Christmas

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 391, 20 December 1946, Page 5

Christmas

T is a proof of the enduring hopefulness of our race that we hesitate to be cynical about Christmas. Governments fall and systems crash, friends fight and allies denounce one another, but we sit down together at Christmas for the same draught of hope and good cheer. Another way of putting it of course is that it is a proof of the enduring power of Christianity. We might put it that way ourselves if this were the occasion and the place. But whatever words are used they mean that hope springs eternal in most of us. It would not be so if we were decadent and effete; if the sap had left the tree and there remained only dead wood; if misery had beaten us to the ground and we had no strength to rise again. We are young, as growth goes. We cling to the upturned boat never doubting that we shall reach the shore-the beautiful shore that we still find so satisfying. We are children. And because we are children, little children weak who can forgive and forget and believe and wonder and burn our fingers and cry and do it all over again, Christmas still has a meaning for us, and a message, and an undying hope. It lets us know that we have another chance; that sins can be forgiven; that the fallen can rise again; that blunders can be forgotten; that weakness can become strength, clouds lift, and tears turn to smiles, not in some distant paradise, but in our own broken, disordered lives when the light of Christianity penetrates them. So we cling to Christmas whether we have conscious faith or none. We know, if we are capable of thought at all, that it is better to melt than to freeze, that kindness is stronger than unkindness, charity more satisfying than suspicion and hate. We know these things always; but we see them better and feel them more strongly when the emotions of two thousand years make us for a little one family. — :