A Christmas Hope

Earlier this week NPR’s morning news report moved seamlessly from the Connecticut school shooting to something like “the names of ten nine- to eleven-year-olds are still unknown”; after a moment of confusion I realized the story had changed to a bomb blast in Afghanistan.

Additional news compounds the season’s weightiness stateside: Calls for increased gun control measures encourage assault weapons purchases; the Westboro Baptist idiots talk about picketing the Sandy Hook Elementary School victims’ funerals.

It’s a heavy time for me as a parent and teacher–and I can’t even begin to imagine the grief now faced by families and the communities in Newtown or east of Kabul.

And it’s Christmas, when we sing about the Prince of Peace’s reign on Earth and proclaim that justice “shall guard his throne above, and peace abound below,” all of which “no end shall know,” lines from one of the five or so hymns I ever learned to play on the piano, the yuletidal To us a child of hope is born.

I believe in what that song is about, but not because God is my security chief. (If he were, I’d better get my head out of the sand real quick and start looking at other options; as far as I can tell, God isn’t doing a very good job of protecting the innocent.) Rather, I believe less in God personified or deified and more in Earth-grounded goodness that is life giving; the Christ child symbolizes hope for a better way of life that, while upside-down, cultivates that which is right.

It’s a messy theology, with few clear-cut answers and lots of human obligation; my Christmas hope cannot be removed from humanity’s roles as justice guarders and peace abounders.

Yet hope I do: that even in the inevitability of our vulnerability to nature, each other, and ourselves, all that is life giving will increase and know no end.