Thought for the week - 21 December 2025

There are all kinds of dreams, are there not. Dreams which we forget the second we wake up, no matter how immersive and occasionally preferable to reality they may be. Dreams which turn into nightmares which we are happy to forget, personal dreams and dreams for others. What are your dreams? We are supposed to be able to achieve our dreams, be they of wealth, avarice, charity or for good or ill – we say ‘you can achieve anything’ to children, which always seems rather unlikely. I have done the funerals of dozens of young men who were killed in gang attacks, all of whom, we heard, were about to become a famous DJ or footballer, but who, instead, became dead with a knife in their back, and the murderers dream of getting away with it generally came true. We have dreams, but we inhabit reality, and that reality as we perceive it is often more fantastic than dreams ever could be.

No doubt Joseph the carpenter had his dreams. Perhaps of having lots of sons who would all be successful carpenters or furnishing Herod’s palaces by winning the contract to build all the furniture. But all these were dashed by his holy dream, in which he is commanded by an angel to take Mary, his pregnant fiancée, and marry her and raise her child as his own. This dream sunk all the little private dreams he might have had – the reality meant that the fantasy had to take second place. So far, so normal. I used to say to the young people at school ‘would you have the courage to follow the message of an angel in a dream when you heard that your fiancée had become pregnant through the operation of the Holy Ghost?

I am not suggesting that we should not follow our dreams but they may seem small and petty compared with Joseph’s dream, which is about being caught up in the infinite mystery of God’s love for all of humanity. Few of us are likely to have dreams of angels commanded us to do alarming things. But Joseph’s dream is God’s dream for us all. It is of the child who will save all people, who is Emmanuel, God with all of us. Do we inhabit our own dreams for ourselves or do we get caught up in God’s great dream for us all together? Or a love beyond all hope? It’s a big question and one that God asks Ahaz in the first reading, saying ‘Ask for any sign you want, absolutely anything’. But he does not dare to. He pretends that he does not want to bother God. ‘Far be it from me to tempt the Lord’ he grovels. It is like someone who is offered Paradise opting for a week on the Costa del Sol because he’s been there before, he can imagine it, he knows he likes it, he knows its safe. These are knowable ambitions. We see other people who have achieved them. And there is no safety here, only challenge and unfamiliarity.

Joseph’s holy dream passes all our understanding. It is a love which is beyond our grasp. It apparently involves disaster. His nice respectable life must be lost. He must marry a woman pregnant with a child not his own. He will take upon himself shame. And the child will be a disgrace to his parents, hanging around with undesirables and coming to a dreadful end. It sounds more like a nightmare than a good dream. But actually it is the most wonderful story of love. But it takes time to see this and it takes experience of love and of God to know the difference. Just like any love, it may leave to abandonment, to what can look like rejection, to uncertainty with anything apart from the trust that God will bring us home and His love does not end and that we never need fear, even when, frankly, there is a lot of be scared about.

At Christmas we are invited to trust the Lord who only longs for our utter happiness, even if he seems to go about it in an odd way. This is the holy obedience that Paul talked about in the second reading. It is not just doing what you are told. It is being led into the mystery, step by step, and finding love and hope there and then leading others into it as well.

Finally, the little private dream often makes promises that are frankly untrue. It is untrue that I can do anything I want. I cannot stand in a bucket and pick it up. I cannot run a four-minute mile. I cannot bring myself to go to Subway and actually consume the food which is, I assume, the source of the stench that emanates from them. I have the wrong kind of body to run a four-minute mile and the wrong kind of mind to be cautious. We are not a kind of fleshy material which 4d printers can turn into anything. We are us, and we should be happy to be so.

But in God’s holy dream, we are accepted as we are: limited, weak, foolish, mortal. In Jesus God has embraced us in our limitations and offers us everything. We are at once what Christ is, immortal, beautiful, loved and capable of love. There is a dream for us to follow, and we are able to follow it, because Christ himself once inhabited a body just like these.