The waiting is over. The waiting begins...

I've been so looking forward to Advent.

One of the great things I've found about being part of a Christian community is that the joy of anticipating Christmas starts on Advent Sunday, four Sundays before Christmas. Growing up, any attempts to celebrate Christmas before the start of the school holidays were frowned on. (I would never have been able to get away with watching 'Scrooged' in November). The Christian calendar observed by most churches allows the fun to start early, however. Today is Advent Sunday. It's official: Christmas is coming.

This is a photo of the fun and games that were had in the church garden on Friday during the switching on of Leigh on Sea's Christmas lights. I had very little to do with the planning and setting up and wasn't even able to be there on the evening. My small contribution was towards the crib you can see in the foreground. Propped on a display of autumn leaves and branches (artfully arranged by a florist friend), filled with hay and adorned with fairy lights is the manger from the Christmas story. It's empty, because we're waiting for the baby. Christmas starts with Christ; Advent is the time we spend waiting for him to come. Tick tock...

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Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties. This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks. The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids). I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday. The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children. I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too. I decided to carve a simple f...

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral. The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness. During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead. I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home. Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that. But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness? My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent. I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity. I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have hea...

Broken at the altar

A new drama series by Jimmy McGovern finished a couple of weeks ago on the BBC. Broken tells the story of Roman Catholic priest Father Michael Kerrigan, a broken person ministering to other broken people in an unnamed northern city. It's still available on BBC iPlayer and I would encourage you to watch it - only be prepared for a few grim hours. I'll try to avoid spoilers here. Michael has a problem: whenever he celebrates Mass (which I think in the Roman Catholic Church is every day), he has flashbacks. At the moment of consecration - the point at which, Catholics believe, the bread and wine physically become for us the body and blood of Christ - he remembers every shameful thing he's ever done, and every shameful thing that has been done to him. We see his mother screaming at him that he's a dirty, filthy little boy; young women crying because he has treated them badly; mistakes he has made as a priest; people he has let down. His voice falters and he struggles ...

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