Article

Advent

Creed

Gaza

3 December 2023

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.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

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.

Explainer

Belief

Community

Creed

Politics

10 June 2025

7 min read

The peripheries of belief: how faith shaped the north’s identity

Northern spirituality’s rebellious capacity to adapt is still in play today

Tom Rippon

Tom Rippon is Assistant Editor at Roots for Churches, an ecumenical charity.

Durham Cathedral and town.

David Connor on Unsplash.

2025 has so far been the year of the north. At its start, we were treated to the plasticine escapades of Wallace and Gromit, whose unabashed northern-ness was enough to faze American TV executives. Then in April, the story turned to northern industrial decline when Scunthorpe steelworks hit the headlines, prompting last-minute state intervention. In May, the local elections saw the astonishing rise of Reform across areas previously dominated by Labour. Taken together, these three moments encapsulate the range of associations often evoked by life on the periphery of England: regional pride, good-natured humour, close communities, economic precarity and hard graft.

The north is a landscape of contraries and co-existence, where sweeping fells and dark skies meet red-brick chimneys and rolling waves of terraced houses. As David Barnett puts it, it is “a place made up of individuals, bound by an ethereal quality that is at once a myth and, conversely, as real as grit and graft.’

Hard to pin down, yet real once seen, the same could also be said for the faith that has filled the region with a multitude of expressions to this day.

Of course, when we talk about ‘the north’, we mean everything and everyone from the conurbations of Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the Lake District and Northumberland, where centuries of border warfare have left a plethora of castles and fortified houses (‘pele towers’). Two landscapes dominated by buildings which have long lost their original purposes. Perhaps the principal shared characteristic of these communities is a sense of distance from mainstream political and cultural life (just try catching a train that isn’t heading to London). But with distance comes an independence of identity and a proud sense of cultural distinctiveness. If anything, the only thing that can be definitively said about northern identity is that it is the quality of being ‘not southern’.

Northern Christianity has not escaped this wavering relationship with the south. In 664 AD, the Northumbrian Church gathered at Whitby for a meeting presided over by King Oswy of Northumbria and the Abbess Hilda of Whitby. It was quite literally a pivotal moment for the early Church and the north more widely. The matter at hand was whether Northumbrian Christianity, then centred on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, should remain orientated towards Celtic Christianity, which had as its principal focal point the abbey of Iona, or whether to turn towards Rome and its growing mission in the south, headquartered in Canterbury. North or south? Canterbury or Iona?

In the end, the group opted for closer links with the Roman Church. Yet the Christian faith in the north remained distinctive, blending the older influences of St Columba and St Aidan with the new ones coming up from the south. Lindisfarne Priory remained a centre for Christian life in the north and its prestige led it to accumulate the wealth that eventually precipitated its own destruction by Viking raids in 793 AD. In spite of this, the northern saints drew reverent pilgrims for centuries to come, as the grandeur and scale of Durham Cathedral, the burial place of St Cuthbert, testifies to this day.

Behind the independent northern spirit lies a long history of political, economic and spiritual divergence from the south. Northern spirituality is characterised by a sustained distinctive flowering of the Christian faith that intertwines itself with the social identity of the peoples and places of the north. The region’s response to the religious reforms of Henry VIII was the Pilgrimage of Grace, which protested both his break from the Roman Catholic Church and socio-economic policies implemented by the king and his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

By the seventeenth century, faith in the north had taken on a distinctly reformist hue as non-conformism – that is, churches and sects not aligned with the Church of England, the Church of the state and the establishment – flourished in the region. The beginnings of the Quaker movement can be traced to an open-air sermon given by the reformer George Fox in 1652 on Firbank Fell, near Sedburgh in modern Cumbria - the crag he spoke from is still known as Fox’s pulpit - while other reformist movements, including Methodism, Congregationalism and Presbyterians, also drew increasing crowds with their passionate preaching in fields, moors and disparate farming communities.

The very landscape of northern England, often challenging and remote, drew its inhabitants away from both socio-political centres and the established Church, nurturing forms of belief in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which were as independent as those of seventh- and eighth-century Northumbria. Much of religious life in the region was organised around a large parish church that served numerous small communities spread across a large area. Living at such distances, no wonder people felt a disconnect from the parish church and the national Church it represented. Non-conformist chapels and meeting houses quickly spread across the landscape, particularly in remote villages outside of the control of major landowners and Church authorities. As David Petts argues, the building of chapels expressed the collective economic and organisational independence of rural labourers and miners, and united dispersed communities through collective endeavour.

The region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment.

Once the chapel was built, they would prove valuable training grounds for rethinking the political organisation of the poor; the significance of non-conformism thus lay not only in its spiritual divergence from the establishment, but also in its fostering of alternative political systems. Methodism in particular was to provide an ideological and practical template for mass movements such as Chartism, which campaigned for social reform and an expansion of democratic suffrage in the mid-nineteenth century. Chartist campaigners called themselves ‘missionaries’ and crisscrossed the country preaching ‘the gospel of Chartism’ and forming Chartist congregations. Their political vision found a receptive audience in the working population of the industrialised north, who were raised on the non-conformist emphasis on Christ as the carpenter’s son and a poor man, one who worked for his living as they did. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the non-conformist social Gospel produced notable reformers such as the journalist W. T. Stead, born in rural Northumberland as the son of a Congregationalist minister, and the Quaker confectioner Joseph Rowntree of York.

Amidst the darkness, grime and crushing conditions of nineteenth-century mills and mines, the Christian message of mutual aid and fellowship, first articulated by the early Church, again found expression. In Manchester, the Methodist Central Hall served a dual purpose, providing a space for worship on Sundays and a community space during the week, when it offered libraries, food, clothing, shelter, childcare and even entertainment to the people of the city.

Social reform and the Christian faith buttressed one another across the region and together resisted the fractures, pressures and degradations that industrialisation exerted on the communities they served. The social values of these interdependent movements left a lasting impact on the modern political landscape of the region, until recently known as Labour’s ‘Red Wall’. As any political correspondent will tell you, northern politics can no longer be taken for granted and the region has proved itself capable of delivering considerable shocks to the London political establishment. Walking through these communities, left behind by deindustrialisation, globalisation and our periodic post-crisis recoveries, the air seems pervaded by a sense of unravelling as the old bonds and certainties slowly slip-away. The Church is not immune to these processes and the north follows the overall national trend of declining church attendance. The empty chapels testify as much to the seismic shifts taking place in the region as the empty warehouses and factories.

But if the history of Christianity in the north tells us anything, then it is that northern spirituality has never stood still. It has an ingenious capacity to adapt, to regenerate itself to meet the challenges faced by each generation. The challenges are varied and specific to each community, but the Church is there. In Burnley, the fight of the early disciples against urban poverty is echoed in the work of the Church on the Street, whilst on Holy Island itself, the Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin is a driving force behind the Holy Island 2050 project, which aims to assure the sustainability of the Island community in the face of depopulation and rural precarity.

If the dominant atmosphere in the north is one of feeling left behind, then the Christian call to reach out to those around us is needed more than ever. More than one thousand years separate St Aidan from us, but the Christian faith can still help the us to navigate the challenges and precarities of a changing world.

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