I recently finished reading John Mark Comer’s new book Practicing the Way – Be with Jesus; Become like him; Do as he did. By way of a recommendation, I offer a series of sound bytes from the book which I hope will give you a nice taste of both the language and substance of the book.

• Grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning. Sadly, this tragic misunderstanding tends to produce consumers of Jesus’ merit rather than disciples of Jesus’ way.
• Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not. And, as Thomas Keating says, the chief act of the will is not effort but consent.
• The great enemy of the spiritual life is hurry. We must eliminate hurry from our lives. Most of us are just too busy to live emotionally healthy and spiritually vibrant lives. (In an attempt to slow down, Comer twice quit his job. His only regret is that he didn’t do it sooner.)
• Salvation is a communal experience. Jesus called disciples, not a disciple. Living in community is not easy but worth it. We can all tell horror stories of living in community when things go terribly wrong but when it goes right, it’s a glimpse of eternity.
• What do you want as the substance of your eulogy at your funeral?
• Are you growing in love not just for your friends and family but also for your enemies? When you are hurt, wounded, and treated unjustly (as we all are), are you finding yourself increasingly able to emotionally release the bitterness, to absorb the pain and not give back in kind? Can you pray for and even bless those who curse you?
• The genius of Jesus’ ethical teaching was that you cannot keep the law by trying not to break the law. Don’t weigh a possible behavior with ‘Is this sinful or not?’ but rather with the question, ‘does this move me toward Jesus or away?
• On healing: only one thing is required, open your pain to God. The beginning of salvation is to honestly face your own weaknesses. The more we hide, the less we heal. Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced. Generally, we sin alone, but we heal together.
• Why do you struggle? Because Jesus may be in your heart, but grandpa is in your bones! When the devil came to Adam and Eve in the garden, he didn’t come with a stick, he came with an idea. Pay attention to your jealousy. Push back on the forces that deform you.
• Our generation is witnessing a cosmic shift in human history, the shift from the industrial revolution to the digital world. The digital age has us more connected than ever before. But sociologists tell us that we are the loneliest generation ever. Could the way forward be as simple as meeting people in the place of pain? Regarding the use of electronic media: Choose your own constraints or they will be chosen for you.
• Our great cultural illusion is that our growth can be: Easy, Fast, and Controllable.
• In fasting you are literally praying with your body.
• You can’t think your way to Christlikeness.
• You cannot apprentice under Jesus and not have it interfere with your life. To follow Jesus requires that you leave something behind. For Peter it was fishing nets. What is it for you? Following Jesus will cost you, but not following him will cost you more, that is, it will cost you happiness and peace. Quoting missionary/martyr, Jim Eliot: “He is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose.”
• Most people think they will grow to be more like Jesus through trying hard rather than through training hard when the exact opposite is true. You don’t run a marathon by trying hard, you do it through training. Training, not trying, is the secret to becoming more like Jesus. What do monks do in a monastery? They fall and get up again, fall and get up again.
• There are four levels to prayer: Talking to God, talking with God, listening to God, being with God.
• If you want more of God, give him away.
• We cannot die on every cross, nor are we expected to.
• Quoting Isaac the Syrian: “Speech is the organ of the present world. Silence is the mystery of the world to come.”
• His nine rules of life for practicing the Way:
  • Practice Sabbath in a culture of hurry and exhaustion.
  • Practice solitude in a culture of anxiety and noise.
  • Practice prayer in a culture of distraction and escapism.
  • Practice community in a culture of individuality and superficiality.
  •  Practice scripture in a culture of ideological infection and compromise.
  • Practice fasting in a culture of indulgence.
  • Practice generosity in a culture of consumerism.
  • Practice service in a culture of injustice and division.
  • Practice hospitality in a culture of hostility.

But this series of sound bytes is no substitute for reading the book!

What is a monastery? How do monasteries work? Saint Benedict (480-547 AD), who is considered the founder of Western monasticism, offered this counsel as an essential rule for his monks: Stay in your cell and it will teach all you need to know. Properly understood, this is a rich metaphor, not a literal counsel. When he is telling a monk to stay in his cell and let it teach him what he needs to know, he is not referring to a literal monk’s cell in a monastery. He is referring to the state of life in which a monk or anyone else finds himself or herself. 

