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Good morning. On Boxing Day, I walked through a door and that door opened onto Hell that has become my new life. So said Hanif Kureishi, our guest editor, earlier this year. The suddenness of the change that he has experienced, and the resilience that he and his family have had to show is something that is both hard to imagine and difficult to face, for the rest of us. And his honesty reveals how complex resilience is. Today, Boxing Day, is St Stephen’s Day, and for the day straight after such a joyful festival as Christmas it carries surprisingly tough themes itself. These first few days after Christmas can feel like a sort of antidote - or even correction - to the wonder of the birth of Christ. Because today the church remembers the violent death of Stephen, stoned for his faith, and on Thursday the commemoration of what’s known as the ‘slaughter of the innocents’. It’s as if the Christian calendar is urging us not to get carried away, and remember that the song of the angels, singing for peace on earth, is as potent, as needed in the dirt and dust of real life as in the visions of the night sky. These first few days after Christmas reveal profound teaching about the contradictions of the human spirit, and what the celebration of Christmas really means. We’re asked to banish from our minds any empty fantasies of a cost-free ‘peace on earth’ or a cheapened generosity that is more concerned about the value of a present than its meaning. And we’re asked to contemplate the Christmas proclamation not only in the starlit stable but in the cold light of day: that God is with us. Emmanuel. The plunging, on Boxing Day, back into the real contradictions of life in the world, acknowledges that peace lies next to violence, that hope can live alongside deep despair. It’s not intended to be a depressing return, but a refreshingly truthful one. Boxing Day has that atmosphere of the morning after the night before. The morning after, that insists, after the shepherds have gone back to their fields, a new commitment to love and hope has been made - even in the hells we create for ourselves in war - or are visited on us in life’s sometimes shocking events. And as the old carol says, when the night is darker and the wind blows colder, when our hearts feel as if they are failing, our resilience and hope is tested to breaking point but found to hold. In the reality of life, on the Feast of Stephen.