December is the month of our greatest anticipation, followed at a distance– in this country, anyway–by May, when children are waiting for school to liberate them for the summer. But December is a month of anticipation around the world, the season in the Christian church for expectation. We re-live in worship and celebration the Most Blessed of all events: the birth of Jesus.
His birth is narrated, re-read, and re-told, acted out on school and church stages, frozen in live tableaus in church-yards and (we saw it once) just off exit ramps near interstates. It is a story both dramatic and quiet, rich with opportunity for imagination to bring the re-creations to life.
These acts are good ones, as we must always fight against the familiar to remember the wonder, miracle and mystery that Christmas means. If kept in perspective, even the gift-giving of Christmas aids us, serving to remind that any gift points to the Perfect Gift, that any gift’s goodness is merely symbolic and a shadow of the Ultimate Good.
And so these days and weeks of anticipation are good ones, in that they literally prepare us (or can, anyway) to receive again the Word made Flesh.
Which is why the events of Friday morning at a school in a corner of Connecticut are perhaps even more appalling– as if there could be a worser time for them to come to pass.
Today we awake again to reminders of lamentation, to parents who likely haven’t slept, forgetting that sleep matters in the wake of their loss. Parents who have closets and hiding places bulging with gifts for children lost– children who were waiting for Christmas, who opened advent calendars and giggled over games with the elf on the shelf. The loss of these parents, grandparents, friends, siblings is unspeakable.
I have sat too many times at the side of a mother bereft. To say that her pain is sheer agony would maybe come to the edge of it. In instances like this, “injustice” and “horror” and “emptiness” signify only the insufficiency of language, and “comfort” comes to mean “hopeless.”
Events such as this slice open the vein of longing, make more real than we can bear our desperate and real desire for Something Other, something away and far from and even beyond all of this– this world and its capacity to kill.
Which is why we have Christmas: the beauty of the hope that it offers, hope as fragile as a newborn– and all that will come because of it.
And in despair I bowed my head
“There is no peace on earth,” I said,
“For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men.”