Sometimes this has been expressed in Christian spirituality as being faithful to your duties of state. The idea here being that if you are faithful in love and in good heart to the situation in life in which you find yourself, life itself will bring you to maturity and virtue. For example, a mother who gives herself over in selflessness and fidelity to raising her children will be brought to maturity and altruism through that process. Her home will be her monk’s cell and she will be metaphorically the Abbess of the monastery (with some very young monks) and staying inside that monastery, her home, will teach her all she needs to know. She will be raising children, but they will also be raising her. Motherhood will teach her what she needs to know and will turn her into a wise elder, a biblical and archetypal Sophia.

The process of aging is a natural monastery. If we live long enough, eventually the aging process turns everyone into a monk. Monks take four vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and perseverance. The process of aging, which moves us (seemingly without mercy) toward marginalization, dependence on others, away from an active sex life, and into a living situation from which there will be no escape, in a manner of speaking, imposes those four vows on us. But, as Saint Benedict counsels, this can teach us all we need to know, and has a unique power to mature us in a very deep way. Monks have secrets worth knowing. So does the aging process.

This can be particularly instructive vis-à-vis how we can make our final days and our death a more radical gift to others. In the first centuries of Christianity, martyrdom was seen as the ideal way for a Christian to end his or her days here on earth. It was seen as a radical way of imitating Christ and giving your death away as a gift. Of course, this had to be rethought after Christianity became the state religion and emperors no longer martyred Christians. What followed then were various attempts at doing this, metaphorically martyrdom. One fairly popular way of doing it was that, after raising their children and reaching retirement, a couple would leave each other and each would go off to a separate monastery and live out the rest of his or her life as a monk or a nun.

Classical Christian mystics speak about how in the last phase of our lives we should enter something they call the dark night of the spirit, namely, that we proactively make a radical decision grounded in faith to move into a situation in life where we can no longer take care of ourselves but must trust, in raw faith, that God will provide for us. This parallels Hindu spirituality which suggests that in the last, fully mature stage of life we should become a sannyasin, a holy old beggar.

I suspect that most of us will never proactively cut off all our former securities and, on purpose, place ourselves in a situation within which we are helpless to provide for and take care of ourselves. But this is where nature steps in. The aging process will do it for us. It will turn us into a sannyasin and put us into the dark night of the spirit.

How? As we age and our health declines and we find ourselves more marginalized in terms of having a vital place within society, we will progressively lose our capacity to take care of ourselves. Eventually, if we live long enough, for most of us it will mean moving into an assisted facility, which is in effect a natural monastery.

What an apt metaphor! An assisted living facility as a natural monastery. The metaphor is also apropos for what it means to (by conscription) enter the dark night of the spirit and what it means to be a holy old beggar, a sannyasin. In essence it means this:When someone is in an assisted living facility, irrespective of whether he or she is a millionaire or a pauper, the rules are the same for everyone. Since you can no longer take care of yourself (and indeed you don’t have to) you live a monastic life of obedience and dependence.

In assisted living, you live by the monastic bell and you die as a holy old beggar.

What is our deepest center? Normally we take that to mean the deepest part of our heart, the deepest part of our soul, our affective center, our moral center, that place inside of us which Thomas Merton called le pointe vierge. And that is a good way of imagining it. But there’s another.

The classical mystic John of the Cross saw things differently. For him, the deepest center of anything is the furthest point attainable by that object’s being and power and force of operation and movement. What does he mean by that? In essence, this is what he is saying: The deepest center of anything, be it a flower or a human being, is the furthest point to which can grow before it dies.

Take a flower for example: It begins as a seed, then grows into a tiny bud that sprouts into a young plant. That plant eventually bursts forth in a beautiful bloom. That bloom lasts for a while and then begins to dry out and wither. Eventually, what was once the substance of a beautiful bloom turns into seeds, and then in its very act of dying, the flower gives off those seeds to leave new life behind.

Thus, for John of the Cross, the deepest center for a flower is not its moment of spectacular beauty, its bloom, but its last moment when its bloom has turned to seed and it is able to give off that seed in its very act of dying.

There’s a lesson in which goes against how we commonly assess things. When are we the most generative potentially? When do we have the greatest capacity to use our lives to give off the seeds for new life? What is our deepest center of growth?

