Coventry City of Culture! What a brilliant Christmas present for Coventry.
What a confirmation of the city’s great music, our big names of literature, our Cathedral’s world-famous architecture.
What a chance to celebrate Coventry’s creativity, and for an explosion of art and dance, song and drama that will dazzle the world.
That’s what happened at the first Christmas – the angels sang a heavenly hymn that’s resounded through the ages and rises again in our hearts every Christmas: ‘Glory to God, peace and goodwill to the world’. That takes us into the deeper meaning of culture – not just the songs and poems, not only the art and architecture of human creativity, but the way of life, the values, the things we hold dear, the way we want to live with each other as one people in one city.
Christmas tells us a lot about what it truly means to be a city of culture. A culture that welcomes the destitute family, like Mary and Joseph, and doesn’t say to them, ‘There’s no room at our inn’. A culture where every child is safe and doesn’t allow them to live in poverty, or to be threatened by violence in the way that Jesus was. A culture where people, like the three kings, come from all over the world because they have heard that God’s light is shining upon us.
Let’s be that sort of city of culture, and let’s begin this Christmas.
The Rt Revd Dr Christopher Cocksworth
