�鶹��

Available for over a year

Good morning. “A paradox: you need to be open to be secret?” asked Nick, in his fascinating interview earlier this week with the head of MI6 regarding the Secret Service becoming more open. Paradoxes can be obvious: in I Confess, the Hitchcock thriller, the priest’s scrupulous honesty makes him the perfect person to keep the killer’s evil secret. Paradoxes can be devastating: who’d expect the survivor of savage rape to sell millions of copies of her attack, while the man found guilty emerges four decades later as another victim. Paradoxes can be inspiring: as Conscientious Objector my father refused a direct order to bear arms because of his respect for life, fully expecting his own life to be sacrificed for his disobedience. His Christian faith had taught him to lose his life in order to find it; and the Judaeo-Christian scriptures are full of such paradox. The first will be last. Those who promote themselves will be relegated. Leadership is for service. The meek inherit the earth. The word Glory implies honour, success and recognition; magnificence, splendour; the pleasure and pride of people’s praise. But John in his Gospel equates glory with shame, suffering and nakedness; humiliation and brutalisation; the worst indignity of death. The very story begins, like MI6, with secrecy within transparency. At a time of terror, foreign occupation and espionage, with a brutal usurper on the throne, the line of royal descent would have been carefully hidden. But the first thing in Matthew’s account is its publication: the great King David’s descendent, the ordinary craftsman Joseph; his own legitimate heir conceived illegitimately; the well-concealed birth broadcast across the heavens; those who track him down with public data hiding his whereabouts in strict privacy. In Advent, we anticipate these events with parties, mulled wine, mince pies; and yet it’s properly a period of fasting and abstinence. More paradoxical, Christians joyously look forward to the end of the world: “Come quickly,” we sing in the Advent hymn celebrating dreadful Judgement and the destruction of everything we know and love. Anthony Broadwater was the innocent man vilified for the horrific rape he didn’t commit. He was found, “in very dire circumstances, very, very poor,” and yet this man who lived in the freezing cold with tarpaulin for walls and no glass in his windows, was preoccupied with taking food to the destitute and hungry. Alice Sebold, whose ordeal resulted in his terrible conviction, said his whole was life unjustly robbed from him: and yet his vindicator said he “got his life back a week ago”. Advent, like Diwali and Hanukah, celebrates the darkest time of year with a festival of light. And it’s when we feel deepest despair, we can experience the greatest hope.