Normally, of course, we think of the deepest center as the bloom, namely, that period or moment in our lives when a combination of good health, physical attractiveness, talent, achievement, and influence make us someone who is admired and perhaps envied. This is the time in our lives when we look our best and, as they say, are at the peak of our game. This is our bloom! The best we will ever look!

John of the Cross wouldn’t denigrate that moment in our lives. Indeed, he would challenge us to be in that moment, to enjoy it, be grateful to God for it, and to try to use the advantages and privileges that come with that to help others. But, he wouldn’t say this is the peak moment of our generativity, that this is the moment or period of our lives when we are giving off the most seeds for new life. No, like a flower that gives off its seeds in its very act of dying, we too are potentially most generative after the bloom has given way to the grey of age and our achievements have given way to a different kind of fruitfulness.

Imagine a young woman who is beautiful and talented and becomes a famous movie actor. At the height of her career, she is in full bloom and is given the gaze of admiration. Indeed, she is adulated. Moreover, in her life outside of the movies she may be a generous person, a wonderful wife, a dedicated mother, and a trusted friend. However, that bloom is not her furthest point of growth, her deepest center, that time in her life when she is giving off the most vis-a-vis generating new life. Instead, when she is an aged grandmother, struggling with health issues, her physical looks diminished, facing the prospect of assisted living and imminent death that, potentially, like the flower whose bloom has dried and turned to seed, she can give her life away in a manner that helps create new life in a way she couldn’t do when she was young, attractive, admired, envied, and in full bloom.

A similar case might be made for a star male athlete. At the height of his career, winning a championship, becoming a household name, his envied youthful athletic image seen everywhere in ads and on billboards, he is in full bloom; but at that time, he is not optimally generative in terms of his life giving off seeds to bring about new life. That can happen later, in his old age, when his achievements no longer define him, and he, like everyone else, with his hair greying, is facing physical diminishment, marginalization, and imminent death. It’s then, after the bloom has left the rose, that in his dying he can give off seeds to create new life. We tend to identify a spectacular bloom with powerful generativity. Fair enough, that bloom has its own importance, legitimate purpose, and value. Indeed, one of our challenges is to give that bloom the gaze of admiration without envy. Not easy to do, and something we often don’t do well. The bigger challenge however is to learn what we ourselves are called to do after the bloom has left the rose.

What happens to us when we experience a dark night of the soul? What’s happening and what’s to be our response?

There are libraries of literature on this, each book or article making its own point, but here I want to share a rather unique and highly insightful take on this by Constance FitzGerald, a Carmelite nun and someone well versed in the various classical spiritual writers who speak about the dark night of the soul.

She uses the word “impasse” to render what is commonly called a dark night of the soul.  For her, in effect, what happens in a dark night of the soul is that you come to an “impasse” in your life in terms of your emotions, your intellect, and your imagination. All the former ways you understood, imagined, and felt about things, especially as this relates to God, faith, and prayer, no longer work for you. You are, so to speak, paralyzed, unable to go back to the way things were and unable to move forwards. And part of the paralysis is that you cannot think, imagine, or feel your way out of this. You are at an impasse – no way back and no way forward. So, what do you do? How do you move beyond the impasse?

There’s no simple or quick path out of this. You cannot imagine, think, or feel your way out of this because the vision, symbols, answers, and feelings you need, in effect, don’t exist yet, at least they don’t exist for you. That’s the exact reason why you are at an impasse and so emotionally and intellectually paralyzed. The new vision and feelings that can reset your vision, thoughts, and feelings first have to be gestated and given birth to through your own pain and confusion.

 At this stage, there is no answer, at least not for you. You may have read accounts of others who have undergone the same impasse and who now offer counsel as to how to undergo the dark night. That can be useful, but it’s still your heart, your imagination, and your intellect that are in the crucible of fire. Knowing that others have gone through the same fire can help give you vision and consolation in your paralysis, but the fire must still be gone through in your own life to reset your own imagination, thoughts, and feelings.

For FitzGerald, being in this state is the ultimate liminal space within which we can find ourselves. This is a crucible within which we are being purified. And, for her, the way out is the way through. The way out of a dark night of this kind is through “contemplation”, namely, staying with the impasse, waiting patiently inside it, and waiting for God to break the impasse by transforming our imagination, intellect, and heart.

