I am in Dublin for Christmas: jetlagged, strung-out from another overfull-if-rich year, but home with family and those who know me best because they have known me for so long. The current repeated “lesson” I am being taught is about how to stop and learn to not do anything. I love these people.

I still live in Australia and am passionate about my work, life, and friends there, but Ireland is my underground river, my easy accent, my bloodline. It is good to be here at Christmas. The words in an Irish Times piece by Fintan O’Toole embody this: “Even as we have become an immigrant society, we remain also an emigrant society, a culture hopelessly in love with long distance. Our Christmas story is still underpinned by separation anxiety. It’s a welcome yearning because it reminds us that we are not incorporeal creatures of cyberspace, but humans who feel physical absences because we hanker for physical presences. We need to be reunited because we are, after all, united in the same humanity, with the same feelings of love and loss. We know what it is to feel at home because we know how it feels to be away.”

A culture hopelessly in love with long distance

This is an evocative expression of my understanding of life. Perhaps I am “hopelessly in love with long distance”. In many ways, this is my reality. As a “missionary” (the word is not well understood), I have always been arriving and leaving. It does not mean I am not where I am meant to be. Some of my Australian people struggle to understand this, I feel. They ask where I am going next, as if I am not always where I am now. And it is true that this year has had more travel than most and more than I like – including the first next-generation wedding of two people I love – but perhaps this is the reality of my life as sent.

In any case, here I am in Dublin for Christmas.

I have not blogged as I wanted to and as I said I would! But I am digging in to change that, so this is the first of my “12 days of Christmas” gifts to my reflective self, or the one I want to be.

I’ll make it short… so just one more thing: about music.

The musicking of the Irish way of life was my welcome home at a brother’s significant birthday marked by partying in a pub with singsong included…a gift without price and one I am determined to reclaim a bit more this year.

We have one life. And while the vulnerability of a God-made-baby enshrines physicality at the heart of human existence, “music was my first love”

So I hope to bring music back closer to the centre of my life again.

May your Christmas eve and day (as this bridges both across the worlds I inhabit) be blessed.