Parallel Lines

I was thinking the other day about the growth of our countryside.  The older roads – often based on routes set out by the Romans or even the Ancient Britons – lead directly from one town to the next, deviating for only the most significant obstructions.  On the other hand, the modern motorways and by-passes provide quicker but longer routes that avoid the narrow streets of our town centres.  I recalled my early days of driving for a living, when I’d never driven into London before.  With only the map to rely on, I quickly discovered the limitations of coming to the capital late in life, not instinctively aware of the easier alternatives to the A1 or A5.  Although these are the original, direct routes, they are much slower and often congested.

“AB and CD are two parallel lines,” said my maths text book at school.  I soon learned the key property about parallel lines: they stay a constant distance apart.  If you follow the line AB you will get to point ‘B’, but by following CD, you will only get to point ‘D’.  You’ll be in roughly the same area, but definitely not at the same place.  In the same way, the motorway will take you to the region of your target address, but eventually you will have to turn off it, onto those small local roads, to make the final approach.

I decided that looking forward to Christmas is dangerously similar to this business of using a by-pass.  The secular festival that many people are planning for – I like to call it ‘Xmas’ for distinction – features many appropriate elements.  It focuses on children; it includes many aspects of love and caring: giving presents, for example, or supporting seasonal events for the homeless to make sure they get a festive dinner.  There are parties and expressions of familiarity or behaviour that are not seen at other times, such as the giving of Christmas boxes to trades-people, or the boy-king traditions that are still observed in some of our towns.

As if following the wrong parallel line, the route to this secular festival includes a variety of characteristic phenomena that bear no direct relevance to the intended destination, just like the flyovers and service stations on the motorway.  I’m thinking of the robins, stagecoaches in snow and crinoline ladies that adorn our festive cards; the trees with their candles and baubles, and the holly and paper chains, without which our celebrations just don’t seem complete.

Whether we compare them to parallel lines or to motorways, the route past these landmarks gets us to the right area, but not to the final destination.  A sideways step is essential to make that last link, to take us from Xmas to Christmas.  Our spiritual roadmap, the Bible, has the answer.  We are told that the Father would send the Holy Spirit to teach us, and help us to remember Jesus’ teaching (John 14:26).  The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Paraclete, a Greek name meaning ‘one who draws alongside.’  I once heard of a port so full of fishing boats alongside each other that people could walk dry-shod from one shore to the other across their decks.  The Holy Spirit draws alongside us like that, so that, through Him, we can easily make our way from the Xmas that the world preaches and discover the real gift of Christmas – Immanuel: God with us.