So ultimately, this impasse is a challenge for us to become mystics, not that we begin to search for extraordinary religious experience, but that we let our disillusion, broken symbols, and failed meanings become the space wherein God can reset our faith, feelings, imagination, and intellect inside of a new horizon wherein everything is radically reinterpreted.

How do we do this concretely? How do we contemplate? We do it by sitting in the tension, helpless, patient, open, waiting, and staying there however long it takes for us to receive in the depth of our souls a new way of imagining, thinking, and feeling about God, faith, and prayer – beyond the impasse.

Moreover, the broken symbols, the disillusion, and our helplessness to think or feel our way out of the impasse is precisely what assures us that the new vision which is given to us comes from God and is not the product of own imagination or projection or self-interest.

One of the most penetrating criticisms of religious experience ever given was made by Friedrich Nietzsche who claimed that all religious experience, all of it, is ultimately human projection. He argued that we create God in our self-image and likeness for our own self-interest, and that is why a lot of sincere faith and religion can be hypocritical and false. Reacting to this, Michael Buckley, the renowned Jesuit philosopher, and theologian, made this counterclaim: Nietzsche is 95% correct. Ninety-five percent of what claims to be religious experience is in fact human projection. But, Buckley adds, Nietzsche is 5% wrong and that 5% makes all the difference – because in that 5% God’s revelation flows untainted in our lives.

Now, and this is the essential point here, that 5% happens precisely when we are in a dark night of the soul, when our symbols are broken, our intellect is impotent, our imagination is empty, and our hearts are at loss. It is precisely then, when we are helpless to help ourselves that we are also helpless to fudge and taint the way God is entering us.

God can flow into our lives pure and untainted when we are at an impasse and unable to substitute our vision for God’s vision.

During the years I have been writing this column, I have rarely mentioned the fact that I belong to a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. That omission is not an evasion, since being an Oblate of Mary Immaculate is something of which I am quite proud. However, I rarely flag the fact that I am a priest and a member of a religious order because I believe what I write here and elsewhere needs to ground itself on things beyond titles.

In this column, however, I want to speak about the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Saint Eugene de Mazenod, because what he had to say about Christian discipleship and spirituality is something of value and importance for everyone, like the legacies that have been left us by other great religious founders like Bernard, Francis, Dominic, Angela Merici, Ignatius of Loyola, Vincent de Paul, and others.

Saint Eugene de Mazenod (1779-1861) was a French bishop of aristocratic origins who some popular myths identify as the bishop in Les Miserables. He was a man whose personality ran somewhat naturally in the direction of the stern, the introverted, the strongly inner-directed, the mystical, and the single-minded. He wasn’t the type of person most people would choose as their first choice for light dinner conversation, but he was the type of person who is often God’s first choice to found a religious order.

Soren Kierkegaard once stated that to be a saint is to will the one thing. Eugene de Mazenod clearly did that and, in his case, that one thing had a number of aspects which, taken together, form the basis of a very rich, balanced spirituality – one which emphasizes some salient aspects of Christian discipleship that are often neglected today.

What shaped the spirituality of Eugene de Mazenod and the charism he left behind?

First, he emphasized community. For him, a good life is not just one of individual achievement, fidelity, or even greatness; it is a life that links itself to the power inherent within community. He was a firm believer in the axiom: what we dream alone remains a dream, what we dream with others can become a reality. In his view, compassion only becomes effective when it becomes collective, when it issues forth from a group rather than from just one individual. He believed that alone you can make a splash but not a difference. He founded a religious order because he deeply believed this.

In the face of all the issues confronting the world and the Church today, if someone were to ask him: “What’s the one single thing I might do to make a difference?” He would reply: Connect yourself with others of sincere will within community, around the person of Christ. Alone you cannot save the world. Together we can!

Second, he believed that a healthy spirituality makes a marriage between contemplation and justice. Judged in the light of our contemporary sensitivities, his exact expression of this is perhaps linguistically awkward today, but his key principle is perennially valid: only an action that issues forth from a life that is rooted in prayer and deep interiority will be truly prophetic and effective. Conversely, all true prayer and genuine interiority will burst forth in action, especially in action for justice and the poor.

