The Archbishop of Canterbury has revealed that he keeps "vaguely sane" by running around his garden.

And he used the experience of losing track of the number of laps he had done to reflect on the way events "break in – like running into a tree – and remind you to look where you're going and to see what's going on around you".

Justin Welby was addressing the annual Advent service at Lambeth Palace for parliamentarians and their staff. He said: "I go round and round the garden, and if you go around the track often enough you get to know every hole in every tree – mostly because you've either, in the dark of the morning, run into them or fallen over them."

He continued: "There must be moments when all of you think, 'Am I on this year, or last year, or next year...?' Then we have years like this year, where events come crashing through, and bring us all up short. Events of immense and profound tragedy – when we were praying earlier for those for whom this Christmas will be a hard time, because of bereavement, Jo Cox's name came to mind and her family."

He also referred to the EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump, saying it had been a year of "extraordinary events".

Welby challenged the idea that events were a "cycle that goes round and round", saying: "As Christians, we believe in a direction, a journey... A journey that began with God and ends with God, and in which God accompanies us the whole way along the journey. In which there is both a sense of being looked after, but also of being held accountable and responsible."

The belief that "Jesus is with us", he said, means that "nothing is so disastrous that he cannot redeem it, and nothing is so final that he cannot bring new life after it". But it also means knowing that "he is the one that, day by day, we can turn to in our weakness and our failure, confess and find renewed strength, hope and determination to keep going.

"To forget that is to lapse into that false idea of the cycle, and not to remember that we have begun, we continue – each one of us here has a vocation – and that we will end before him, embraced by his love, but held accountable by his justice and his mercy."