Christmas 2022 – David Ranson

The spirit of Christmas arises this year in a way different from the previous three. The COVID virus is still with us. Yet, this Christmas we have a sense of movement and association we have not enjoyed since Christmas 2019. And yet, still we sense an uncertainty and an anxiety in the humid air. Writing recently in the Sydney Morning Herald,Michael Idato remarked, “As the old year fades away, the exhaustion is palpable. Perhaps our post-pandemic lives have not lived up to the promise of the so-called Roaring 20s. The [last] year was to be a year of renewal and rediscovery. Travel was back. The world was back. So, what happened to that Greek beach holiday we said we’d take the moment the borders reopened? Maybe it was too much to ask that our collective tensions and anxieties dissolve away like snowflakes on New York, New Year morning. But the lived reality has been different. Big-city life feels fraught. Small-town life feels fraught too. There was flood and fire. The economy is rattled. Everything feels rattled.”^[1]

I think Idato might be right. Though life has returned to a sense of normalcy, and 1 January 2023 will begin with “COVID non-exceptionalism,” there remains an anxious, sober mood in the world, accentuated by all the uncertainty of the long conflict in Ukraine, climate change, inflation. We are hoping for a different year ahead, but we have learnt now not to entertain high hopes in its regard.

In this social mood, Idato, however, goes on: “But instead of melancholy, I would like to offer a prayer of hope and humility. Take as moment for yourself this Christmas. As the new year approaches, the fact that we’re still here, and able to find the joy in the chaos, is a gift in itself. Tread gently in the world around you. Be thankful and be grateful. Stop talking and listen. To Christmas carols. And to the world passing by. Enjoy the small things . . ” Sound, gentle advice at a fragile moment of our world.

Each year, of course, has its own challenges, its own weariness. Perhaps, in fact, this year is no different, even if the circumstances change. Each year with all our experiences we come back to telling and hearing the Christmas story again. The Christmas story never tires of its telling because somehow it speaks deep within us of the peace for which we long, the innocence we have lost, the wonder we wish to retrieve, the promise which we yearn to be fulfilled. We need to hear this story in order to be reminded of something we cannot lose. In other words, the story sheds light on a hope that lies deep within us but which, all too easily, can get suffocated by all that presses in on us.

The centre of this story is 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.”^[2] 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.^[3] In every child God waits for us to stir again within us the sense of new beginnings, of fresh possibilities, of awakening hopes

For hope is freedom. Where we have hope, there is an open horizon. We can move, even without knowing the certainty of our destination. Hope gives us the capacity to keep making decisions of trust and for love; it enables us to surrender the despair of self-enclosure and to reach out in commitment to the relationships of our life in and by which we are given our identity and our dignity. For the person who has hope, there is possibility. For the one who lives in despair, the present itself is experienced with finality, as the barrier to the past becoming something more. Only when we have a sense of future does both the past and the present come together to enliven us.

At the heart of the story of Christmas lies a fundamental human hope. Through all its twists and turns – from its outset in Nazareth where the life of a young girl stirs with new beginnings, through to the birth of new life full of possibility and concluding with a visit of strangers from the East who wonder at the meaning of all that has taken place – runs the thread of hope. It is the hope that “God is with us.” In all its various stages, the story reverberates with this unspoken, but nonetheless remarkable, refrain, “God-is with-us”:

God is with us in the struggle of a people to reclaim their identity;
God is with us in the questions which disturb us, and which disclose the emptiness within us, as with Mary;
God is with us as we go about making ends meet, providing and protecting our family;
God is with us as we find ourselves in social and political currents we do not fully understand;
God is with us as we delight at new life and fresh beginnings;
God is with us as we nurture and encourage one another;
God is with us in all the experiences that mark our effort to live as the people we are.

And if “God is with us” then there is always the possibility of something more. For God is an infinite horizon of invitation. And we are not alone; there is something larger than ourselves, something more than our own clumsy endeavours and inadequate attempts in life. We are not alone before a cold force of destiny that is arbitrary in its manifestation. And thus, dead ends can become new beginnings, hopelessness can be transformed by promise, death may be overcome by a stronger force of life. Yes, the proclamation at the heart of the story of Christmas that “God is with us” gives us hope. It gives us a future.

And for this we can never hear the story enough.

^[1] Michael Idato, “The best Christmas present you can give yourself is to be kind, for you survived.” (Sydney Morning Herald, 23 December 2022).

^[2] Moltamnn, In the End – The Beginning, 8.

^[3] See Moltmann, In the End – The Beginning, 16-17.