Third, in his own life and in the spirituality he laid out for his religious community, he made a strong preferential option for the poor. He did this not because it was the politically correct thing to do, but because it was the correct thing to do; the Gospel demands this, and it is non-negotiable. His belief was simple and clear: as Christians, we are called to be with and work with those whom nobody else wants to be with and work with. For him, any teaching or action that is not good news for the poor cannot claim to be speaking for Jesus or for scripture.

Fourth, he put all of this under the patronage of the mother of Jesus, Mary, whom he saw as an advocate for the poor. He recognized that the poor turn to her, for it is she who gives voice to the Magnificat.

Finally, in his own life and in the ideal he laid out, he brought together two seemingly contradictory tendencies: a deep love for the institutional Church and the capacity to prophetically challenge it at the same time. He loved the Church, believed that it was the noblest thing for which one might die; but at the same time, he wasn’t afraid to publicly point out the Church’s faults or to admit that the Church needs constant challenge and self-criticism… and he was willing to offer it!

His personality was very different from mine. I doubt that he and I would spontaneously like each other. But that’s incidental. I’m proud of his legacy, proud to be one of his sons, and convinced enough of his spirituality to give my life over for it.

Piety is the enemy of humor, at least whenever something less than piety is masquerading as piety. Here’s an example: I once lived in community with an overly serious man who, after someone would tell a colorful joke, would bring us back to earth with the question, “Would you tell a joke like that in front of the Blessed Sacrament?” That not only deflated the joke and its teller, but it also took the oxygen out of the room.

There’s a response I would have liked to have given to his question, namely, a joke my Oblate Novice Master used to tell, one whose irony exposes false piety. The joke runs this way: A young woman was getting married and her family could not afford a venue for a reception for the wedding. The parish priest generously offered them the foyer at the entrance of the church, telling them they could bring in a cake and have a reception there. The father of the bride asked whether they might also bring in some liquor. “Absolutely not,” the priest replied, “you can’t drink liquor in a church!” “But,” protested the bride’s father, “Jesus drank wine at the wedding feast of Cana.” “But not in front of the Blessed Sacrament!” replied the priest.

Admittedly, humor can be impious, crass, offensive, dirty, but whenever that’s the case the fault normally lies more in the aesthetics than in the content of the joke. A joke isn’t offensive because it is about sex or religion or any other area we surround with sacredness. Humor is offensive when it crosses a line in terms of respect, taste, and aesthetics. Humor is offensive when it is bad art. Bad art crosses a line in terms of respect, either vis-à-vis its audience or its subject matter. What can make a joke offensive or dirty is when it is told, or how it is told, or to whom it is told, or the tone in which it is told, or lack of sensitivity to what is being told, or the color of the language as it is being told. Whether or not it can be told before the blessed sacrament isn’t a criterion. If a joke shouldn’t be told in front of the blessed sacrament it shouldn’t be told in front of anyone. There aren’t two standards of offensiveness.

Still, bad piety is the enemy of humor. It’s also the enemy of robust, earthy living. But that is only the case for bad piety, not genuine piety. Genuine piety is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and is a healthy reverence before all of life. But it’s a reverence that, while healthily respectful, is not offended by humor (even robust, earthy humor) providing the humor isn’t aesthetically offensive – akin to nudity which is healthy in art but offensive in pornography.

False sensitivity that masks itself as piety also strips all spirituality of humor, save for the most pious kind. In doing that, in effect, it makes Jesus, Mary, and the saints humorless, and thus less than fully human and healthy. One of our mentors at our Oblate novitiate told us, young novices, that there is not a single incident reported in scripture of Jesus ever laughing. He told us this to dampen our natural, youthful, rambunctious energy, as if this was somehow a hinderance to being religious. 

Humorous energy is not a hindrance to being religious. To the contrary. Jesus is the paragon of all that is healthily human, and he, no doubt, was a fully healthy, robust, delightful human person, and none of those words (healthy, robust, delightful) would apply to him if he hadn’t had a healthy, indeed earthy, sense of humor.

