New Year message from the Archdeacon of Brighton and Lewes

I am in awe of those people who swim in the sea all year round. You really need to know what you’re doing, to understand what very cold temperatures can do to you, where the direction of the sea current may take you, what the reaction of your body to the extreme cold is telling you, for this to be a safe activity.

Every day throughout the pre-Christmas cold snap I would see small groups of hardy swimmers spending a few minutes in the cold waters, connecting with the rawness of the ocean.

When I would occasionally stop with the dog on Hove beach and ask them how it was that day, always they would say how alive they felt, how invigorated, how uplifted. And I walked on in disbelief, not a disbelief that I think these tough, year-round swimmers are mad or mistaken because I’m sure they’re on to something. My disbelief is that they would go to such extremes in order to derive such benefits.

Underneath this activity, underneath the waves as it were, is of course a belief, supported by experience, that the earth itself is a place of goodness, a place of gift waiting to be discovered.

When I see these swimmers I cannot help but be reminded that goodness is everywhere and that faith, hope, trust and love are the keys to discovering it. To live according to the principle of underlying and original goodness is to grasp a foundational reality which liberates us deep inside.

It is a reality which is elusive to governments, laws, philosophies, and ideologies. It is a liberation dependent on free giving and joyful receiving, and it is this to which the Christian story points.

Human dignity depends on our capacity for trust, faith, hope and love. To immerse yourself in the sometimes icy cold waters of the world in the belief that at its deepest core there is goodness, is an affirmation of these virtues and an act of courage.

At the heart of Christian story God commits himself, trusts himself, to the world in faith and love.

He does this to demonstrate that all human beings have an inherent dignity which historically has often been denied, and in our own day, at the start of a new year, remains under threat in so many places.

It is a dignity which cannot be claimed or monopolised by the powerful but found, as God himself discovers, by adopting the way of trust and love. It can never be left to any individual or any group to decide who is worthy of dignity, our prejudices always get in the way and the disadvantaged and the powerless so easily miss out.

As the new year begins and living costs remain punishing, war in Ukraine is still terrifying, the response to demonstrations in Iran is horrifying, and the plight of migrant workers taking down World Cup stadiums is very concerning, it isn’t easy to hold on to a belief in original goodness or universal human dignity, and for those things to take me to a place of greater generosity or simplicity.

But in the silence that I try to find each day, in the words that Jesus Christ speaks to me and to the world, in the prayers of the Church, and the connection with strangers, the excitement of the new year and the joy of the natural world, I find hope is renewed as I try and live an undefended and unpredictable life.

I really value these words of the 16th century Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, who knew something of what it meant to pursue a vision for a better world: “May today there be peace within. May you trust God that you are exactly where you are meant to be. May you not forget the infinite possibilities that are born of faith.

“May you use those gifts that you have received, and pass on the love that has been given to you. May you be content knowing that you are a child of God. Let this presence settle into your bones, and allow your soul the freedom to sing, dance, praise and love. It is there for each and every one of us.”