Christmas has nearly gone by as this is written. The date of it, anyway. There’s a school of thought that suggests Christmas is a year-round deal. That’s a line of thinking I subscribe to. Still, the actual date holds special meaning. Sometimes, the date can amplify negative meanings.
That’s what I want to write about in this piece. To be honest, I hadn’t even planned on writing this today. But after spending a goodly hour on the phone with a good friend who has fallen on hard times… well, that’s the genesis of this column.
When I say hard times, I'm he was in trouble not in the physical or financial sense, but in the emotional sense. I told him, as I said here at PJ Media on Christmas Eve, that it's all about control. You can't help things that are out of your control. What you CAN control is your reactions to those events. A couple quotes provide examples of this.
Fox News today posted an article by Anne Beiler, who founded Auntie Anne’s:
For many, Christmas is a time of celebration, laughter and loved ones gathering. But for others, it magnifies the grief of what could be and awakens memories we wish we could forget. A season that promises peace can instead expose our deepest pain.
Before founding Auntie Anne’s, I walked through a season of darkness that I never thought I would escape. The loss of my 19-month-old daughter Angie created a hole in my heart that made it seem as though joy would always be out of reach.
The darkness of grief can make it seem like all hope is lost. I kept wondering when, or if, I could ever piece myself back together. Following my daughter’s death, I sought help from our pastor but was taken advantage of and abused for seven years. My grief led me down a path of shame I thought there was no coming back from. I found myself all alone in a world of secrets and darkness.
God’s love was the turning point and light that brought me out of the tunnel of grief. His salvation brought me restorative healing and led me on the path to being well. Confessing my story and secrets and trusting in God allowed me to move forward and receive forgiveness from others, God and even myself. Regardless of the pauses in my healing, after my first step into the realm of speaking truth, I never went all the way back to the dark place where I started.
Mark Stein, over at The Spectator, points out that Irving Berlin suffered a similar loss:
Christmas was not kind to Irving Berlin. At 5 o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day 1928, his 31/2-week-old son, Irving Junior, was found dead in his bassinet. ‘I’m sure,’ his daughter Mary Ellin told me a few years back, ‘it was what we would now call “crib death”.’
Does that cast ‘White Christmas’ in a different light? The plangent melancholy the GIs heard in the tune, the unsettling chromatic phrase, the eerie harmonic darkening under the words ‘where children listen’; it’s not too fanciful to suggest the singer’s dreaming of children no longer around to listen. When the girls grew up and left home, Irving Berlin, symbol of the American Christmas, gave up celebrating it. ‘We both hated Christmas,’ Mrs Berlin said later. ‘We only did it for you children.’
To take a baby on Christmas morning mocks the very meaning of the day. And to take Irving Berlin’s seems an even crueller jest — to reward his uncanny ability to articulate the sentiments of his countrymen by depriving him of the possibility of sharing them.
Berlin was a professional Tin Pan Alleyman, but his story, his Christmas is there in the music. 23 years after his death, he embodies all the possibilities of America: his family arrived at Ellis Island as poor and foreign and disadvantaged as you can be, and yet he wove himself into the very fabric of the nation. His life and his art are part of the definition of America. Whatever his doubts about God, Berlin kept faith with his adopted land — and that faith is what millions heard 70 years ago in ‘White Christmas’.
Over at Fox News, Jim Gash says that theologians and writers from Martin Luther King Jr to J. R. R, Tolkien recognized Christ's birth as essential to humanity:
Martin Luther King Jr., echoing the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker, often said that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." We see in this passage that God does not stand far off from the affairs of human beings, but guides the world toward his good purpose.
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J.R.R. Tolkien, master storyteller that he was, coined his own word for the moment in a story when all hope is lost — and then is suddenly found again; the moment when evil seems triumphant — and then is suddenly overcome by good. He called this kind of moment eucatastrophe ("good turn") — the opposite of catastrophe.
To Tolkien, this was not just a concept that existed in mythical stories, but one that had played out in an ultimate way in the real world: "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. ... There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true."
The point I’m making here is that, regardless of how sour this precise date may have become for you this year, you can still keep the faith, make something positive out of the negatives, and find that ray of light in the darkness.
When you’re standing in the middle of a huge dark space, it’s hard to see your way forward. Just remember that what you’re aiming for, where you’re going, is beyond your vision at the moment, but it won’t be so forever. That message of hope is what’s kept Christmas so permanently in our minds, in our traditions, and in our hearts.
What keeps people under those kinds of stresses going is something I've been speaking about for the last couple days: Faith. Sad events will happen to each of us. Christmas says we should let our hopes define us, not our losses, particularly those out of our control. There's an outcome ahead you don't foresee.
Let that hope that light I spoke of on Christmas Eve, carries you through the dark places.
