A Christmas Reflection

Finding Joy in a Struggling World

It’s been a cold, damp weekend on Cape Cod. I spent much of yesterday reading – trying to make more progress in War and Peace (more than 1/3 through now), and catching up on last week’s issues of The Economist and The New Yorker.

I’ve always loved to read, and that love has come in handy these last 21 months of relative isolation. Early in the pandemic I tried to occupy myself with several “hobbies,” but most of them have faded out. I tried my hand at writing poetry, putting to use those poetry courses I took in college and reading more books about how to write good poetry, but after a few weak efforts I decided that I’d better stick to prose. I also started playing my guitar again, and that was a good, expressive outlet for a while, but playing the same songs over and over without an audience or another musician to play with eventually bored me. After we watched “The Queen’s Gambit,” I received a chessboard as a present, but it remains on the shelf as there is no one else here who plays the game. The two hobbies that have retained my interest are podcasting and writing this newsletter, which I still do gladly.

In my faith tradition, the Christmas season is supposed to be a special time of joy. As the second Christmas of the pandemic approaches, the joy is still there, but we have to dig deeper to find it. Once again, like last year, my family will skip the holiday parties and concerts. Once again, we will celebrate quietly at home. Once again, we will miss the joyful holiday atmosphere that had always been present on Boston streets this time of year – the busy shoppers, the strategically placed carolers, the Salvation Army bell ringers, the colored lights. We even may attend church by live stream.

Despite the unavoidable gloom imposed by a tenacious virus, made gloomier by rapidly spreading variants, we still have cause for joy. Our family plans to be together, a significant improvement over last year. We all seem to be healthy, though we don’t take our health for granted. We will have a roof over our heads, a warm house, good food to eat, and good hands to prepare it. The sun sets pretty early in coastal Massachusetts, but soon the days will begin getting longer. And, whatever 2022 has in store, we are grateful for what we have right now.

A deeper joy can be found in the reason we celebrate. Like countless others, I have always found special meaning in the Christmas story. The narrative of Jesus’ birth has meaning at several levels, some unique to Christianity, and at least one shared by other religions. That shared meaning is that the good and the true and the sacred do not reside in our might, our wealth, or our prestige. They reside, rather, in our weakness, our poverty, and our humility. Although rich and powerful empires and emperors have come and gone, the crucified son of a carpenter, born in a lowly stable, still has a grip on the souls of his followers more than twenty centuries after his birth.

His message while he was here, rooted in the Hebrew Bible, was not that we should pursue power or riches or fame, but that we should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, let in the stranger, clothe the naked, and care for the sick and the imprisoned. As the prophet Micah put it, what does the Lord require of us but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God? A holy blend of action and contemplation. An ethic for the temporal, grounded in the eternal, born from and producing joy.

We find this joy even today in the selfless work of those who respond to the needs of those in crisis - the social worker who brings healing to a broken home; the teacher who lifts up children in a struggling neighborhood; the builder who shelters the homeless; the nursing home attendant who comforts the elderly; the healthcare worker who works multiple shifts in an overcrowded ICU; the soup kitchen donors and volunteers who feed the undernourished; the missionaries who rebuild a storm-ravaged town.

The people who respond to such critical need are often overlooked in our politics-obsessed media, but they are there and they are multitudes. They may be motivated by a variety of faiths or no faith at all, but the joy they are able to bring to the people and communities they serve, as well as to us mere onlookers who admire and sometimes support their selfless efforts, is a slice of the same joy Christians find in the story of the birth of Jesus. God’s presence comes not in the form of a powerful king surrounded by riches and moving his armies in a game of thrones, but in the perfect vulnerability of an infant, born in the humblest of circumstances, and revealed continuously in the mercies we extend to the vulnerable in our midst, as well as the mercies extended to us when we too most need them.

I am still trying to learn how to live this joyful life that the Christmas story lays out. Part of the learning process, for me at least, is to return to a degree of spiritual discipline that I had long ago abandoned. For most of my adult life, I have had a bias toward action, toward doing good works with little attention to the inner resources needed to perform them often enough and well. And while my intentions may have been good, my response to human need has been wanting. I cannot, it seems, effectively tend to the temporal without a healthy connection to the eternal.

The process for finding that connection, and its relationship to the Nativity, is eloquently portrayed in Part V of T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Dry Salvages,” to which I briefly alluded in a previous post. Like much of Eliot, it is a difficult passage to comprehend, and so I won’t copy it here. But in it, he writes of “the point of intersection of the timeless with time,” a gift experienced “in a lifetime’s death in love, ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.” He describes our momentary glimpses of the eternal through our temporal, natural surroundings, and refers to them as “only hints and guesses” and “hints followed by guesses.” The rest, he says, “is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.”

People of all faith traditions should be able to relate to Eliot’s recipe for a worthy life, combining spiritual practice with a life of action. For Christians like himself, he goes one step further, proclaiming that “the hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.”

A baby lying in a manger. Emmanuel. God with us.

Joy and peace to all.

_____________________

You can find the complete text of the Dry Salvages here.