Christmas This Year

"This Christmas, we ask you, heal us, help us, be born anew in us." ~Max Lucado

I know that I blogged about the tragedy at Sandy Hook yesterday, and I hate to keep rehashing this, but I had a couple of more thoughts that I wanted to share.  Most dealing with how we square what happened on Friday with the upcoming celebration of Christmas.  I have to admit knee jerk reaction is to think that I just don't feel like a bunch of Christmas celebrations this year, but I know that's wrong.  It's because of the darkness in the world that we need Christmas.  As I blogged about last year, Christmas arrives in the darkest, coldest time of the year.  And even in such darkness--in a world where we suffer the horror of last Friday--Christmas provides a little light, and a little hope.  And because of that, we must celebrate.

1.  Here is a beautiful prayer from Max Lucado as we try and square the violence of Friday with the upcoming celebration of Christmas next week.  Here is a portion:

Your world seems a bit darker this Christmas. But you were born in the dark, right? You came at night. The shepherds were nightshift workers. The Wise Men followed a star. Your first cries were heard in the shadows. To see your face, Mary and Joseph needed a candle flame. It was dark. Dark with Herod's jealousy. Dark with Roman oppression. Dark with poverty. Dark with violence.  Herod went on a rampage, killing babies. Joseph took you and your mom into Egypt. You were an immigrant before you were a Nazarene.

Oh, Lord Jesus, you entered the dark world of your day. Won't you enter ours? We are weary of bloodshed. We, like the wise men, are looking for a star. We, like the shepherds, are kneeling at a manger.

This Christmas, we ask you, heal us, help us, be born anew in us.

2.  This is a touching blog asking where God is in such a dark Christmas, and answering the question, simply, that He is in our hearts:

His heart this weekend is in us.
in our weeping and moaning and wounded doubts,
in the places where we don’t believe —
when our believing runs out, God’s loving runs on —
His inexplicable love
somehow beating unstoppable.

3.  This article about Christmas colliding with tragedy, that concludes this way:

Nothing we can say or do will ease the pain. Nothing will justify the shootings, or make any sense of it. But make no mistake—when Jesus came to earth, it was so that He could set in motion events that would culminate in a Kingdom where there is no more crying or grief. Where there are no senseless murders. Where the world will finally be new. And where the meaning of Christmas—the true meaning of Christmas—will finally be made joyfully, wholly evident.

And until that day, there is no better way to mourn the victims of a confusing, evil world and to celebrate the birth of a strange, wonderful child than to enter into the darkness ourselves, and shine a light.

4.  These thoughts from a priest in Philadelphia.  Here is part of his blog:

In these final days of Advent, the Church urges us to lift up our hearts and prepare to rejoice.  There’s nothing remotely naïve in this call to joy; the Church knows the harshness of the world far too well for empty pieties.  The evil in the world is bitter and brutal, but it’s not new.  Nor, in the light of human history, is it a surprise.  Yet in the Old Testament, the Song of Songs tells us that “love is strong as death,” and in God’s redeeming plan, love is stronger than death.  The surprise is the persistence of God’s fidelity and mercy. The surprise is that, despite our sins, we still long to be the people God intended us to be.

Christmas is the birthday of Jesus Christ, our Emmanuel, a name that means “God with us.”  The surprise is that God sends his own Son into a dark world to bring us light and hope.  So it has been with every generation since Bethlehem.  So it remains — even now.

5.  This blog that is maybe the best explanation I've ever heard about God's will in situations like this.  Here is my favorite part:

First, it’s not God’s will. Evil is the absence of God, meaning this is the opposite of His will.

But God also draws good out of evil events. Sorrow is a hole in the heart, and grace rushes in to fill it. “The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway wrote, “and afterwards, many are strong at the broken places.” There is a wound in Newtown. Forty wounded parents of young children. Eighty grandparents. Hundreds more brothers, sisters, husbands, friends, cousins, teachers, pastors, school mates: each person touching so many lives. Grief rippling outward, growing exponentially, until thousands of people have a direct connection to this tragedy.

It’s worse, of course, for the parents: theirs souls torn, their minds wrenched. The sorrow will be unbearable at times. Some will not recover. None will ever recover completely. The scars will never fade, and they never should; neither on them, nor on us. But there will be healing, and there will be grace: the grace that we only allow to enter at the broken places.

Second, God is not “out of the schools” because bureaucrats made some rules about prayer. God was in the heart of every child in that school, and no doubt in the hearts of many of the teachers. God is where we are, and the folly of the  fundamentalists (of both the atheist and Christian varieties) is to think legislation can somehow change that.