Comfort and joy in a long winter’s night

Before 2020, an entire year that seemed like a long winter night, memories of other years of loss were like distant thunder from past generations.

And yet, few of us escape life’s tragedies and unexplainable descents.

I remember my parents, both World War II veterans, trying to put that horror behind them in the shiny chrome of the 1950s.

Underlying the Age of Appliances, though, were fears of nuclear war.

Then, in the 1960s, everything started to unravel again, starting with the assassination of a president, racial injustice, riots in the streets and the mendacity and suffering of the war in Vietnam.

Watergate. Then the age of terrorism, culminating in this country in 9/11.

After that, the Great Recession of 2007-09.

Now, lives mutated and cut short by a merciless virus.

We think, “Never has a time felt like this one.”

But through the rise and fall of empires, through war and political turmoil, it has forever been so.

We reach out for hope, for comfort, thinking, if we can just get past this ill fortune, then the future will proceed in glorious perfection.

This month, though hundreds of millions of miles apart, Jupiter and Saturn seem fused in the nighttime sky; a nighttime sighting like this hasn’t occurred in about 800 years.

Ah, perhaps these gas giants are lighting the way through the cold and merciless universe.

But the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, written thousands of years ago, present a different picture of how light overcomes darkness, as if the two are vying in a cosmic battle. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. put it this way, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

This year, the holiday season for most of us is a virtual one — except for the Christmas tree. Sales were early this year, as people attempted to drive out the fear and restrictions and the losses of loved ones, by gathering with gifts at the tree.

Indeed, so much happens at the tree.

Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew, was born in Bethlehem, the birthplace of the Jewish King David, probably around 4 B.C, on an unknown date. Dec. 25 was adopted by the church to honor Christ (the word means “Messiah”) while incorporating a pagan festival honoring longer days after the dark cold of the winter solstice.

What does a Christmas tree have to do with the birth so long ago of Yeshua, the son of a teenage mother and her faltering husband?

Prodded by a governmentordered tax census, the family had journeyed some 80 miles from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem, a nondescript town about six miles south of Jerusalem, in a dusty Roman province.

There, an old man looked at this commonfolk family and spoke a bittersweet prophecy to the mother and her tiny son. In the hierarchy of the times, the small child was hardly destined to become a figure of elite royalty or high religious standing, but, said the old man, the boy was appointed to cause the rise and fall of many.

And for the mother, “a sword also will go through your own soul — so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”

The old man saw the tree. A wooden cross that would stand until the end of time, that would provide the way out of despair and meaninglessness and death.

In a cold vision in the middle of the night, I see this tree, branches askew. All my failures hang there, my secrets too.

Truly, I have nothing to bring there, and yet, no other place to go.

In the darkness, just before the dawn, I see generations dance across the tree.

We are not of this world.

The lights flicker in the shadows.

The wind whispers soft intonations.

I strain to hear. Sometimes it’s only me.

But tonight, I hear the sound of Christmas bells. And I’m not surprised I hear them toll for … me.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

Behold the man.

A light rises in the east.