BONUS | So This is Christmas

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m Jim Stump.

So this is Christmas. The media market I live in has a radio station that shifts to all Christmas music starting the week of Thanksgiving. When I’m in the car, I usually tune in with a sense of obligation that that’s what I should be listening to this time of year. [sounds of radio tuning to Christmas music] They play an eclectic mix of traditional Christmas carols sung by current pop stars, classics from Bing Crosby, a mariachi band singing Feliz Navidad, and “you’re a mean one, Mr. Grinch”. It’s a wide range of songs, but it’s not very deep, as it feels like the same 10 songs on a loop every time you get in the car. One of those is John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas” that starts with that line, “So this is Christmas.” I’ve not ever really liked that song. The  British “Happy” Christmas always feels a little thin and superficial. But if I’m honest, I don’t feel very “merry” this year either. So the melancholy opening, “so this is Christmas” has summed things up for me pretty well this year. 

You may have heard from our previous episode that Colin and I were in Baku Azerbaijan for the big United Nations climate conference, COP29. It was a remarkable experience in many respects, and we’re working on an episode about that, but the outcome of the conference for the future livability of the planet was pretty disappointing. 

Clip From COP29:

Year after  year, we’re choosing extinction instead of choosing hope.

(Juan Carlos Gomez, Panama’s special representative for climate change)

Stump:

And we came back to a country that is deeply divided along ideological lines, and for those of us who are Christians and accept the scientific consensus on things, that line of division runs right down the middle of most things we care about. I’m also among many I know who are facing other challenges in personal circumstances or family situations or work dynamics or all of the above. It’s cold and gray in my part of the world — both literally and metaphorically. It feels more like the description in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where it is always winter but never Christmas. [background music begins] I know Christmas is coming, but so far it has just felt like the glitzy superficial Christmas of holiday sales and Hallmark movies. There is a kind of thin happiness and faux-merriment all around that seems to me to deny reality. 

Is this just me? It seems to be a lot of the people in my circles, but I don’t want to pretend to speak for everyone. Maybe things are going very well for you right now and this Christmas season does seem happy and merry. I don’t want to talk you out of that, but I’ve been wondering whether we miss something important when everything is cheery. I wonder if there is something deeper — something joyful — that requires that we go through seasons of difficulty.

I know there is a kind of formula we’re supposed to adopt now: some identification with the prophets of old whose people were in difficult circumstances; but they foretold of better days coming. This is Isaiah 9 where Handel took the text of some of his songs from the Messiah that we love so much, “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light” and “For unto us a child is born.” We’re on the other side of those prophecies now, so shouldn’t things be different? I’m not saying I don’t believe those things, just that I’m not feeling it.

What should we do with our feelings? I’ve been reading about emotions and feelings for the next book I’m working on. I’m really curious about how far down our evolutionary development emotions go, and for that matter, how widely they are found in other species today. It sure looks like your dog feels happy sometimes, and that your cat is melancholy most of the time. But undoubtedly we’re reading into those situations what we would feel like if we were in those circumstances. That doesn’t mean our emotions aren’t real — on the contrary, they are enormously real and we don’t have a lot of control over them. It might be tempting to think we just need to “snap out of it” or somehow force ourselves to feel better when we’re down. But emotions don’t work that way. They aren’t switches we can flip on or off, and denying or suppressing what we’re feeling can often make things worse.

What if instead of rushing to fix our emotions, we learned to sit with them — especially in this season, to acknowledge the pain or disappointment that has happened in our lives? Feeling sadness or grief or even anger doesn’t mean something is wrong with us, it might mean there’s something wrong with the world, and that we’re longing for something more, something better, and the something more and better is nowhere to be found at present. [music beings]

Instead of the typical biblical texts from the prophets that are used for the Advent season, this year I’m more drawn to Habakkuk 3: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior.” 

Can I pull a philosopher’s trick here and define the words the way I want to solve a problem? I’ve done this before with hope and optimism, claiming that it’s possible to be hopeful even if you’re not very optimistic. Now I’m claiming we might rejoice in the Lord, I can be joyful in God my savior, even if I’m not very happy about how things are going. Can I have a joyful Christmas even if it’s not very merry?

In this passage, “rejoicing” and “being joyful” don’t sound passive, like things that happen to us depending on the external circumstances. They sound like choices, things I have at least some control of.

Can I choose to be joyful in these present circumstances? That doesn’t mean the difficult emotions instantly disappear, and it doesn’t mean we pretend everything is OK. Habakkuk’s joy wasn’t a superficial happiness or a denial of reality. It was a choice — a decision to look beyond his immediate circumstances and continue to commit himself to a longed-for reality that he didn’t see. Joy requires cultivating a perspective that sees deeper than the present circumstances and committing ourselves to that.

There’s no better literary illustration of this than Puddleglum in another of Lewis’s Narnia books, The Silver Chair. He’s a melancholy character from the swamps who helps lead the children in search of a lost prince, and their journey takes them to a nasty, underground kingdom where the circumstances get as bad as ours are today. They find the prince, but he’s under the spell of a witch. And she attempts to put them under the same spell through some incense in a fire and her soothing words that their memories of the world above and Aslan their king are just a dream of silly children. They all come to the point where that explanation does in fact seem perfectly reasonable and consistent with their experience. But then Puddleglum, in a herculean effort to break free from the spell, stamps out the fire and makes this speech to the witch queen:

“One word, Ma’am,” he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. “One word. All you’ve been saying is quite right, I shouldn’t wonder. I’m a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won’t deny any of what you said. But there’s one thing more to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play world. I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we’re leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.”

If this Christmas feels wonderful and happy, then I’m happy for you. Don’t let my melancholy pull you down. Perhaps you’ve already made your way to the Overland. 

But if this Christmas feels hard, know that you’re not alone. Many of us are in that waiting line. But we’re standing with the prophets, with generations of people who have waited. Their waiting wasn’t passive. It was active and full of longing. They prayed, they wrote, they probably would have made podcasts if they had the technology, they did all these things to call their people to a better vision of the world. 

So this is Christmas. It is hard and cold and bleak. The fig trees aren’t blossoming and no fruit is on the vine. The way we think things should be going in our world has been thwarted, and our vision of the good future we expected seems like it might have been just a dream. Yet… I will rejoice in God. I will live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia. I will rejoice that God has become flesh to put things right, even though the Kingdom of God has not yet been made fully known. I will act in the expectation that it really is true, even if current circumstances suggest otherwise. [In the Bleak Midwinter begins in background]

Joy like this doesn’t come to us in the moment the way happiness does when something good happens. And maybe the joy that comes from such circumstances is better than the happiness we might feel when everything is great.

This Advent season, we’re invited into the kind of waiting that doesn’t deny our struggles but allows us to find God in the midst of them. Like Habakkuk, we can learn to say, “Yet I will rejoice.” Not because everything is great, but because God is present. Not because our circumstances are easy, but because we believe that joy can grow even here, even now.

[musical interlude]

We’ll be back in the new year with a bunch of stories that we’ve been working on, and then we have some other ideas we want to follow.

Until then, we wish you all a…joyful Christmas. 

Hoogerwerf:

Language for God is produced by BioLogos. BioLogos is supported by individual donors and listeners like you. If you’d like to help keep this conversation going on the podcast and elsewhere, you can find ways to contribute at BioLogos.org. You’ll find lots of other great resources on science and faith there as well. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf, that’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the Grand River Watershed. Thanks for listening.