What Christmas Songs Tell Us About Hate
It’s all around us this time of year, if we listen. Subversive, revolutionary ideas about how the world ought to be fill the air. Our ears ring with the promise of hope,
life, light in the darkness, the broken made whole, those who are oppressed
finding justice, those who are enslaved finding freedom, those who are fleeing
from conflict finding peace. It’s in there, right beside the Santa Baby’s and that
one song by Mariah Carey that everyone still knows that they play
every where, even in Thailand.
I hum the songs. I love the words, and as I hum them, so
familiar, they catch at my awareness and bring tears to my eyes, steal my breath
away. These words, they turn everything upside down.
“Truly he taught us to love one and other, His law is love, and his
gospel is peace.
Chains
shall he break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name, all oppression
shall cease…”
“Come thou rod of Jesse bind, all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy strife and discord cease, fill the whole world with heaven’s peace. Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come you.”
“Come thou rod of Jesse bind, all peoples in one heart and mind. Bid envy strife and discord cease, fill the whole world with heaven’s peace. Rejoice, Emmanuel shall come you.”
It’s a lot to hope for; the end of war, the end of slavery,
darkness turned to light, GOD with US.
But the words tug at us, if we listen to them, because they
speak of what we all long for.
My husband went to Bangladesh last month. He went to Cox’s
bazaar. He saw the press of desperate humanity, driven from their homes and
villages, the country of their birth, stampeding over each other and being
beaten back by soldiers with sticks, all for a few boxes of food.
Every week we see despair creep it’s way into hearts and
minds and beat people down. We see men give themselves over to alcohol, to
rage. Why fight to be good, to be strong, when at every turn you lose, are
beaten down, and reminded that to some you have less value than the machines
you work next to?
Women leave premature babies behind at the clinic, certain
that they won’t live. They don’t want to even stay and allow for hope to creep
in, to make the loss that much more painful, or take the chance that a child
lives and is not normal, that their whole life will be hard and painful, and
not worth living.
Little girls are raped, their humanity stripped away,
reduced to flesh, to be owned and used.
I fight against despair too. Sometimes I succumb. I feel so
small, so helpless in the face of so much evil.
All that we can do, and all that we are doing, may never be enough.
I can’t bring hope to the whole world. I don’t have that
kind of power, though I long to see it all set right, all suffering to be
ended. But every person we choose to help means saying no to someone else. That’s
the nature of limited resources. Worse yet, we look in the faces of the people
we must say no to, in order to better help those we’ve said yes to. I turn
people away. I look in their eyes, and I turn them away.
Four days ago at the market a boy appeared beside my car, holding his hands out. All he said was hello, over and over again. I was putting my own children in the car at the time. Every time I walked around to another door, he was there in front of me, staring at me hopefully, saying hello. He was only a few years older than my little boys. How do you see someone, and let them know that you see them, that they are not invisible to you, without filling the pockets of the person most definitely controlling them, and using them to make money? I tried. I looked him in the eyes, and I told him I wouldn’t give today. It’s the right thing to do, in order to not make it worse for many children, sent to beg instead of to school, to not make it so profitable for those who would use children this way. But that doesn’t make it any less painful to send this child away empty handed, and with nothing I can do right now to help him.
Think of those soldiers, there to try and distribute food,
to help people, taking out their sticks, and beating on them to get them to
move away from the truck, looking into their desperate faces, and not being
able to keep them from stampeding, from greater danger, without a stick.
“I
heard the bells on Christmas Day, Their old familiar carol play, and wild and
sweet, the words repeat, of peace on earth good will to men.
And
in despair I bowed my head, “There is no peace on earth”, I said, “For hate is
strong, and mocks the song, of peace on earth good will, to men.”
I stop here, often. Hate seems so strong. The world is full
of it. It’s full of people who hate so much they will turn a country to rubble
and it’s people into refugees on the strength of their hate. In yesterday’s
news I read that there are soldiers in Myanmar who will cut the throats of children and
set huts on fire with living people inside of them, and worse. How can any of
us have hope?
