Riding Mill Parish News #512
I love pictures, images, representations, stained glass, portraits, icons, parables… for the visual world is a language all of its own, that nearly everyone with sight on our planet can share without barriers of language, age, origin, privilege or education.
Pictures like those in the excellent ‘Go Wild’ photo exhibition – one hundred and two magnificent images of the beauty of God’s created world – remind us to stop, to stare, to notice, to think.
Photos like these are also tributes to the observational skill of the photographers, and to their learned techniques.
It was a great exhibition and worthy of your time for a long, thoughtful – even prayerful – look. Yet, what did we see?
There is an old adage that ‘When the sage points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger’. Well, no-one in Riding Mill is anyone’s fool and you’ll get the point of a saying like that in no time at all.
Still, try pointing at something to get a stranger’s dog to understand you – and the dog doesn’t get it at all. No, the dog is just as likely to jump up at your finger.
It is, though, an easy mistake to make at Christmas, even for humans: Advent wreaths and calendars; stars to follow; angels in the sky; prophecies in old books… they are none of them particularly important in their own right.
Certainly not important enough to shift human history to a new direction; to compel us to change even our dating system.
It’s simply that they all point to the central reality of Christmas: Jesus, coming to God’s created world. That is the important event. The event that shaped us.
So, just as the photos in the ‘Go Wild’ exhibition point to God’s creation, so too will all of those carol services, Christmas cards, enormous dinners, stars, prophecies and shepherds point to the Creator.
They point to Jesus.
The pointing fingers, if you allow them, will take you to the reality of Christmas, which is Jesus Christ: God, come among us. It’s the best reason for a December celebration that I know.
Rev’d Diana
Originally published in the Riding Mill Parish News #512 – December 2021
