WHAMAGEDDON is the name given to the attempt to get from 1-24 December without hearing Wham’s “Last Christmas” — a nearly impossible task, given the ubiquitous Christmas soundtrack in every shop on every high street. But there’s one Christmas song that always makes me ponder important questions about popular understandings of how we keep the Christmas season.
It’s thought that Chris Rea wrote “Driving Home for Christmas” while stuck in traffic on the M1, during a snowy trip home for the festive period in 1978. Whenever I hear it, my first thought is that one of the blessings of clergy life is that we rarely drive anywhere for Christmas, as people generally come to us. But, much more significantly, I also wonder where — or what — is “home”, anyway?
In one way, the last Christmas I spent “at home” was in 1979, when I was 13 years old: my last Christmas in my homeland of Iran. A strange Christmas it was. The Revolution was in its early days, the American hostages had been seized the previous month, and the tiny Anglican Church of which I was a part was in a precarious state. Its bishop — my father — was in Cyprus, unable to return from his travels because of fears for his safety, and the future of our community was uncertain.
And yet my abiding memory of that season is one of blessing, and of being surrounded by support and care. My mother, having travelled with my father, had returned to be with the family, and we did what we always did: we kept the feast.
That year, as in many churches around the world, there was a performance of Handel’s Messiah in St Luke’s, Isfahan, and the words carried a very particular resonance for us. Our beleaguered community needed to hear the tenor sing “Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people,” and it still fills me with awe to recall the rich alto’s reminder that “He was despised and rejected”. For rejection and derision was our experience, that year, with the murder of one of our clergy, and more — much more — to come.
What I remember most, however, are the faces of the members of the choir, including American and British missionaries, embassy staff, and those working in the oil industry. Our church was an unusual mix of foreigners and local Persians, many of them converts. My older sister and brother took part in the performance, but the Westerners, in particular, stand out because the very next week they were all gone — just like that, every single one of them: recalled to their homeland as the political situation spiralled dangerously out of control; and suddenly we felt very lonely and exposed.
That uprooting was traumatic for them, and for us, and, six months later, it would be the experience of my own family, following my brother’s assassination early in May 1980.
SINCE then, England has been my home — firstly, as a refugee, and now fully settled with my own family and ministry in the Church of England. Over the years, I’ve built a rich and integrated life at the heart of Christian communities, in places including in London, Rutland, Leicestershire, and now in Essex. Each of these has been home to me, and this feels particularly so at Christmas.
As Bishop of the diocese of Chelmsford, I’m generally at the cathedral for the Christmas morning service, but I well remember the round of parish carol services, school nativity plays, Christingles, and crib services — especially when our own children were small. In many parishes, attendance rises for Christmas services, but there can be a gloriously deceptive side to the figures. Those attending are not necessarily regular worshippers, or even local folk.
It is still the case that people seek out their own church at Christmas, but you can’t make any assumptions. Many are from other places, visiting friends and family; having left their own familiar worshipping communities, they join with others, briefly making “home” elsewhere.
Being uprooted from my homeland, building a new life, and gradually finding a sense of belonging in England, I have learned something from these various experiences. “Home” for the Christian believer is not where we feel most comfortable; nor is it where we are known and welcomed. Christmas, above all, is a time where we return to the foundations of what we understand our faith to be. You will hear it at carol services and at midnight mass, through the words of St John’s Gospel: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”
It is in the reality of knowing the incarnation — of building a relationship with Christ, who is God in human flesh — that I have come to see that “home” is wherever we join in worship and service with others, each one fearfully and wonderfully made in God’s image.
OVER the past 18 months or so, I’ve had the privilege of participating in the Commission on the Integration of Refugees which, in March 2024, produced its report From Arrival to Integration: Building communities for refugees and for Britain (News, 28 March). Based on meticulous research and deep listening, the commission (made up of members from a wide range of backgrounds, and of differing faiths and political persuasions) called on the UK Government to reform its approach to refugees, with a series of concrete and practical recommendations.
In my work in Essex and east London, I frequently meet fellow refugees whose stories have a common theme of longing for their homeland, and yet at the same time wanting to settle and integrate in the place they find themselves. There is much that we, as a nation, need to do to facilitate a better process of integration, which is good not just for the refugee, but also for the host community.
At its heart, the Christmas story is about the transformation of “home”. We are grateful for the blessings of the earthly reality of home and family life, and we seek to build thriving communities to share with our neighbours.
At the same time, my own experience, and that of many refugees, is that we are strangers in a strange land, longing for a home that we can know only provisionally, but which will come in all its fullness when we are part of that great multitude that cannot be counted, from every nation, from all tribes, peoples, and languages. Only then can we truly say we have come home.
Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford.