Consider this/ Einfach zum Nachdenken

The weeks before Christmas were always very special in my early childhood. Aunt Lisa would appear on Saturdays in order to bake what seemed like industrial quantities of Christmas cookies. Aunt Lisa was a sweet, tall, grey-haired woman with enormous hands. She had looked after us from when we were babies (in fact she had been my mother’s midwife and delivered my sister), and her presence conveyed peace, security and fun. Therefore working with her in my mother’s kitchen on those Advent Saturdays was something very special. So were our family evenings around the Advent wreath during which we sang, read Bible passages and Advent stories, while mom invariably cried: we rarely were so close to each other than on such occasions, and my mother knew it. Many other Advent rituals could be mentioned, but they all contributed to the feeling that “all will be well and all manner of thing shall we well”. In other words, I believed in Santa Claus, not only in the sense that he was bringing the Christmas gifts, but that somehow forces for good were directing my little life and that of my loved ones.

Disillusion was sure to come, and it did: a casual remark of my dad gave away that he had indeed bought my mother’s travel bag, not a white-bearded man on the North Pole. Worse: an uncle committed suicide, my love for a school sweetheart remained unreciprocated, and Aunt Lisa was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and started to wilt away. All this, together with copious amounts of required existentialist reading in my French school, produced deep angst and a conviction that life was a struggle and a valley of tears. Santa was well dead.

It probably took another five or six years before I first heard the Christian story explained to me in a way that made sense: God was not a fairy queen or a benevolent, yet distant ruler. He did not wave his magic wand to make pain and suffering disappear; nor was he a sadist who had set up this world in a way that made human beings miserable. Suffering and betrayal were of man’s making, when in his free-will he chose his own way rather than the ways of the Lord. But God decided to show solidarity with those beings he created and to send his own son into this world to share our fate. That was the Christmas story and it suddenly made sense of this seemingly sense-less world. God became man, and in so doing expressed who he truly was, God with us (Emmanuel).

It will have been forty years this December that I first heard this story explained to me, but it has not lost any of its power. As a result, this year’s news has not phased me: not the fact that a friend’s sister was raped, or that another aunt has a malignant tumour in her pelvis, or that Africa continues to be plagued by Ebola, corruption and droughts. None of these things are as strong as the love of him who made himself a little child: and he enters all those situations and transforms them, just like Tante Lisa’s presence transformed my otherwise drab December. So, in a new way, I do believe in Santa Claus: I hope you can too! Happy Christmas!