The Grand Contradiction
Christmas . . . what do you visualize when you think about Christmas? Dancing lights, shimmering bulbs, air thick with the delicate aroma of turkey; wisps ascending from frothy cups of hot chocolate. Maybe your mind races warm with thoughts of carefully selected gifts, sugar cookies rendered brilliant by colored frosting and a dash of sprinkles, crackling fires laced with a hint of smoky hardwood, window panes etched delicate with frost. You might visualize friends and family, festive gatherings wrapped in something nearly magical; the taste of hope and good cheer faintly inching in around the edges of our lives. We may strive to see fresh hopes for the New Year teased out from the fading embers of the old one. We often see much indeed.
Yet there is this massive and rather chafing contradiction in it all. In fact, the contradiction is something of a scandalous oxymoron where the placid and serene rendering of what we’d like the world to be like is jarringly offset but the brutality that darkens that very rendering. It seems that Christmas embodies some fanciful ideal that we would wish upon the world if we could. The dream of an irrepressible goodwill, never ceasing to cherish the fellowman, seizing the golden rule as our standard of faith and practice, and walking with a commitment to bless in word and deed is a grand dream indeed. In fact, it is likely borne of some deeply primal side of ourselves that reflects some grand original design now flawed that Christmas calls us back to. Yet, too often we have relegated it to the sweetly fanciful fiction from which dreams are crafted.
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urviving the Holidays
The World
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