 Dear Reader
With the Midwinter festival of new Birth fast approaching, we’d like to offer you this jewel. Written on Christmas Eve in the year 1513 by Fra Giovanni, and included in the anthology ‘Images of Christmas’, it expresses – more eloquently than we ever could – the most beautiful Christmas wish. Please see yourself as the noble person to whom the letter is addressed, for noble you are!
Most noble Contessina, I salute you. Believe me your most devoted servant. The rascal who carries this letter, if he devour them not on the way, will crave your acceptance of some of the fruits of our garden. Would that the peace of Heaven might reach you through such things of earth.
Contessina, forgive an old man’s babble. But I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got; but there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. No Heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take Heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see; and to see, we have only to look. Contessina, I beseech you to look.
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendour, woven of love, by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the Angel’s hand that brings it to you. Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, or a duty: believe me, that angel’s hand is there; the gift is there, and the wonder of an over-shadowing Presence. Our joys, too: be not content with them as joys; they too conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and of purpose, so full of beauty - beneath its covering - that you will find that earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it: that is all! But courage you have; and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you; not quite as the world sends greetings, but with profound esteem, and with the prayer that for you, now and for-ever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away. I have the honour to be your servant, though the least worthy of them.
Fra Giovanni
With much love from all of us, Geoff, Ann, Jackie, Derek, Martyn, Jackie M, Sue, Samantha, Regina, Jon, Sam, Bertel, Sandra, Pat, Karena, Louisa, Mary and Emma.
Text & photographs © Cygnus Books 18-Oct-2005
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