Christmas 2020.  Covid Blues.  Christmas: Green Hope & Red Truth

Rick Malloy, S.J.

In 2019 it was, Stay away from negative people. In 2020, it was Stay away from positive people.

In 2020, I was so bored I called Jake from State Farm just to talk to someone. He asked me what I was wearing.

In 2020, The world has turned upside down. Old folks are sneaking out of the house & their kids are yelling at them to stay indoors!

In 2020, I saw a neighbor talking to her dog.  It was obvious she thought her dog understood her. I came into my house & told my cat.  We laughed a lot.

In 2020, Every few days you had to try on your jeans to see if they still fit. Pajamas trick you into believing all is well.

In 2020, we didn’t take showers (parfum de moi…) We just keep washing our hands.

In 2020, the virus did what no woman had been able to do before.  Canceled sports, shut down all bars & kept men at home!

In 2021, I need to practice social-distancing…. from the refrigerator.

 

All kidding aside, 2020 has been a year of years; a time unprecedented; an epoch of chaos, challenge, and change.  The year of the Covid shutdown, the year of Black Lives Matter Protests, the year of deathly dangerous and painful political partisanship.  One White House correspondent on Meet the Press summed up the year as “the year of alternative facts.” As this year ends, what do we really need to give one another?  I suggest we need to give one another the gifts of dialogue, truth and hope.

 

The philosopher Gadamer writes, “To reach an understanding in a dialogue in not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were” (1991, p 379.  Italics added). 

 

What a gift.  To really reach understanding with one another.  To listen and learn from one another.  To stop shouting and asininely asserting.  To begin to hear and heal.  Hear one another’s hurts and fears.  Heal our wounds and weariness. 

 

“The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”  So proclaims the Gospel of John.  The WORD, in Greek, the LOGOS, is much, much more than a mere one syllable utterance.  THE WORD means understanding has come to live within us, in our heads and hearts, in our communities and countries, in our cosmos.  THE WORD is the ground of being that undergirds all existence.   THE WORD is wisdom that reality is good and beautiful and true.

 

THE WORD is reason, the awareness that reality makes sense, that our lives have deep and desperately significant meaning.  Think of George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.  Without George, Mr. Potter destroys social life, for the greedy and selfish do not live according to THE WORD.  The mean and mendacious, the stingy, sad, and sinful lot, live according to the lie, not according to the WORD of truth and faith and hope and love.  When lies rule, all is lost.

 

William Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) observes:

 

“I myself was to experience how easily one is taken in by a lying and censored press and radio in a totalitarian state. Though unlike most Germans I had daily access to foreign newspapers, especially those of London, Paris and Zurich, which arrived the day after publication, and though I listened regularly to the BBC and other foreign broadcasts, my job necessitated the spending of many hours a day in combing the German press, checking the German radio, conferring with Nazi officials and going to party meetings. It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were” (Kindle edition, loc 5761 ff.).

 

This Christmas, we need truth and hope more than ever.  THE WORD is truth.  THE WORD is not just in touch with reality, or just corresponding to reality. THE WORD creates and sustains reality, permeates and penetrates all the pulsating beauty and bodacious being of existence.  THE WORD has become human and we see the glory.  THE WORD takes on our human being and transforms us, giving us grace upon grace upon grace (John 1:16).  In Greek, grace is charis, from which we get the word charism, meaning a divine gift, a transcendent power.  Thomas Aquinas says grace is the ability to do what we could not do before.

 

The great grace and gift of Christmas is light.  This year we are all mesmerized by the Star of Bethlehem in the night sky, the closest Jupiter and Saturn have been for 800 years (https://www.space.com/great-conjunction-jupiter-saturn-2020-fun-facts).  “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

 

We cannot see light, but light gives us the power to see.  This Christmas, let’s give one another, give our communities and countries, our churches and cosmos, the gift of looking for, seeing and appreciating the light, the light that makes life possible, and pregnant with the possibilities of new birth.  Carl Sandburg once said, “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.”  This baby, this light, this WORD, is God’s pledge and promise that life will go on forever.

 

And isn’t that our hope?  That, despite it all, despite the destructiveness of our days, light and life, goodness and grace, faith and freedom, joy and justice, peace and promise, love’s crashing into our stubbornness (Damn it, for God’s sake, wear a Mask!) will win in the end.

 

We need to grace and gift one another with hope these days.  But how?  More than 325,000 in the USA and 1.7 million worldwide lost lives to Covid.  Political tensions can terrify.  Families stressed and strained by months of isolation and/or too much togetherness, now face holidays on Zoom rather than in the warmth of fireside with “fire water.”  No traveling.  No visiting.  No cheer.  A year without Easter and, the final insult, the cancellation of Christmas.  How hope? 

 

“Hope it the thing with feathers // That perches in the Soul // And sings the song without the words  // And never stops – at all” – Emily  Dickinson.

 

How hope? Sing.  Communicate.  Zoom.  Don’t eat too much junk food or drink too much wine, but indulge wisely and well.  Watch the movies. Decorate the tree.  Walk outside on a 15 degree, clear star filled night and let the awesomeness of the universe caress you.  Play with children.  Sit late at night, in a room lit by Christmas lights, and gaze on the manger.  Know God is with us. 

 

Isaiah proclaims: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.  You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing” (Isaiah 9:1).  St. Paul attests, “The grace of God has appeared, saving all” (Titus 2:11).

 

Luke reveals, “And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.  And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:10-14).  And little Linus sagely tells us, “That’s what Christmas is all about Charlie Brown.”

 

Pope Francis addressed the world in an op-ed article in the New York Times on Thanksgiving Day.

“If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain.  … the danger that threatens in a crisis is never total; there’s always a way out: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” That’s the genius in the human story: There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.

This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.

God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.

The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.

To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.”

 

There’s the hope.  We can dream big.  We can come out of this crisis better.  We can allow ourselves to be less selfish.  We can open our hearts to feel others’ pain.  We can delve into dialogue and come out “transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.”  To all who receive him he gives power to be sons and daughters of God (cf. John 1:12).

 

Have a Blessed Christmas.  Un Prospero Año Nuevo.  Jesus again begins the Dialogue.  He calls us to live and to love Truth.  He is our Hope.

And may we stay away from the frig in 2021.