I Needed This Christmas

"The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." (John 1:5 NRSV)

"I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ."                    (Philippians 1:6, NRSV)

I needed this season.  Yes, I love the Christmas tree anchoring the great room, and the nutcrackers standing guard.  I love the nativity set handmade by a friend, populating the mantle.  I love making use of the Christmas dishes and the extra sweets and the holiday playlist emanating from the speakers.  I love the anticipation of cards from loved ones reconnecting the gift of our lives.  I love the memories stirred reanimating people and places and stories from the past.  All that, and wrapping paper and bows never hurt anything, either.  

But none of that names the dimension of the season for which I only now realize I was desperate.  The darkness, I now can name, had overcome me.  

It is, by now, a familiar litany:

• The virus and the ensuing quarantine that have in countless ways stood over us like a severe parent with the constant refrain, "you can't do that."  The illnesses of friends.  The deaths.  So many deaths.
• The economic anxiety that has gripped so many as businesses have shuttered, jobs have been put on hold, while the rent still comes due and the nourishment and medicines still need taking.
• The racial acrimony that is a virus all its own, killing our souls and too many of our neighbors just as savagely as COVID-19.  And the tragic recognition that we don't even seem to be looking for a vaccine to "cure" this social, moral pestilence.
• The political rancor that long ago abandoned the microphone of honest and earnest debate, in favor of the boxing ring where we simply intend to bludgeon our adversaries into blood-covered unconsciousness.  
• The "Poor-Loser-in Chief" who persists in a toxic cocktail of self-aggrandizement and outright sedition.  Persuasively, so it seems.
• A church that, through the years and increasingly today, too often squanders its energies on its own popularity and "fun," and the insularity of enjoying its own salvation to the neglect of the incarnation it is called to be.

It has all been just about too much.  

It is certainly true that the darkness is incomplete.  I am literally surrounded by love and life in ways too plentiful to enumerate.  Unlike so many I know; unlike so many in the world, I live amidst an embarrassment of riches - health, comfort, shelter, food in the pantry, and medical insurance.  I know this.  I am humbled by this.  I am persistently challenged by this to be a better, more faithful steward of these assets to which I am not entitled but of which I find myself in possession; resources and opportunities I have "earned" only by virtue of a constellation of circumstances on which I have had minimal influence.  

Increasingly, however, over the recent months and years these brilliant beams have seemed more like a penlight by which I have been trying to read while huddled under a blanket, as the battery gradually dimmed.  

I haven't been in a good space.

I suppose I have to admit that I drifted far off the path.  

My soul got out of focus.

In ways of which I repent, I lost the faith...

...the faith reasserted this Christmas, with candle flames shared and lifted high, that, "what has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it."

Darkness, after all, is nothing new.  My particular darkness is hardly novel.  Poverty, disease, xenophobia, despotic and self-serving leaders are no strangers to the human family.  John's assertion of persistent light has never been an easy one.  Or obvious.  Or, I now realize, personal.  How is it that I have never heard it for the radical affirmation it is?  And ponder, prayerfully, what it has to say to my particular state of mind?  I needed John to remind me, this year especially, that we do not - dare not - ignore the myriad blights; we simply refuse to grant them sway.  Darkness, yes, but the darkness does not overcome it.

That determined affirmation, along with Paul's confident trust that the One who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.  

I needed this season, more than ever - more, perhaps, than I even realized.  

A reality check, of sorts.  

Or perhaps it has been the Spirit as obstetrician, slapping my infantile faith into cries of new life.

Let the New Year begin.