The Hopes & Fears of All The Years

“…are met in thee tonight.” — O, Little Town of Bethlehem

Yes, but what about all my hopes and fears — all the accumulated woundings, emotional baggage, unanswered questions, unmet expectations, abandonments… of all of my years?

I have 38.5 of those, personally, so far. Years, that is. Years, and all the etcetera’s mentioned above that invariably accumulate from birth to adulthood for the average human person. How is it, at my age, I still have hopes and fears — fears of disappointment enmeshed with “Christmas”?

This hopes and fears line from the old Christmas hymn is a poignant reference to the ‘hopes and fears’ in all of Israel’s years — centuries of struggle, enslavement, freedom, wandering, idolatry, heartbreak, exile, and liminal despair. One long and troubled relationship. All the hopes tethered to the fears of a nation that was supposedly set apart by the God of their ancestors in order to ultimately be a blessing for the entire world. The voices of their prophets rang out in weeping and sighing and jangly, frightening, murky sayings and riddles, eventually growing so faint as to fall utterly silent. And then, in that silence — a messenger, the willing humility of an impoverished teenage girl, and a star — all subverting the shadow of an harrowingly brutal Empire. This is the stuff of fairy tales. This is myth made true.

But again, what about my own personal hopes and fears? What about yours? How many years’ worth of the …etcetera do you come to the Bethlehem of your Christmas 2021 with?

I’ll be uncomfortably vulnerable for a moment and just note: Christmas, as an adult, is woefully and invariably disappointing. None of the Christmases, since I was probably 10–12 years old, have been able to compare to both the immensity and magic of that expectation… followed by the lavish, often unforeseen or better-than-hoped-for gifts of that era. Those Christmases and their associated gifts made such a deep impact (in the way that so many childhood events tend to) that Nintendo, for instance, is forever interwoven with my ‘hopes’ and ‘expectations’ for what a ‘good’ Christmas ought to look and feel like. It’s what I have inextricably hard-wired into my own heart and mind’s category for Christmas with a nervous system/bio-emotional/soul-level link. It is, in fact, so hard-wired as to be embarrassing to admit to as an adult. Second only to that would be a drum kit. These (the Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong Country and a drum kit) were both gifts from Christmases wherein my stepdad hid away in the attic to let us believe we’d opened everything there was to open downstairs…and then came down the attic door with that one, final, unexpected and not-dared-to-hope-for Gift of Gifts! Both of these memorable instances were years that my mother and stepdad went to a special amount of trouble, with money they did not have to spare, to give my brother and I those ecstatic, hard-wiring childhood Christmas surprises.

Those Christmases no longer exist. Those memories are impossible to replicate, either in substance or in feeling.

You might well say, “Well, of course! Get over it! As an adult you should know Christmas is about so much more than getting a pile of toys!” And you are correct. Correct on a technical level. But on some deeper level… what if my adult disappointment in Christmas, the shadow side of that childhood expectation, that longing…what if there’s something true there? What if Christmas is a glimpse of something we all know should be, and for a moment or two we taste it, and then it flickers out like a glitchy bulb on a Christmas tree?

In their over-the-top gift giving (and we were lower-lower-middle class, which could be an entire essay in and of itself: “The Unconscionable Burden of Christmas Gift Giving for the American Impoverished and/or Lower, Lower Middle-Class”) my family set me up for perennial adult disappointment. But they paradoxically imparted a much deeper, more lasting gift: the longing of expectation, itself. I learned how to wait, in longing.

We’re, each of us, looking for a place where our own hopes and fears — the baggage of all our years — can be met. Especially in Christmas 2020/2021. We will never not be disappointed with Christmas, as adults. We will never not feel that ache. Some years it’s a subtle, underlying sense that can easily be brushed aside with a favorite Holiday drink or party (or toy.) Some years, though, it’s as thick as a winter coat that can’t be unbuttoned or removed, and it smothers every waking moment with the enchantment of half-hopes, unspoken, tears on the brink of rolling down hot from scrunched eyes, running nose, clogged throat. We don’t have adequate words for this, but we all feel it, to one degree or the other.

If you feel it so thick around you this Advent/Christmas season (as I do) and don’t even have the energy to begin to gather your own years’ worth of hopes and fears, take heart. You don’t have to have the energy for Christmas. You don’t have to do anything/everything you can to avoid that ache — that fear of deep disappointment. You’re not alone.

Christ comes quietly, to be born and laid into a makeshift cradle — like his hay-stocked feeding trough of old — within your ache. That’s where you’ll find Emmanuel, God With Us, bundled into all your hopes and fears. Be gentle with yourself, this Christmas, and feel whatever you feel. Christ comes quietly, “…where meek souls will receive him still…”