Hope

Although change is a constant, there’s one thing I can count on. Every day my 5 year old grandson will ask, “How many days until Christmas?” Everything beyond about three days is, to him, an excessively long amount of time.

On the Christian calendar, we’re in Advent. It’s the season of anticipation and preparation for the birth of Jesus. Different groups down through history have traditions associated with this time. At least one actually included fasting! Thankfully, that horror was never popular and is not, to my knowledge, practiced by anyone these days.

Now we indulge in the sacred rituals of eating and drinking to excess and worshipping almighty capitalism. We shop, buying stuff for friends and family. This, incidentally, has become a worldwide tradition regardless of any connection to the birth of Jesus. Our devotion is determined by money spent.

The day we celebrate as Christmas is, in all likelihood, not tied to the date of Jesus’ birth but to the ancient celebrations when the Earth’s poles reach the maximum tilt away from the Sun. From the 21st of December forward, in the Northern Hemisphere, daylight gradually increases. Ancient peoples celebrated this change, relieved that spring would once again warm the earth, crops would grow, life would be renewed.

Quite simply, it marks the renewal of hope in our world. The world in which Jesus was born was a world filled with violence and oppression. Unless you were fortunate enough to be born into high rank, or just exceedingly lucky, life was likely to be, as Hobbes would put it, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Certainly that was the case for folks born in the despised backwater of the Roman Empire where Nazareth and Bethlehem lay. Mary and Joseph had so little status and money that they were sent to the little cave where animals were kept out back of the inn rather than a room where better off people stayed. They were a couple of so little stature that their baby was delivered and laid in an animal feeding trough, a manger. Surely, their only real possession was hope that life would be tolerable.

Given the state of the world today, are we really all that different? We have wars and oppression around the globe. The wealthy accumulate more and more leaving less and less for everyone else. Money and power rule instead of love and goodwill toward others.

We now know that not only do all human beings have different objective perceptions based on personal life experiences, but people have different subjective perceptions. We literally do not see things the same way even when we belong to the same culture, race, religion, even family. Just because two people were raised in virtually identical circumstances is no guarantee that they will perceive things the same way. There is no single right way to look at life.

The message of Christmas has universal application regardless of religion. We all need more hope and more tolerance for one another.