Article
Advent
Creed
Gaza
8 min read

The bleak midwinter: why tears could be the best thing for us this season

In a world of devastation, you can share honest feelings of hopelessness - yet not be overcome.
In front of a collapsed building, a rescuer carries a new born baby by the arms.
The rescue of Afraa Abu Hadiya, Syria, February 2023.

On February 6th 2023, a heavily pregnant Afraa Abu Hadiya, along with her husband and their four children, was awakened in the dark, early hours of the morning by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake violently shaking their apartment building in Syria. Afraa and her husband gathered their children and made for the building’s exit.  However, just as they were nearing the door, the building collapsed upon them, crushing the entire family.  Afraa, however, seems to have remained conscious for some hours because she did the unthinkable and delivered a baby girl while trapped beneath the rubble.  Then, tragically, she died and her baby was left alone buried beneath a building in the middle of winter. 

This year we have read too many such stories.  In places such as Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and most recently, Israel and Gaza, thousands of women, men, and children have suffered and died and grieved as a result of natural disasters and armed conflict.     

For those of us who live in relative safety, it is difficult even to begin to comprehend such tragedies.  Yet despite our advantages, many of us are struggling in our own ways. According to the CDC, between 25 and 30 per cent of adults in the US are currently experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.  And it is no secret that mental distress levels have been steadily climbing for years in the UK as well, especially amongst youth

It can make the joyful, merry, jolly, happy, cheerful, peaceful Christmas spirit encouraged at this time of year strike a discordant note with the actual state of our minds and hearts. All is not well inside many of us, but we sense that Eeyore is an awkward personality to bring into a room, so we tend to conceal the parts of ourselves that are anxious and hurting.   I confess I’ve become pretty adept at keeping parts of myself out of sight. 

I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world.

I met up with a couple of friends recently.  We talked about our children and their school and our plans for Christmas.  I said we were going to keep Christmas simple this year.  What I didn’t say was that we’ve been keeping Christmas “simple” for several years now.  I didn’t say that, a few years after my brother died, my parents and my siblings and I agreed that we would no longer see each other at Christmas because the hole my brother left is too acutely obvious when the rest of us are together.  I didn’t say that we don’t keep our Christmas tree up for long because the crystal star we hang near the top is in memory of our son who never saw his first Christmas, and while I love to make him a part of the holiday in this way, I also can’t live with the visual reminder of that pain for long.  I didn’t say that although we make an effort to give our children a happy Christmas, my husband and I are just trying to make it through to the other side of the holidays because we’ve twice in recent years painfully and unexpectedly lost our household income right before Christmas and the season now triggers within us the fear and confusion and hurt of those Christmases.   I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world. I just told my friends that we were going to keep Christmas simple.  Maybe you have your own lines you trot out on such occasions. 

If you do, the season of Advent is a welcoming space for such as us.  Advent is observed during the four weeks leading up to Christmas and marks the beginning of the Christian church year.  Traditionally, it is a time when Christians remember how their spiritual ancestors, the ancient nation of Israel, spent roughly 600 years being conquered and enslaved successively by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome.  The God of Israel had, however, promised that he would, one day, send them a deliverer, a “messiah”, to rescue them from their bondage.  And so, the Israelite people, in their suffering, waited and looked and prayed for the coming of their deliverer.    

Christians believe that Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, was that messiah, and that (spoiler warning) he ended up delivering not only Israel, but the whole world in a very different way than anyone was expecting.  (But that’s the story of Easter, and we’re not there yet.) During Advent, Christians remember the centuries of Israel’s powerless waiting to be rescued, and how, true to his word, God sent them a messiah.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air. 

However, Advent is not just for looking back.  It is also a space for acknowledging all the myriad ways in which darkness still rules over us today.  How we still suffer and hurt and die.  How we inflict these things on each other.  How it seems like, no matter how we try to make the world better, it’s still always in a tragic mess.  And then, while we’re acknowledging all of that and feeling its great weight, Advent asks us to do something that feels preposterous at times: to believe the promise Jesus made that he will, one day, banish darkness from the earth and make it completely and irreversibly whole and new.  In short, we’re asked to continue to wait hopefully for light to break while we live in the darkness.   

