful humanity full of contradictions may you and yours have some Joy, Peace, Light and Love whatever and whenever you will be commemorating or celebrating.
May we all be well, healthy and strong:
May we all be happy.
May we all abide in peace
May we all be forgiven and forgiving
May we all feel safe and secure
May we all feel loved and cared for.
Reading:
“Frankly inhuman to ban Christmas”
https://theglobalherald.com/news/boris-johnson-it-would-be-inhuman-to-cancel-christmas/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c8nq32jw8r1t/boris-johnson
Pandemics
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0blmn5l/the-flu-that-killed-50-million
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-876f42ae-5e44-41c0-ba2d-d6fd537aadfe
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p061rrx1
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000j2tz
Quite contrary:
God Bless our contradictions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01rfy4s
Mary Mary quite contrary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Mary,_Quite_Contrary#:~:text=%22Mary%2C%20Mary%2C%20Quite%20Contrary%22%20is%20an%20English%20nursery,a%20Roud%20Folk%20Song%20Index%20number%20of%2019626.
