'Listening to the Music of the Soul: The Archbishop of York’s Advent Book 2025' by the Right Reverend Guli Francis-Dehqani (London: SPCK, 2025).
Bishop Guli’s book for Advent is a real treasure, a very different type of Advent companion. From her own life-story of persecution, exile and family tragedy, Bishop Guli imbues the traditional themes of Advent – the four last things of death, judgement, heaven and hell – with a fresh, contemporary and realistic resonance.
Those deeply serious traditional Advent themes have been largely cast aside for more reassuring and comforting themes of hope, peace, joy and love. No doubt these seem to fit better with the festive preparations for Christmas, but they can so easily become quite saccharin. My local council has emblazoned some of the new themes on its tinselly Christmas decorations, bereft of any Christian or Advent meaning, around the shopping centres. Bishop Guli’s traditional Advent reflections, however, are embedded in the not remotely saccharin deep existential hope and joy that should underlie preparation for the Incarnation.
First, Bishop Guli’s story. She was born in Iran, the daughter of the first indigenous Persian bishop of the Anglican Church in Iran. The Islamic revolution of 1979 resulted in persecution of the small Iranian Christian community. Her mother was wounded in an assassination attempt on her father, and her brother was murdered. The situation was so dangerous her family was forced into exile when she was 13, making their home in England. The Bishop of Chelmsford since 2021, she has never been able to return to her homeland.
Her story means Bishop Guli is not afraid to confront the hard realities behind the stories of the Christmas narrative. For example, for her, Mary’s song, the Magnificat, principally offers the good news of God’s care for ‘the downtrodden and the powerless’. The tiny, persecuted Christian church in Iran is certainly both downtrodden and powerless, she says.
In the chapter entitled ‘The Flight’, focused on the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt, she reminds readers of the many stories of flight from danger found in the Bible. Her own difficult story of flight emerges there but so too do the harsh realities facing many people today. “The fact is,” she writes, “that anxious and despairing people far from home have always existed”. Today’s anxious and despairing people include Ukrainians, Gazans, Afghans, Syrians and many more, she says.
The chapter entitled ‘Violence’ is powerfully honest. She writes: “However delightful it may be to imagine that Advent and Christmas are mainly about angels and stars, nativity plays and twinkling lights, this is simply not the case”. The Christmas stories are littered with “moments of brutality”, she says. Herod’s massacre of the innocents is an obvious example.
This is an Advent resource like no other – powerfully real, relating the harsh world of first century Palestine to the confronting world of today, and yet nevertheless resonating with the indestructible deep peace and joy of the angels’ song.
The Right Reverend Gulnar Eleanor "Guli" Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford, UK.
For more information or to purchase the book, please see:
https://spckpublishing.co.uk/listening-to-the-music-of-the-soul-551
