Gavin Ashenden, who served as Queen Elizabeth II’s chaplain from 2008 to 2017, told Fox News Digital in an interview why he believes Christmas offers special hope for those who suffer.
“I would say Christmas can be a time of year where people are under pressure,” he said. “It’s dark. It’s cold. Politics are cruel internationally. And what human beings need most is a sense of purpose and hope. And one of the things that Christmas does is it brings purpose and hope.
“It provides a purpose, because it tells us that if we are willing to believe it, the intelligence behind the universe came on a rescue mission to find us,” he said. “And it gives hope because every time Christ meets people, their lives are turned upside down and all the raw material of pain and suffering turns to gold and something better.”
THE JOY OF CHRISTMAS IS REVEALED TO EVERYONE: THIS IS HOW LOVE IS MADE FLESH ON CHRISTMAS MORNING
Gavin Ashenden served as Queen Elizabeth II’s chaplain from 2008 until he stepped down in 2017 to eventually join the Roman Catholic Church.
(Gavin Ashenden)
“So it’s about trying to interpret the religious experience of Christmas and making it applicable in terms of personal meaning and hope,” he added.
‘Money does not give you immunity from suffering’
Ashenden noted how throughout her long reign, Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Royal Christmas Messages to her subjects around the world were among the rare moments “when she came out from behind the mask of being a queen.”
“We have to understand that the way the English system works is that there are two people in the figure of the queen,” he explained. “There was the queen and there was Elizabeth Windsor; like Russian dolls, just one doll inside the other. And then on her Christmas broadcast, the doll inside, Elizabeth Windsor, the person, the human being, got a chance to speak personally. with her nation. So she continued to be the queen, but suddenly she came out.”
Queen Elizabeth II and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, admire the Christmas decorations on the Christmas tree in the Buckingham Palace Picture Gallery on December 15, 1998.
(Anwar Hussein/Contributor via Getty Images)
Ashenden said the monarch used her unique platform each Christmas to speak candidly about her own experience with God and to promote Christianity’s ability to transform lives.
“Although we think of her as the queen, privileged, right at the top of the hierarchical pile and a very wealthy woman, like everyone else, she had her problems,” he said. “She presided over a nation that had endless hardships. And she presided, frankly, over a family that had exactly the same kind of hardship that we had. She wasn’t immune to any of this. Money doesn’t give you immunity from suffering. .”
NY TIMES OP-ED CRIME FOR ARGUING ROYAL FAMILY SHOULD BE DISMANTLED AFTER ‘HARRY & MEGHAN’ SHOW
Queen Elizabeth II receives flowers from children after a Christmas service at Sandringham church on December 25, 1994. Ashenden said the Queen used her Christmas messages to promote the Christian faith.
(Tim Graham/Contributor via Getty Images)
“Her experience was that God was real,” the queen’s chaplain said of her. “God was love. God was personal. God had taken care of her, and God could take care of the people of his nation if they reached out to him. He did it in a subtle way. He was not intimidating, he was not self-righteous. Every time More as she got older, she was like a loving granny who had something wise and deep to share that worked with people.”
‘The wrong questions’
The English monarch is the titular head of the Church of England, an institution Ashenden left after resigning as Queen’s Chaplain in 2017. He resigned after speaking out against St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, for celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany with the recitation of verses from the Koran that deny the divinity of Jesus.
UK WOMAN ARRESTED FOR PRAYING NEAR ABORTION CENTER WARNS MORE ARRESTS COULD BE COMING
He would go on to join the Roman Catholic Church while expressing his concerns about free speech and the integrity of Christianity in the public square.
Street view of St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, Scotland.
(Google Maps)
Ashenden told Fox News Digital that he believes that cultural Marxism and the corrosive spiritual effects of wealth have seeped into the Church of England, and that its deterioration is accelerating rapidly, especially since the queen’s death.
CONSERVATIVE ANGLICANS WARN CHURCH OF ENGLAND IS FALLING DOWN IN AN ATTEMPT TO STAY RELEVANT: ‘THE CHURCH IS DYING’
He took particular note of the recent sermon at Trinity College, Cambridge, which sparked an international reaction near the start of Advent, when a junior researcher spoke of Jesus’ “trans body” from the pulpit and compared the wound in his side to a vagina. .
A Cambridge researcher claimed during a Vespers service in November that in the 14th-century Luxembourg Bonne Prayer Book, an isolated depiction of Jesus’ side wound “takes on a decidedly vaginal appearance.”
(The Met Collection API)
Although leading Church of England clergymen were silent on the issue, the homily drew public rebuke from figures including Ashenden and evangelist Franklin Graham.
“People are so comfortable that in our superabundant wealth we are asking the wrong questions,” Ashenden told Fox News Digital, adding that anyone questioning the vaginal motifs in crucifixion wounds is “an example of someone asking the kind of wrong questions.”
CAMBRIDGE DEAN DEFENDS SERMON ON JESUS’ ‘TRANS BODY’, ‘VAGINAL’ SIDE WOUND HIGHLIGHTED AS ‘HERESY’
“What we should really be asking is, what kind of world is this where God the Creator allows himself to be hurt on our behalf?”
“Because people who hear that [Cambridge] sermon, when they went home that night, they would all have been faced with questions like: ‘Am I important? Do I matter? What value does my life have? Can I love and be loved successfully?'”
“What we should really be asking is, what kind of world is this where God the Creator allows himself to be hurt on our behalf?”
All of the secondary questions about identity and society fall into place after those fundamental questions are answered, Ashenden said, adding that “all of those questions are answered in the wounds of Christ on the cross.”
‘Holding on to hope’
Ashenden, who said he has wrestled with deeply dark moments in his own life, recalled once being drawn into a “very strange mystical encounter” during which he said he was invited to share briefly in the suffering of Jesus.
“As someone who has hit rock bottom multiple times, because things happen to all of us in life that take away hope of who we are and what we’re doing, I would say that the most important thing in life is to find some way to hold on to hope.” , said.
Ashenden said that the Christmas story urges us to consider “hope and the highest good, which is self-sacrificing love.”
(Fred de Noyelle via Getty Images)
He said he doesn’t think such a hope is possible “apart from a belief, a suspicion, an understanding that each one of us was created for a purpose and God never, ever, ever lets us go, no matter how wrong we are.” “
In an experience he said “has never happened before or since,” Ashenden recalled joining several other “broken people” during midnight prayers at a monastery in the late 1990s, at a time when his life “had just hit a brick wall, and I found myself faced with complexities that were contradictory.
“I couldn’t manage and I couldn’t see any way out,” he recalled. As he cried out to God for his own suffering, Jesus appeared on the cross in front of him.
5 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD GO TO CHURCH ON SUNDAY, EVEN IF IT’S CHRISTMAS
For less than 10 seconds, he said he was offered an experiential window into the physical and mental anguish of the cross, which he said “recalibrated” his perspective on his own trials in an indescribable way.
A portion of the 1490 painting “Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth” by Marco Palmezzano, now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
(Uffizi Gallery)
“Once you’ve discovered that God truly loves you, and loves you to the point where he’s willing to hurt himself more than you could ever imagine hurting yourself, he brings value to your life that you never lose.” said. .
“I could never look at Jesus on the cross again without thinking about what he went through to find me, forgive me, give me hope, give me purpose, and inspire me to stand by other people who are also in the dark and stuck.”
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
“So Christmas and Christianity is a counter-intuitive way to find your way to love, compassion, forgiveness, hope and the highest good, which is self-sacrificing love,” he added.
