Despite the Paul McCartney jingle echoing through our department stores this season, many of us will not be “simply having a wonderful Christmastime.” Much of our Christmas joy will be met, and made to sing, shoulder to shoulder with dissonant sorrows.
I’ve had cancer since 2018. I received my Stage 4 diagnosis in December 2020—just in time for Christmas to be included in all the crookedness of that year. This blow came just a month before our third child, Jane Ridley Wright, was born. We soon learned our “baby Jane” had been born with a regressive and rare gene mutation.
I bear witness that the hope and joy of Christmas are not easily held in hand with the harshness of life under the sun. It’s a weary task trying to unify it all: birth and disability, sacred and profane, transfiguration and tragedy, cancer and Christmas. But, as Leo Tolstoy observes, “All the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.” Samwise Gamgee agrees: “It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were.”
It’s a weary task trying to unify it all: birth and disability, sacred and profane, transfiguration and tragedy, cancer and Christmas.
Maybe you’re not grappling with a cancer diagnosis or a suffering child; maybe you are. But all of us will one day meet something so off in our world that we ask, Does any of it matter? We’ll be tempted by nihilism because sometimes constructing a beautiful narrative to straighten what’s crooked is harder than just letting it all burn.
How might we better hold in tension light and darkness in this “wonderful” season? What hath Christmas to do with crookedness?
All Is Vanity
Ecclesiastes begins with this conclusion:
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever. (Eccl. 1:2–4)
The Preacher’s oft-repeated phrase “under the sun” evokes a limited, disadvantaged view; it’s paradoxically hard to see under the sun. Think of it as Charles Taylor’s “immanent frame”—a closed system with nothing transcendent to orient us. We look for orientation in an array of things the Preacher goes on to explore: wealth, pleasure, folly, legacy, identity, popularity, influence, morality, vice, and more. Some of these have the potential to be good, but they all shrivel under the sun.
Meanwhile, “a generation goes, and a generation comes.” Everyone dies. We toil in search of “gain,” but to what end? All is death—vanity. No point. George Orwell sums up the Preacher’s sentiment: “Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.” What an uplifting sentiment for your Christmas! Be merry and bright, you’re rotting upright!
The Preacher serves us as a prophet of lack. He tells us that this desert world presents itself like a mirage, charged with the enticing grandeur of gain. But it’s an optical illusion; the world is naked, barren, and empty.
Yet the Preacher doesn’t subject us to this bleak vision of “under the sun” life for despair’s sake. Rather, he hopes to spark in us a longing for truly imperishable gain, for Someone beyond the immanent frame, a true Transcendent who offers real orientation and purpose.
Bell and Berry
As loudly as the off-key notes ring in the ears of all who experience suffering and its dissonance with Christmas hope, there remains a bright Bell that makes glad the people of God. Beyond the noise of our secular age, we can hear faint whispers of people who have dwelled in darkness but now have seen a great light (Isa. 9:2).
It’s only after coming to see the darkness that the light of Christmas truly shines. It’s only in the deafening dissonance that the faint, enrapturing, resonant bells of Christmas can really be heard. True life is savored best in the shadow of death.
True life is savored best in the shadow of death.
The Preacher’s grim picture of life provides us with the photonegative image of what we miss and truly desire, what Christmas beckons us toward. Darkness, in a way, vivifies the light. Shadow proves the sunshine. Hunger implies the existence of a supremely satisfying banquet. As Marilynne Robinson writes in Housekeeping,
To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know anything so utterly as when we lack it?
What is the Bell our ears long to hear? What Berry will break upon the tongue and finally satisfy? It’s the Logos (Word) made flesh—a true Transcendent. This incarnate Logos is not an “it” but a personal “he,” born in a manger. As John declares the glory of Christmas, Jesus is a person who took on flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). In his light, we finally see; in his life, we are finally free of death.
Hear the Bells
Darkness and death met Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the author of the classic “I Heard the Bells of Christmas Day.” His wife was killed when her dress caught fire, and his son ran away from home only to be severely injured in the Civil War. Hence Longfellow’s poem:
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!”
Then comes Longfellow’s breakthrough into Christmas hope:
Then pealed the bells more 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.”
Francis Bacon observed, “A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” To this we may add: A little suffering inclines man’s mind to despair, but depth in suffering brings men’s minds to the manger. For Longfellow, it was not joy that made the berry sweeter; it was pain. Pain secured for him a deeper joy than wife or child could ever secure or loss of them could ever touch. He found imperishable gain in Christ and so met beauty amid shadow.
A little suffering inclines man’s mind to despair, but depth in suffering brings men’s minds to the manger.
I’ve trembled at the hardships my family and I have had to endure, and the light and song of Christmas does wane in these tragedies. But to my fellow mourners: Take heart this Christmas. Though the wrong often seems so strong, the bells are still ringing for those who have ears to hear. “My beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Cor. 15:58). And neither are the hardships you endure.
My beautiful baby Jane was given the middle name Ridley, after one of my favorite poets, Frances Ridley Havergal. I leave you with lines from her poem Disappointment:
We mourned the lamp declining,
That glimmered at our side;
The glorious starlight shining
Has proved a better guide.
The discord that involveth
Some startling change of key,
The Master’s hand resolveth
In richest harmony.
Don’t buckle under the pressure to be “simply having a wonderful Christmastime.” Instead, have a very merry and complex Christmas, knowing now there is reason in the season, for “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).
The Gospel Coalition