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air.  But, in the face of the anguish of Israel and Gaza, and the wounds I’ve experienced in my own life, do I dare live as if everything will come right in the end?  I would like to, but when hope ends in disappointment it wounds deeply.  I’m not always sure I can afford to risk hope.

If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome. 

Advent urges me never to stop calling for help, but if calling for help isn’t exactly the same thing as summoning hope, it’s perilously close.  Is it possible to call for help if I don’t believe, if I am afraid to let myself believe any help will arrive?   

Well, apparently it is.  I learned this from Afraa’s tiny daughter buried in rubble.   

After the earthquake, relatives and friends rushed to the ruins of the collapsed apartment building in order to try to rescue those who had been inside.  As they dug through the debris, one of them reported hearing “a voice” from beneath the rubble.  The rescuers followed the sound and eventually uncovered the baby, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord.  She was pulled from the wreckage of her house and family, and sped to hospital where she miraculously made a recovery and was adopted by her aunt and uncle who gave her her mother’s name.    

She was rescued because someone heard her voice.  The journalist does not specify what kind of noise she was making, but given that she was injured, suffering from hypothermia, and barely breathing it seems it must have been weak crying or whimpering.  And considering that she was surrounded by her dead mother, father, and four siblings, and that the entirety of her short life outside her mother’s body had consisted of the noise, terror, chaos and pain of the building falling upon her, it seems impossible that she was hopefully and consciously calling for help. How could she imagine what help might be?  Her mother had not even had the chance to hold her in her arms. What could she know of a tender face, gentle hands, warm blankets, nourishment in her belly, soft fabric against her skin, the healing of wounds?  She was not waiting or hoping for any of these.  She did not even know they existed.  She was simply weeping for the terror and pain and loneliness of her little life.  But the weeping was enough to save her.    

As I consider tears, it seems to me that they can, in themselves, be reason for hope.  The person who weeps has accepted neither that things are the way they should be (as do those who cooperate with or advance the destructive forces in the world), nor that things are the way they must be (as do those who, however understandably, give up and surrender themselves to being destroyed).  If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome.  In fact, unless we grasp how grievous our wounds are, how can we begin to seek out the right physician?  How will we choose to make the changes within our power to make?  A world that is lamenting its own brokenness, as Advent encourages it to do, seems to me to be a world for which there is yet hope.    

I have never experienced the trauma of a building collapsing upon me, but I’ve spent plenty of time trapped beneath the twin wreckages of a life I once had and the one I was hoping to build.  Maybe you’re buried in rubble too.  Maybe you’ve survived an earthquake and its aftershocks, but you’re not sure you’re glad you have because you’re bleeding and crushed and in the dark and you can’t imagine how you will rebuild and survive in such a world even if you do eventually emerge.  Maybe you’re not even sure you want to be rescued because it’s all, all broken now – your home, your family, your bones.   

This Advent I am trying to gather the strength to call for help for myself and for the world although my heart and my faith are bruised.  Maybe you will call too.  But if we are too afraid and confused and wounded to do even that, then let us weep, friend, together in this darkness.  For although this is a world in which much breaks and dies, it is also one in which rescue has been known to arrive unlooked and unhoped for.  And if the memory and the promise of Advent hold any truth, sometimes the hand outstretched unexpectedly to deliver turns out to be, beyond all imagining, the hand of God. 

Review
Creed
Education
Theatre
Weirdness
8 min read

Why I was wowed by this five-hour outdoor drama

Wintershall’s re-telling of an ancient story enthrals a sceptic

Rachel is a reader and writer, a coach, and an educator. 

An outdoor theatrical setting shows Jesus with a basket.
Wintershall.org.uk

Were I to write a recipe for disaster, it would look something like this: 

  • Gather a large cast of mostly amateur volunteers and a few professionals 
  • Include everyone from a baby to a 90-year-old man, 1 donkey, 2 horses and a flock of sheep 
  • Create an outdoor venue with no seating and no shelter from the elements 
  • Welcome a mixed audience of around 1200 school children and the public every day for five days 
  • Present a five-hour dramatisation of the entire life of Jesus from 10am to 3.30pm 

I am delighted to record that contrary to our assumptions, the above proved to be a remarkable recipe for triumph. Accompanied by my 18-year-old son who, as an actor and teenager, was sceptical, I’ll admit that expectations were not high as we embarked on a 2-hour drive to review The Life of Jesus 2025 at Wintershall Estate. The same drive home was rich in deeply moved and unexpected conversation about the incredible phenomenon just experienced.  

