BBC Radio 4 2015-12-22

As Christmas is nearly here, I guess most of us know where we’ll be on the day; at our church, we will be holding a lunch on Christmas Day for all comers – and I’m always surprised by the number of people who do seem to wander in and who haven’t made particular plans. But later today after I leave the studio here at the BBC I will be going to a place where everyone knows where they’ll be and not by choice. I’m going to a prison to take part in their carol services and to spend time with women who will be in their cells over Christmas.

Whenever I go into prison, it strikes me that while from the outside, it seems full of prisoners, from the inside, it’s full of people. People who have made yes mistakes or unwise choices - also people who have wilfully caused harm, people who are racked with remorse and people who are not sorry. People who have not thought about the consequences of what they were doing, and people who thought about the consequences and did it anyway.

The range of personalities and motives of people who are in prison is as great as people who are not. And it’s easy to fall into a false kind of sentimentalism at Christmas especially where prison is concerned. But the Christmas story, far from being some kind of magic tale in a Narnia- like fantasy Bethlehem, is itself a story of precarious joy, of Herod’s crime and the birth of the Prince of peace into a violent world.
Festivals like Christmas, and perhaps uniquely Christmas, help us measure the stages of our lives. We clock where we are and what are the circumstances “this year”: this is the last Christmas we’ll spend in this house: next Christmas, things will be different: this Christmas is the first one without a loved one. And if our circumstances are difficult, the desire to escape becomes even stronger. For people who are bereaved or in debt or suffering domestic abuse or going through any number of tough experiences, the expectations of Christmas can be debilitating to the extent that we just want it all to go away.

For the women I’ll see today, it may be the first of many Christmases they will spend dealing with the consequences of something they did; or they may have been there so long they can’t remember Christmas on the outside: but the universal themes of the season; peace, generosity, and the celebration of love in a violent world will find as much resonance there as here. Christ is born at Christmas, not just in the stable but behind bars too.