We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. The television flares with images of despicable political louts. We cannot look away from the pictures of enraged nature, hurricanes, and fires, from the footage of the too-familiar mass murders committed by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We mourn for the violation of the ancestral land of the First Nations people. We pray for peace as we see the protests of the Palestinians and others who fight for the dignity of their lives and the right to live on their land. Countless people migrate between continents seeking refuge, fleeing from wars and violence. So many children in the world grow up only knowing hunger and violence due to living within the confinement of walls and wires in their lives, or on the dangerous roads. We pray with all who struggle toward peace for all.
When I asked some people at Immanuel what Christmas message they wish to hear most, they responded unanimously: the message of hope. Since then, I wanted to share a message about the hope we find in the middle of the light and the dark. In the in-between spaces of possibility and impossibility. Then I wondered, what do we really mean when we say, “We pray that the Christ is born anew in our hearts.” Here, we ponder hope as something we dream, aspire to, or yearn to be kindled in us, as it is reflected and depicted in the most popular image of Mary’s pregnancy in the nativity story. (Christ being born in us.) We don’t really celebrate the part of the labour - Mary's painful yet necessary time of “giving birth”. I wondered, what if hoping is not just remaining in the state of pregnancy but giving birth, the active process of labour, in other words, taking on the struggle of activism. We are not just pregnant with hope; we give birth to hope. Holy labour is something we can celebrate and contemplate. It really is a sacred time. It is not the quiet, silent part of the night of Christmas Eve, but the loud part of the night, with sweat, and crying out, and needing every bit of your strength. Birthing is hard, yet we can only meet the incomparable, exceeding joy and the mystery of Incarnation after the hard, messy “birthing” of hope. In our activism may God’s dream become alive as we pass on the light and candle of hope.
Hoping is not just the longing for a happy ending, but making this story be the one with the happy ending. We take the journey of incarnational struggling in activism, in prayer and in faith.
The novelist E. Annie Proulx says, “Yet somehow the old discredited values and longings persist. We still have tender feelings for such outmoded notions as truth, respect for others, personal honour, justice, equitable sharing. We keep on trying because there’s nothing else to do. The happy ending still beckons, and it is in hope of grasping it that we go on.”
The values and hopes Proulx describes are what we call “faith.” And for us, the ground for such faith and hope is God’s promise in Genesis and in the Gospel that the seed of hope is permanent, firmly established already in the beginning of time, and therefore to the end.
If we dream the happy ending of things, God promises that the seed of hope is not just temporary, tethered to only the here and now. It is firmly established already in the ‘beginning’ of all things from the beginning of time. What Christmas tells us is that the seed of hope is permanent in the promise of the Word made flesh. Let us ponder this mystery with the Choir’s voices in singing, Who is This Tiny Child?
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