New Year - Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord Jesus Christ - 1st January 2026
God lives dangerously! In this season of the incarnation of God we hear all the stories around the birth of Jesus, the messiness and dangers of life in an occupied country. God did not play safe and become incarnate in the comforts of the Royal household to ensure that his kingship was recognised. Neither was he born into a priestly family that would have given him authority within the religious institutions of his day. Rather he was born into an ordinary family from a provincial town and grew up outside the structures of royalty or the inherited institutions of religion.
Of course, as this feast tells us, he was brought up as an observant Jew, marked in his circumcision as a son of Abraham. He was deeply immersed in the Jewish scriptures and traditions. But he did not rely for his living on being part of the royal or religious institutions. Indeed, Jesus could only do the work God required of him because he was outside all the constraints and expectations of traditional structures. He had the freedom to question and challenge those who had fossilised the ways of God into structures that no longer served to bring people to the fullness of life that God desired for them. In Jesus God was doing a new thing that was missed by so many who thought they had got God sorted. As we know, it ended in his crucifixion…
As we come to this feast we are also on the eve of the secular New Year. I find this brings an interesting duality to this day, how do I hold these two aspects together? The turning of the year invites us to reflect on the year past and to ponder our hopes for the year to come. What might it mean for us at this time to embrace the path of the God who lives dangerously?
We have made some significant decisions over this last year, in particular recognising that we are no longer in a position to form a new generation of nuns ‘in our own image’. But we have also made the decision to release more space in our enclosure for others to use for retreats. There is both death and resurrection in this, an element of living dangerously as we move into the unknown.
The challenge for us in the coming year will be to find what that means and how we manage the impact on our own lives. We need a firm sense of what is important in order to retain the integrity of our lives whilst making space for God’s call to open our hearts to something new.
Card designed and printed at Malling Abbey
I have turned again to the card that I was drawn to last year through Advent and Christmastide and then left on our notice board throughout the year – ‘You are THE PLACE where God speaks’. Looking at it again a year on, I had the thought ‘THIS is a place where God speaks’, this abbey is a place where many people come and find themselves to be THE PLACE where God speaks. I am hoping that with the refurbishment of The Join to create space for longer silent retreats we will provide more opportunities for people to find themselves to be that place where God speaks.
Our work in support of that is to cherish the silence and stillness of this place so that it will continue to be a place where God speaks, and into which God can call a new generation of people who wish to carry this work forward. This spring we will once more be living with the disruption of building work. We will be needing the deep roots of our rhythm of prayer, both our offices in church and our times of personal prayer. We also need to be rooted in our love and care of one another in community, especially when we feel unsettled and stressed.
Much as we would wish it, life never stands still and change is the price we pay for being alive – changes are forced upon us by our ageing or illness or by external circumstances. At this stage in our community’s life we are having to let go many cherished traditions, which can feel like death, and it is right that we feel grief at what we are losing. But in following our crucified messiah we know that through death there is resurrection. Our true identity is not in what we do or the institution to which we belong but in the glorious liberty of being much-loved children of God, whereever that leads us – a dangerous calling indeed!
Mother Anne - 1st January 2026