Dave Perry writes, '...With temperatures down to -16C our snow-bound village has been blessed with a spectacular display of frost. One sight in particular caused me to stop and think, an image which quite unexpectedly visualised my expectation of Advent and the Christmas season.
I came upon a barbed wire fence adorned along its entire length with a translucent fringe of delicate ice crystals. It was as though a decorative strip of tinsel had been unwound and very gently and deliberately put in place to counter the barbs with beauty. And what beauty.
The frost was growing by the hour, and to me it had the quality of a determined and irresistible protest at that which is designed to harm. Materialising out of thin air, the frost made visible the front line of love's work. Where else would I expect love to be if not where life's barbs are the sharpest and its boundaries the cruelest and most intransigent?
Where the tools and techniques of violence and oppression separate us from each other, where hatred divides and the innocent are denied freedom, that is where love materialises. Advent tells me this is so.
And so in the frosty miracle of love's incarnation in Bethlehem, God's crystal clear protest at all that bedevils and belittles the beauty of our humanity is made manifest for all to see. Such translucent grace makes a mockery of our barbed wire world. It encourages us to believe that love will always appear where the need is greatest...'
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From Dave Perry's moving and enlightening Visual Theology blog...
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