For fifteen years I taught a course entitled The Theology of God to seminarians and others preparing for ministry. I would try to cover all the required basis asked for in the curriculum – biblical revelation, patristic insights, normative church teachings, and speculative views from contemporary theologians. But, inside all of this, like a recurring theme in an opera, I would tell the students this: In all your preaching and teaching and pastoral practices, whatever else, try not to make God look stupid. Try not to make God look unintelligent, tribal, petty, rigid, nationalistic, angry, or fearful. Every homily, every theological teaching, every ecclesial practice, and every pastoral practice ultimately reflects an image of God whether we want it to or not. And if there is something less than healthy in our preaching or pastoral practices, the God who underwrites it will also appear as unhealthy. A healthy God does not undergird an unhealthy theology, ecclesiology, or anthropology.

Hence, if we teach a Jesus who is humorless, who takes offense at the earthiness of life, who is uncomfortable hearing the word sex, who flinches at colorful language, and who is afraid to smile and chuckle at irony, wit, and humor, we make Jesus appear as rigid and uptight, a prude, and not the person you want to be beside at table.  

What goes around comes around, so it would seem. Christians took a pagan feast and sacralized it as an occasion to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, and now the secular world is returning the favor.

The decision to celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25^th was not based on careful calculations vis-à-vis the actual day that Jesus was born. Rather, it had these origins. In polytheistic Rome, December 25^th was a celebration of the Unconquered Sun, marking the return of longer days. It followed Saturnalia, a festival where people feasted and exchanged gifts. The church in Rome began celebrating Christmas on December 25^th (somewhere between 306-337) during the reign of Constantine the first Christian emperor, possibly to weaken pagan traditions.

Christians sacralized a pagan feast and today we are seeing the reverse. More and more the celebrations of Christmas are being shorn of all religious symbols and connotations: Santa has replaced the Christ Child; Rocking around the Christmas tree has replaced Come all ye faithful and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas has replaced Silent Night. Merry Christmas has become Season’s Greetings. Why is this happening?

First, we are becoming ever more secularized as a society. Fewer people are drawn religiously to the Christmas story, even as they value the Christmas season as a very special time of year. They value the feast for its emphasis on love, gift-giving, color, specialness, and celebration, but prefer that the emphasis be precisely on these things without a reference to Christ.

However, within that secularization, there are a number of voices conspiring to positively strip the celebration of Christmas of its religious roots. Their fundamental critique goes this way. In essence, we are a secularized culture, not a Christian culture, and it is unfair to non-Christians to emphasize the religious (Christ) aspect of this feast. It is offensive to Jews, Moslems. Buddhists, agnostics, and non-believers. Given the pluralistic make-up of our society, saying “Merry Christmas” can be imperialistic, narrow, and not fully respectful of others.

How valid is this? It carries some legitimacy, though it is also deeply flawed. How so? First, this criticism doesn’t come mainly from Jews, Muslims, and the non-Christians. It arises mostly from some excessive and less-than-fully healthy sensitivities within Christians and ex-Christians. Yes, admittedly we are a secular, pluralistic culture. However, don’t Christians have a right to celebrate Christ’s birthday with all the appropriate language, symbols, and rituals? No one begrudges Jewish believers the right to celebrate Hanukkah or Muslims the right to celebrate Ramadan. Why should a Christian celebration be singled out?

And a critical question might be posed here. Is this expressed concern for fairness and the feelings of others being driven primarily by a genuine concern for the feelings of others or is it also being driven (however unconsciously) by certain feelings about ourselves, namely, by an unhealthy combination of self-hatred, hyper political correctness, and a certain adolescent grandiosity? It is easy to fall victim to a self-hatred, where we can be fair to every tradition except our own; to a hyper political correctness, where there are no common sense boundaries to our sensitivity; and to something that might be termed adolescent grandiosity, where we see only the faults in our parents and not their virtues or where we are indebted to them.

We need to be sensitive to others and realize and accept that we cannot impose a Christian celebration on those who don’t share our faith in Jesus Christ. But society must also be fair to us and allow us to celebrate Christ’s birthday as a religious feast. Indeed, there shouldn’t be any tension here. No one should begrudge another for saying Merry Christmas or Season’s Greetings. Silent Night can play alongside White Christmas. Jesus, no doubt, is on good terms with Santa. Love, joy, gift-giving, and colorful lights do their own work on the heart and what they do there is contingent upon what’s in that heart. To some hearts they will say, Merry Christmas, to other hearts they will say, Season’s Greetings, and to some hearts they will say both. We should be good with that.

