ADVENT REFLECTION
Zoom alone! Ron Thomlinson and the Rev James Macfarlane conclude their series of reflections for Advent
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IM, not being sure whether it was spam or phishing, I’d like to check whether you also received an email from melchior@wisemenfromtheeast. org. He claims to have read our Advent articles and thinks we might be interested in a Zoom meeting he is arranging at a Bethlehem inn on Christmas Eve. He will send us a link an hour before the thing kicks off. For years, I managed to avoid social media. I only relented when desperate to follow Sunday worship from my favourite Anglican church. I am now inundated with people wanting to be my friend or suggestions for groups that might interest me – all the reasons I didn’t want to join social media in the first place. If only I could have the Church without other people! What might the consequences be for those of us who accept Melchior’s invitation? First, we wouldn’t have to mingle with kids dressed up in tea towels, dressing gowns and beach sandals pretending to be shepherds. And no itchy, glued-on beards either. Heaven. We could sit back in our easy chairs, dressed in a comfortable sweater and some old tracksuit bottoms and watch the Zoom Advent meeting with a bowl of crisps and a glass of ginger cordial. A bit like my original social media plan: the Church without other people. Using Melchior’s link means that I wouldn’t need to attend a meeting around the crib with other people I don’t really like. I can have Mary, Joseph and Jesus – plus a few shepherds – all to myself. I won’t need to take account of real people, known or unknown. Do you remember when the Army categorised many people as ‘outsiders’?
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Salvationist 18 December 2021
We spoke of ‘outside’ bands and hoped to attract the ‘outsider’. Thanks to social media, people are now obsessed with inclusivity, belonging and sharing practically every detail of their lives. However, the fact remains that it can be hard for all of us to take the knee at the crib next to someone we find difficult, for whatever reason. Isn’t it a shame?
My dear Ron van der Scrooge – Christmas without other people? The Nativity as your personal property and popcorn for Christmas lunch in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt? What’s next? Telling the lady you pay to wash your socks, Mrs Cratchit, to work overtime on Christmas Eve? I haven’t heard such a farrago of nonsense since Monty Python applied for a five-star rating for the café in which everything came with Spam! If you weren’t in the Netherlands, I’d come and give you a thump with my tartan Zimmer frame. It is true that Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people’ and you may remember that in his play, No Exit, his vision of hell was three people in a stark room tormenting each other. That, at least, is two more than you would be celebrating Christmas with in your scenario. I would rather go with Mitch Albom’s story in The Five People You Meet in Heaven – see, the numbers are increasing already! In this scenario, a maintenance man killed in an accident meets five
people who, in different ways, unveil the meaning of his life and show how redemption can transform its deepest hurts. It is a modern Christmas parable about life. So, back to your idea of Christmas with no people and only a router, a computer screen and the Zoom app. You would make a great contemporary version of the hermit who lived on a pillar for 40 years. I think his Christmas dinner had much the same festive spirit as yours. So, please, no more of this isolation mentality – it’s a backward step. The Christmas message is about the enrichment and fulfilment of our lives. It’s about the dawn of joy, love and peace as the norms for our humanity. You don’t get that on a desert island using a laptop with its battery running down. Enough of this teasing, Ron. You are one of the kindest, most caring and most social of people that I have ever had the good fortune to encounter. I wish you, and any reader who managed to get to the end of our articles, a blessed and happy Christmas.
RON IS A CHRISTIAN WRITER IN THE NETHERLANDS AND JIM LIVES IN RETIREMENT IN DUNOON. THEY BECAME FRIENDS IN 1966 WHILE CADETS AT DENMARK HILL
