WHAMAGEDDON is the name given to the try and get from 1-24 December without hearing Wham’s “Last Christmas” — a virtually unattainable task, given the ever-present Christmas soundtrack in every shop on every high street. But there’s one Christmas song that at all times makes me ponder essential questions on popular understandings of how we keep the Christmas season.
It’s thought that Chris Rea wrote “Driving Home for Christmas” while stuck in traffic on the M1, during a snowy trip home for the festive period in 1978. Whenever I hear it, my first thought is that one among the blessings of clergy life is that we rarely drive anywhere for Christmas, as people generally come to us. But, far more significantly, I also wonder where — or what — is “home”, anyway?
In a method, the last Christmas I spent “at home” was in 1979, once I was 13 years old: my last Christmas in my homeland of Iran. A wierd Christmas it was. The Revolution was in its early days, the American hostages had been seized the previous month, and the tiny Anglican Church of which I used to be a component was in a precarious state. Its bishop — my father — was in Cyprus, unable to return from his travels due to fears for his safety, and the long run of our community was uncertain.
And yet my abiding memory of that season is one among blessing, and of being surrounded by support and care. My mother, having travelled with my father, had returned to be with the family, and we did what we at all times did: we kept the feast.
That yr, as in lots of churches world wide, there was a performance of Handel’s Messiah in St Luke’s, Isfahan, and the words carried a really particular resonance for us. Our beleaguered community needed to listen to the tenor sing “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,” and it still fills me with awe to recall the wealthy alto’s reminder that “He was despised and rejected”. For rejection and derision was our experience, that yr, with the murder of one among our clergy, and more — far more — to come back.
What I remember most, nevertheless, are the faces of the members of the choir, including American and British missionaries, embassy staff, and people working within the oil industry. Our church was an unusual mixture of foreigners and native Persians, lots of them converts. My older sister and brother took part within the performance, however the Westerners, specifically, stand out since the very next week they were all gone — identical to that, each one among them: recalled to their homeland because the political situation spiralled dangerously uncontrolled; and suddenly we felt very lonely and exposed.
That uprooting was traumatic for them, and for us, and, six months later, it will be the experience of my family, following my brother’s assassination early in May 1980.
SINCE then, England has been my home — firstly, as a refugee, and now fully settled with my family and ministry within the Church of England. Over the years, I’ve built a wealthy and integrated life at the guts of Christian communities, in places including in London, Rutland, Leicestershire, and now in Essex. Each of those has been home to me, and this feels particularly so at Christmas.
As Bishop of the diocese of Chelmsford, I’m generally on the cathedral for the Christmas morning service, but I well remember the round of parish carol services, school nativity plays, Christingles, and crib services — especially when our own children were small. In many parishes, attendance rises for Christmas services, but there could be a gloriously deceptive side to the figures. Those attending usually are not necessarily regular worshippers, and even local folk.
It remains to be the case that folks search out their very own church at Christmas, but you may’t make any assumptions. Many are from other places, visiting family and friends; having left their very own familiar worshipping communities, they join with others, briefly making “home” elsewhere.
Being uprooted from my homeland, constructing a recent life, and steadily finding a way of belonging in England, I actually have learned something from these various experiences. “Home” for the Christian believer just isn’t where we feel most comfortable; neither is it where we’re known and welcomed. Christmas, above all, is a time where we return to the foundations of what we understand our faith to be. You will hear it at carol services and at midnight mass, through the words of St John’s Gospel: “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.”
It is in the truth of knowing the incarnation — of constructing a relationship with Christ, who’s God in human flesh — that I actually have come to see that “home” is wherever we take part worship and repair with others, every one fearfully and splendidly made in God’s image.
OVER the past 18 months or so, I’ve had the privilege of participating within the Commission on the Integration of Refugees which, in March 2024, produced its report From Arrival to Integration: Building communities for refugees and for Britain (News, 28 March). Based on meticulous research and deep listening, the commission (made up of members from a big selection of backgrounds, and of differing faiths and political persuasions) called on the UK Government to reform its approach to refugees, with a series of concrete and practical recommendations.
In my work in Essex and east London, I continuously meet fellow refugees whose stories have a typical theme of longing for his or her homeland, and yet at the identical time wanting to settle and integrate within the place they find themselves. There is way that we, as a nation, have to do to facilitate a greater means of integration, which is nice not only for the refugee, but in addition for the host community.
At its heart, the Christmas story is concerning the transformation of “home”. We are grateful for the blessings of the earthly reality of home and family life, and we seek to construct thriving communities to share with our neighbours.
At the identical time, my very own experience, and that of many refugees, is that we’re strangers in a wierd land, eager for a house that we will know only provisionally, but which is able to are available all its fullness after we are a part of that great multitude that can not be counted, from every nation, from all tribes, peoples, and languages. Only then can we truly say we have now come home.
Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford.
