Sorry about that but we’re all suffering from it. It’s a premature experience of what the Book of Common Prayer calls the nativity of our Lord, or the birthday of Christ, commonly called Christmas Day. (Prolepsis is not a disorder in the abdomen. It is anticipating a future event as though it has actually taken place.) On the screen and in the supermarket it’s Christmas every day.
Not that I’m against repetition. It’s a measure of success on Broadway or Shaftesbury Avenue. It’s an indication that a pantomime has earned its keep when it has an audience gasping ‘He’s behind you.’ When we’re toddlers we like to hear the same story again and again. Sometimes this preference carries over into adult life and we relish formulaic crime stories with predictable scripts and catch-phrases.
Robert Louis Stevenson was exploring the same territory when he said, ‘To travel is a better thing than to arrive.’ And if fulfilment is a let-down after a long build-up, then we have to recognise that dismay or disappointment is often the human lot. ‘See Naples and die’ may work for some people. Did it work for me? I can’t remember. Have I seen Naples?
No, I take back what I said when I began this piece. Perhaps we don’t all have to make the best of a proleptic festival. Prolonged repetition may be just what meets our need. Anything that relieves a round of unvarying drudgery (though that is not the inescapable back-breaker it once was) is welcome.
Reality does take some enduring. Human kind cannot bear very much of it. There is enough truth in Eliot’s maxim to make us look for the muscles and sinews in the story of the incarnation. It is clearly a time for children and their view of things. It is also a time to ponder the severe aspect of a visit by the Maker who came on a rescue mission to his creatures that made Peor and Baalim forsake their temples dim.
ACOMB TURN-OUT
The Anglo-Saxon name suggests that a visitor to Acomb, York may well expect to find oak-trees in the vicinity. Whether that is the case nowadays I do not know. But the name ‘Acomb’ has a comfortable air about it and the two churches serving it – St Stephen’s (with a history going back to the 12th century) and St Aidan’s (built in 1965) – have a business-like website with good photographs. The Remembrance service on Acomb Green draw close to 400 worshippers from local churches. The two churches have their sights set on global mission, supporting work in Hull, Durban, Malaga and Madagascar. The Vicar is Peter Vivash.
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