Hearing superlatives from me is as unlikely an event as watching a rare desert flower bloom in a decade of drought. And yet, I have nothing else to offer in this case. I have viewed much professional and amateur theatre - Wintershall is like nothing I have witnessed before.  

Perhaps what makes it so different is the intent of those who continue to create it. In 1989, Ann and Peter Hutley decided to open their beautiful estate to visitors interested in hearing about the life of Jesus. They began with a nativity in their new barn before Peter wrote a longer script for the millennium celebrations about Jesus’ ministry. It is tangible in the air that this is a monumental work of love and passion not profit-making. 

On arriving, we met Ann and her daughter, Charlotte, who has taken over the enormous responsibilities as Wintershall’s producer. With consistent warmth, welcome and energy, Charlotte took us to join the cast as they received exacting professional notes from the director, Ashley Herman. She invited us to join hands with the cast in prayer. ‘No questions asked, it doesn’t matter what you believe, join hands and pray with us. Everyone is welcome here!’ she said. This is the truth about Wintershall in a sentence.  

As a teacher of 23 years, I am sorry to admit that I had never heard of Wintershall. I would likely have baulked had someone suggested that I take my class on a daytrip of this format. My assumption would have been that they would hate it, they would be hot, bothered and bored, and I would be very stressed as a result. How foolish am I!  

We visited on a day when the audience consisted of roughly 700 captivated school pupils, ranging from 7 – 18 years, and 300 members of the public. The previous few days had been exclusively for schools and had welcomed in the region of 1,200 pupils on each day. Looking for honest opinions, I asked an adult sat near me why she had brought her class. ‘Oh, I’m not a teacher,’ she said, ‘I volunteer to come on this trip every year because it’s the best thing I’ve ever seen. It just gets better and better!’ Clearly my prejudice was misplaced, and this is the very important issue.  

My years in education mean that I have watched far too many five-year-olds in wonky tea towels, shouting at an inn keeper while the audience laughs. The life of Jesus has taken on a twee familiarity akin to Jack and The Beanstalk or Cinderella. It has become the stuff of folklore and fairytale when it is anything but. We have distorted it from the contemporaneous, historical recount that it is and Wintershall magnificently sets this straight.  

Regardless of faith or belief, there is great damage done in forgetting to view history as reality. Those who work in schools and churches must remember that today’s children perceive the millennium celebrations as ancient history. They cannot fathom time outside of their own existence. All stories from the Egyptians to Princess Diana seem to them to be works of fiction because they must be imagined. Test this, as I have done, by asking them about a recently retired Roger Federer and observe their blank faces! 

Even for me and my son, there came a meaningful realisation that this is not merely an all-too-familiar children’s story retold every year at Easter and Christmas. This is the biography of a man whose contemporaries were prepared to die in order to record the naturally inexplicable things that they saw him do. This first lands around 15 minutes into Act One when Wintershall presents Herod’s slaughtering of the children as the horrific and barbaric act that it was, with none of the usual soft-soap. Not gory or gratuitous in any way, it hits hard, just as it should, since, as Charlotte passionately reminded me, this is still happening in the world today! The same hit came from the disturbing noises made by the man suffering from demons, the size of the rocks about to be hurled at the woman accused of adultery and the often-omitted audible gasping of three men dying by crucifixion. These should not be benign imaginings, they are barbaric and torturous reality, and we do humanity no favours in desensitising ourselves.  

Wintershall is clear that their production is for those aged seven and above because this is no fairytale. I would argue that this is precisely why they are able to keep children captivated through five hours of intense viewing. They have achieved the perfect balance of hard-hitting realism and enjoyment.  

