You thought it couldn’t get any less Christmas-y than yesterday’s dead bird, didn’t you? Awfully sorry. We’ve got a ways down to go, it seems.
There was an exposé several months ago that I should not have read but I did, and now I know: the situation seems almost hopeless. And what to do with that knowledge? Faith becomes a tangle for me where children are concerned. Adults can mash and mangle each other up and still manage to find the tools, if we’re privileged or lucky or saved, that will heal and bring a modicum of peace and wellness. But little ones? Their lives are a present tense, their brains are developing based on what’s happening to them right now. When now is unspeakable horror, and the grownup perpetrators of trauma are greedy and almost impossible to catch thanks to the dark web, and the “customers” of the product are insatiable and almost impossible to catch thanks, again, to technology… where is the spirit of God during those moments? Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
What on earth is going on? What in hell is going on? Where, somewhere, between the hell we make for ourselves and the earth we wait to see redeemed, is justice, and why is she hiding?
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
And into this world a baby was born at what we now know as Christmastime. So we have this little swaddled creature to remind us of a powerful hope. He is shaped like a baguette in most of my boys’ nativity sets. Will this little baby baguette be able to save the suffering toddlers on the internet?
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.
As I cried and wrote and questioned today, I looked into the vortex of everything that’s been awful in our world since human beings began abusing one another and realized the absurdity of offering a newborn into that darkness. Yet it was just this absurdity of hope that began to faintly flicker again. A tiny baby, held aloft Lion King style, managing to hold back everything that would spill out of the crack to devour us fully and finally.
If there’s one thing I believe about Biblical hell, it’s that in whatever metaphysical sliver of space/time it occupies, Jesus, after he was done being a swaddled baguette, a willful toddler, a nerdy teenager, and a gentle teacher of both men and women, went down there, stayed a good long time, and walked back out again. He wasn’t consumed by the horror. He wasn’t destroyed by the despair. He didn’t lose himself so much that he became incapable of hope, or light, or silly jokes with friends and family.
He went down, and he must have healed something, and then he came back.
This then is what I must remember that I believe about comfort for the suffering: as the spirit is outside of linear time, so too is my trust that a God who is the pure essence of love has somehow already/not yet/always/forever healed all the deep and horrible sorrows in this timeline, despite their weight in this present tense. And also it is still our job to find those suffering now and bathe their wounds. To embrace another’s misery whether they will ever credit us for our graciousness or not.
What good is a baby held up against the void? All the good.
Merry Christmas.
Post 5 of Waiting: An Advent Series.
