Christmas hope

It is hard to have hope, isn't it, when the world is so full of violence and the Earth herself is under such assault. And so I bring you an excerpt from an opinion piece in the Washington Post by E. J. Dionne Jr. called "The Enabling Virtue":

Even more than faith and love, I think, hope is closest to the heart of the Christmas story. In an anthropological sense, Christmas celebrates new life and birth, a theme that crosses cultures and traditions. This sense of Christmas has a beauty all its own and embodies a nearly universal quest for renewal.

But in the theological sense as understood by Christians, the holiday is even more radical. Christianity -- drawing on the Jewish scriptures, particularly Isaiah -- revolutionized the concept of the divine by putting aside deities who dominated humanity in favor of a God who entered the world in human form.

Thus were authoritarian conceptions swept away in favor of a loving God sympathetic to creation and empathetic toward human suffering. Think about the line from John's Gospel: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him." John was not some 1960s hippie. He was offering something very new and important, a trustworthy God who inspired hope.

Somehow, in spite of everything, I still believe in Love and that all love will last - whether the part of us that knows the way we know now lasts or not. And that gives me true hope.