So, Christians, let’s celebrate Christmas as Christ’s birthday without apologies or apologetics. The secular world doesn’t have a right to stop us from saying Merry Christmas and celebrating Christ’s birthday with the creches, carols, symbols and rituals that speak of Jesus’ birth. Our Christian celebrations don’t preclude the secular celebrations, the Christmas lights, the special decorations, the Santa parades, the gift-giving, the season’s parties, and rocking around the Christmas tree. These are legitimate and in their own way are good ways to celebrate Christmas. Hey, we stole this feast from the pagans, they have a right to reclaim parts of it. Moreover, paganism and Christianity sometimes make for a rich mix. And let us not forget that the world does measure time by Jesus’ birth. We are in the year 2023 since the time-altering event. Doesn’t such a monumental event merit a double celebration? Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings.

In the days of apartheid in South Africa, Christians there used to light candles and place them in their windows as a sign to themselves and others that they believed that someday this injustice would end. A candle burning in a window was a sign of hope and a political statement. The government didn’t miss the message. It passed a law making it illegal to place a lit candle in a window, the offense being equal to owning a firearm; both were considered equally dangerous. This eventually became a joke among the kids: “Our government is afraid of lit candles!”

And well they should be! Lit candles, more than firearms, overthrew apartheid. Hope, not guns, is what ultimately transforms things. To light a candle as an act of hope is to say to yourself and to others that, despite anything that might be happening in the world, you are still nursing a vision of peace and unity that’s based upon something beyond the present state of things and upon deeper realities and powers than what the world admits. To light a candle is to state publicly that you believe that, at the end of the day, more than what you see on the evening news will shape the final outcome of things. There are other powers also at work.  To light a candle is an act of political defiance and an act of hope.

What is hope?

First, it’s not wishful thinking. I can wish to win a lottery, but that wish, in itself, contains no real power to make it happen. Second, hope is not simply temperamental optimism, an upbeat temperament that always sees the bright side of things. An unwavering optimism about things can sometimes be helpful, but it’s no basis for hope; like wishful thinking it lacks the power to make its own dream come true. Finally, hope is not simply shrewd observation and common sense, a talent for sorting out the real from the fluff. Useful as this is, it’s still not hope. Why not?

Because hope doesn’t base itself upon a shrewd assessment of the empirical facts, but upon belief in a deeper set of realities: God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness, and the promise that flows from that.

There’s a story told about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that helps illustrate this. Teilhard wasn’t much given to wishful thinking or even to an optimistic temperament; he tended rather toward a lonely realism. Yet he was a man of real hope. For example, on one occasion, after giving a conference where he laid out a vision within which ultimately unity and peace will be achieved on earth in a way that parallels the vision of scripture, he was challenged by some colleagues to this effect: “That’s a wonderful, idealistic vision of things, but suppose we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, what happens to your vision then?” Teilhard replied, “that would set things back some millions of years, but this will still come to fruition, not because I say so or because the facts right now indicate that it will, but because God promised it and in the resurrection of Jesus has shown that He is powerful enough to deliver on that promise.”

Hope, as we can see from this, requires both faith and patience. It works like yeast, not like a microwave oven. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, expresses this colorfully: “All politicians are alike,” he says, “they hold a finger up and check which way the wind is blowing and then make their decisions in that direction. That will never change, even if we change politicians. So, we must change the wind! That’s hope’s task – to change the wind!”

When we look at what has morally changed this world – from the great religious traditions coming out of deserts, caves, and catacombs and helping leaven whole cultures morally, to apartheid being overthrown in South Africa – we see that it has happened precisely when individuals and groups lit candles and hoped long enough until the wind changed.

We light Advent candles with just that in mind, accepting that changing the wind is a long process, that the evening news will not always be positive, the stock markets will not always rise, the most sophisticated defenses in the world will not always protect us from terrorism, and secular liberal and conservative ideologies will not rid this planet of selfishness.

However, we continue to light candles and hope anyway, not on the basis of a worsening or improving evening newscast, but because the deepest reality of all is that God exists, that the center holds, that there’s ultimately a gracious Lord who rules this universe, and this Lord is powerful enough to rearrange the atoms of the planet and raise dead bodies to new life. We light candles of hope because God, who is the ultimate power, has promised to establish a kingdom of love and peace on this earth and is gracious, forgiving, and powerful enough to eventually make it happen.