A Merry Christmas message!

From the biblical stories of the birth of Christ we read:

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child.
— Luke 2:1–5

Matthew 2:16

When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

According to the bible, at the time of the birth of Christ the world was run by despots. How much have times changed? There are still despots and despot-wannabes. And it came to pass last July that a non-biblical perspective about the current Herod-like regime in Washington, D.C. was written by Rebecca Solnit and published in The Guardian:

We have talked about resistance a great deal these past 18 months or so, but I want to talk about opposition for a moment. You oppose a regime by standing up to it, but also by being its opposite. For this regime that means being compassionate and inclusive where they are vicious and exclusionary. It means being committed to precision and accuracy when they are sloppy with the truth and the facts or at war with them. It means preserving memory, both of how things are changing in the present, and the longterm memory of how many people before us have opposed and resisted and won, of this country’s histories of both heroes and of racism from the anti-Chinese riots of the nineteenth century to the mobs of Klansmen in the twentieth. The United States has an abundance of those heroes in the past and some in the present. John Lewis, who is one of those heroes, said recently “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

a path is made by walking

Photo by J. Harrington

We think we see much similarity between our current situation and the regime under which Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem. We also see, unsurprisingly, comparable similarity in the messages preached by Jesus Christ millennia ago and that from John Lewis via Rebecca Solnit six months ago. Each would tell us today:

Merry Christmas! Be of Good Cheer! Be Hopeful! A New Year is coming!

Christmas

By Bill Manhire

Evening: the nervous suburbs levitate.

Height does us no harm, now we are high above the mineral pools,

above the flash hotel whose only use is treachery.

Someone knocks on a door and you crouch behind the bed.

Down in the bar, the small girls toast their parents,

the brother breaks a large bone for its marrow.

I’m thinking of a challenge for us all. The star in the sky

has traveled all the way from home. Now follow that!

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