Since I was a little girl, listening to the stack of
Christmas records on my father’s turntable this song has haunted me, the
refrain of my deepest questioning summarized in two short lines of poetry.
I’m thankful for the answering refrain that I also can’t
forget.
“Then still the bells tolled loud and deep, “GOD IS NOT DEAD, NOR DOTH HE SLEEP. THE WRONG SHALL FAIL, THE RIGHT PREVAIL, with PEACE ON EARTH GOOD WILL TO MEN.”
Those bells man, they won’t shut up. They make me look
deeper, and look differently. Because hate is really loud, and it does shout
mockery at the songs of hope, the songs of peace, but the songs are still
there. Hope is still there. Peace is still there. Love is still there.
It’s in every family gathered around table tonight with
enough to eat and drifting into contented sleep, snuggled together against the
cold. It’s in every tiny baby who smiles for the first time and is greeted with
answering smiles from an adoring mother or grandmother, father and older
siblings.
It’s quiet, this revolutionary force. It doesn’t shout like
hate does. But it shows up.
It’s there with the boxes of food sent to a refugee camp and
aid organizations already working to help.
It’s there with every person who decides, “I’m going to send
my extra $20, $30, $50 to help bring relief to families in extreme poverty.”
It’s there every time someone sits down next to someone
suffering and becomes a companion through the pain.
It’s there in the foster mother cooing at another woman’s
baby, making sure he knows he’s loved.
It’s there when a mother comes back, because she’s realized
that there’s no escaping the thought of her child, and she needs to know.
It’s in every sincere apology and every moment a person
picks their self up again after being knocked down.
It’s there in a story of a savior who rejects all of the
things we might cushion ourselves with;
money, power, fame, and enters into the rawness of human suffering, coming into
squalor, to the lowest of the low. “God with us” in the worst of it, in the
blood, guts, and tears of the poor. Love is where most of us would be afraid to
enter.
Hate is strong, but we, the people of love, we are stronger. By God’s grace we don’t stop
showing up.
We keep singing the song of hope, still
letting ourselves be caught up by it, by carrying the flame of what we know this
world ought to be inside our hearts. We may not see it completed in our
lifetime, we probably won’t. But we don’t stop singing. We are
the people of hope, the people of love, the people of peace. What a gift it is,
this vision of what is not yet, but yet to come.
You and me, all of us, we keep our candles lit against the
darkness and we ask, “How can I help?”
Sometimes we struggle to keep the song alive in our own
lives, in our own struggles and suffering. But I’ve come to believe that hate
cannot win, no matter how loudly it shouts, if there are still more people
committed to love, who say yes to love, who don’t shut their eyes and ears to
the suffering that they see, but they meet it with hope, with resources, with
their own strength laid out on behalf of the weak.
I may have seen a lot of suffering, but I’ve also gotten to
see how many people care about that suffering. I’ve seen too many of you throw
in against the darkness, with your time, your strength, and your money, to ever
be able to stay with despair long.
You lend strength to the right. You light a candle in the
dark. You bring hope to the hopeless, and make it possible to say yes to one
more person, for one more day. “Yes, we see you. Yes, you matter. You are not
alone. We are with you.”
You are the bell ringers. The world needs you. We need you.
We are so thankful for you and your faithfulness.
*******************
Carrien is a founder of The Charis Project, an organization that provides vital support to families in
crisis, through emergency aid, nutrition support for pregnant and breastfeeding
women, education, and family enterprise initiatives in Thailand and Myanmar. By supporting The Charis
Project you bring hope, strength and healing to desperate families and
children, giving them a future and the opportunity to thrive.
Please consider partnering with us this coming year with a
monthly gift to help a family in need get back on their feet.
Heal families, strengthen families, and keep families
together. Together, we are Charis.
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