Our car park behaviour gives it all away. It is said to be a season of peace and joy, but it doesn’t look at all like that in the car park, or on the roads in general.
I’ve just been to the shopping centre, where a long tailback of cars, many with horns blaring, was the simple outcome of one elderly man trying to manoeuvre his car out of a parking spot, while giving way to another driver, who did not understand his intention. This could have happened anytime, but at this time of the year it seems that patience and understanding have worn very thin.
I see aggression, people over-staying the parking limits, intolerance for the driver who is perhaps less skilled or insecure, perhaps because they don’t drive very often. Why do we do all this, towards this ‘season of peace and joy’?
In Australia, Christmas is part of the ‘end of year’—for schools and university. Graduations and such events are crowded into this time, along with work ‘break ups’, parties, and preparations for the summer holidays. We’ve added the imported ‘Black Friday’ sales, which invite another frenzy lasting at least a week. And the bushfire season is already upon us, and looming very threatening this year, we are told. The reminder of Cyclone Tracy, which destroyed the city of Darwin fifty years ago this Christmas, is another element in our collective consciousness. This stuff happens, all at once, in our ‘season of peace and joy’.
Along with it, charitable groups now see this as a special opportunity to raise funds.
Then, too, there is the personal reality of family life: so much stress is placed upon families gathering at this time, which actually evokes the angst associated with the unreal expectations that families will always get on, and enjoy celebrating together. Literature is filled with expressions of the pretence and conflict resulting from these pressures.
We need to take a deep breath and think again about what we are doing.
I’ve noticed some churches invite people to an event they call a ‘Blue Christmas’—a simple opportunity to acknowledge to oneself and others that this can indeed be a really tough time. For some, it is a time of grief, as a dearly loved one is not with us this year. For many, it is exactly that ‘family’ emphasis that underlines tensions or bitter memories. Offering comfort, inviting people to acknowledge, not pretend, express the reality of what they are feeling, can be very helpful, and assure them they are not alone in that struggle. At least for some, this allows people to engage more positively with this season.
I suggest it is helpful to generalise this idea. As we undergo the different activities, celebrations, stresses, and more, let us take time out to reflect and simply remind ourselves what really matters here.
Let us value those we are with and help each other to know that relationship is far more important than things. The gift of being together is really enough!
Let us take some time to think about the idea of peace:—a reality the world so desperately needs at this time. Peace is so much more than the absence of war and conflict (though that would be a good start!) It depends upon justice, right relationships within a community, where all are valued and have opportunity to flourish. How can we contribute, even in our own homes and neighbourhoods, to such peace?
Ultimately, though, peace is a gift. This is what we are invited to see, to receive, and to practice at this time. The Christian story suggests that peace is given, from the creator-God, to all and at no cost. It is given not as a finished product, but as an opportunity to be received, lived into, practiced and preserved.
This invitation offers an assurance, that in spite of it all, the stresses, privations, cruelty, even wickedness, which dominates so much of the world, there is a peace-opportunity. There is a peace, given. It can be ignored as we rush to the shops and hurry to the next ‘celebration’. It can, on the surface of things, be invisible, so much so that we may consider it an illusion.
But the gift of ‘peace on earth’ remains as a calling to a new reality, a deeper life together. Attending to that calling may even evoke joy: a sense of hope, in spite of it all. Nothing we do can manufacture this hope and joy. We can miss it, fail to see it, but we can also take the time to open our hearts to it, and in doing so we may find ourselves and each other joined by ‘choirs of angels’ in a song that even the worst of us can sing.