'
Christmas day
The waiting is over and it might well be an anti-climax. Four weeks waiting for the birth of a baby.
In my pre-Christian youth I always used to wonder why Johnny Mathis was banging on about a brand new morn, why walls of doubt crumble, why the solid ground and other such hopeful notions just because a child was born.
Then in my early Christian days, I would mentally translate this hope to Easter and when Christ died. More recently I associate the hope with the life of Christ; how he treated the poor, opposed the rich, how he stood for justice and exercised non-violent resistance to evil. It was not passive resistance, but it was non-violent and it was resistance.
Now that my first grand-child has been born I am reminded all the more of how this new child will face a future world that is very different to the one I grew up in. I am not always hopeful in the sense that I expect the future to be more fair than the past or present but I am hopeful in the sense that, if anything can change our world and specifically our human nature, it is surely love. I specifically mean love of enemies, love of those different from ourselves, love of the oppressor for it is only through love that the stranger, the enemy becomes a friend.
Happy, hopeful Christmas
Des
Answers to the puzzles on Day 19
HOPE Holly, O Come all ye Faithful, Pine cone, Egg cup
LOVE Lantern, Oast House, Vase, Easel
JOY Joseph, Orange, Yellow
PEACE Present, Egg, Angel, Candle, Elephant
CHRISTMAS Cracker, Holly, Reindeer, Icicle, Snowman, Tinsel, Mary, Angel, Star