Christmas 2020
In German, one word is often used to bring into summary an entire concept. This is often achieved by the way in which German strings words together to what looks an impossibly long word to the English eye. However, there is a relatively simple German word that describes one whole concept, and that is Zeitgeist. It is the German for the idea of “the spirit of the times.” The internet search engine Google has picked up on this and has commandeered the term for its own analysis of the top trending searches over the net. So, the Google Zeitgeist measures the terms that have seen the largest increase over the last year as well as the most popular search terms overall. As a Google spokesman once remarked, “The Zeitgeist is a cultural barometer that gives us the feel for where everyone’s going.”
It is hardly surprising what our current Zeitgeist might be: our lives have been dominated by a pandemic that keeps outbreaking each time we think we have it contained. It has shattered our complacency, increased our anxiety, separated us from one another, closed down much of our social life, made us fragile financially, emotionally, and perhaps even spiritually. We have learnt not to look too far ahead. Our plans have no surety about them. What of our future? Do we have one? What might it look like?
As we struggle with these questions in the midst of all that this last year has brought us, we come to gaze upon a baby, eternally the symbol of new life, new beginnings and hope. As one writer puts it, when we gaze upon a child we are caught intensely between an immediate experience of the present and a heightened expectation of the future, between a “fulfilled moment and the beginning of a new day.”[1] Every child “represents a new beginning of life . . . original, completely incomparable” and every birth “strengthens and confirms the great hope for the victory of life” that each of us cherish deep within us even in the midst of the distortions of our life journeys, our failures, our cynicism and frustration.[2] In every child God waits for us to stir again within us the sense of new beginnings, of fresh possibilities, of awakening hopes.
A baby is one of the most amazing creatures! In their presence there is nothing about which for us to be defensive; their presence invites us; it does not coerce. They call forth our love in a way that it is we who are changed because now we can be just as we are – there is nothing to prove, nothing to compete against, nothing to defend.
The more serious God becomes with us, the more humble God becomes with us. He does not demand our dependency on him but confuses us by his dependency on us. On this day God has become utterly humble. God has become so utterly humble so that we might not lose sight that we do have a future, that the future obscured as it may be for us, still remains as gift and invitation. We flail about, so often reacting in our anxiety in ways that cannot bring us to all that God wishes to realise in us and for us. Does God lecture us? Does God place a demand on us? No, God empties himself so completely into the sheer vulnerability and fragility of a baby to indicate to us that no matter the uncertainty of our situation, there is always a new beginning.
If we want to know if we have future, we do not need to log on to Google. Rather, let us enter the stable in which is birthed the answer for which we are searching as this tumultuous year draws to its end. For the mystery of the Divine Child is that in every end there is a new beginning.
[1] Jurgen Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning: The Life of Hope (Fortress Press, 2004), 8.
[2] See Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 16-17.