After stretching your legs, Act Two is simply glorious. We forget that Jesus’ ministry took the form of a pilgrimage delivered while walking with people in nature. He spoke on paths, hillsides and lakes which Wintershall authentically recreates. There is nothing to match the experience of sitting on a hillside next to a lake as the character of Jesus delivers the Sermon on The Mount whilst looking you straight in the eye. For the first time, I inwardly understood how a small number of loaves could literally feed a very large crowd because I experienced it first-hand. Quite simply, without needing to be told, you share. You break bread to ensure that those beside you have some and, in so doing, realise that there was always enough for everyone. This precious memory will endure as reality, not magic. 

Act Four depicts the crucifixion. Seeing is believing. Again, this stuff of children’s stories is anything but. The logistics of this scene are extraordinarily well executed, and, for the first time, I was struck by the gasping of these men as they spoke. This was no polite conversation about meeting in paradise, these were their final words during their slow and painful death. The act is completed by the inexplicable and somewhat mystical reappearance of the risen Jesus in a different location beside us. I still have no idea how they did it, but it impacted powerfully.  

So, what then were the negatives? Any trustworthy review must be balanced.

"There is nothing I have ever seen that I have more wanted to be a part of. Compared with this, I have never seen anything more meaningful."

Remember here my aversion to praise and my teenage son’s initial scepticism. Remember this seeming recipe for disaster and my remit to look critically.  

After digging deep, we came up with two very minor concerns that are, in truth, little more than a matter of opinion or preference.  

The first relates to the Angel Gabriel. In a production that so brilliantly undoes the fictionalisation of this biography, one could argue for a more nuanced representation of this angel. Perhaps not a female wearing the sparkly halo and white wings that fits with the wonky tea towels in school halls. Perhaps the name of Gabriel is sufficiently recognisable to permit something a little more daring? 

The second relates to Act Three. Undoubtedly, the vibrant warmth, variety and personally immersive nature of Act Two makes it a very hard act to follow. Act Three is disadvantaged from the outset by occupying what we teachers know to be toughest gig of the day - that slot immediately following lunch. There is usually some social altercation to sort, attention needing to be refocused, and blood sugar levels fluctuating left, right and centre. At this time of natural siesta, you either accept a lull or bring your largest dose of entertainment. In this case, Jesus enters Jerusalem, overturns the tables in the temple, heals a leper, is betrayed by Judas, prays in Gethsemane, is arrested and tried before Pilate. Essential but not exceptionally entertaining, as the story goes. At around the 60-minute mark in, Jesus is stripped and whipped causing the children around me to literally sit up again and re-engage before Act Four. Perhaps, on reflection as I write, this is just as it should be.  

And that is it, the sum of my critique. Believe me, my expectations are unforgivingly high; I struggle booking a holiday because the likelihood is that I will be disappointed. If there were critique to deliver, then deliver it I would.  

To the contrary, it is unusually delightful to leave somewhere with the desire to do everything in my power to support a truly exemplary endeavour. It is to my detriment that I have been so ignorant of Wintershall for the last 25 years; I regret the thousands of children that I did not ever take to see this exceptional phenomenon.  

I urge you to do better than me, to make up for my short fall.  

Go!  

Take everyone you can!  

Make the journey!  

Enjoy the day in glorious natural surroundings!  

Show your pupils that even a flock of sheep can be perfectly well-behaved.  

Rewrite the soppy fairytale as the gritty, historical biography that it is.  

Replace the over-familiarity and wonky tea towels with a real-life experience in how to share what we have so that all might be fed.  

Reimagine the mad magician as a man who loved the low, lost, and lonely, and will look you in the eye to remind you that you are blessed.  

Reset the polite chat about paradise as the last conversation of a man gasping to share his love as he was killed for upsetting the authorities.  

Remember that the infants are still being slaughtered and the women are still being stoned.  

Reawaken to the fact that this is no fairytale. This is the message that the world needs.  

As my son put it, ‘There is nothing I have ever seen that I have more wanted to be a part of. Compared with this, I have never seen anything more meaningful.’ 

Wintershall, one and all, you do not need to take a bow.  

Stand tall and keep going.  

What you are doing is superlatively necessary and remarkable! 

Bravo! 

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