Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, friends.
By the time you get this, Christmas will be over. Pine needles will be sifting deeper into the carpet, you'll be guiltily eating the last of the stocking candy and trying to adjust New Year's Resolutions accordingly, and even those pretty white lights will have begun to look gaudy. The Advent season will be dwindling to a close. However, in the Church liturgical calendar, Advent is the beginning, not the end, of the year. We open the year, rather than close it, with the birth of our Lord and the birth of Hope.
This year my teammate Heather made me a lovely Advent calendar, perhaps because she pitied my empty beige walls and conspicuous lack of Christmas decorations. It is a mobile that hangs in my window, and each hanging ribbon is attached to a day's reading. Today's was an entire chapter from Frederick Buechner's book, The Hungering Dark. It speaks of hope, the prevailing sentiment of Advent. During Advent, we look back at the audacious hope of the incarnation, and it gives us strength for the daring hope of Christ's second coming. In the chapter, Buechner says, "There is a Hebrew word for hope, gāwāh, whose root means to twist, to twine, and it is a word that seems to fit our brand of hoping well…, a hundred little strands of hope that we twist together to make a cable of hope strong enough to pull ourselves along through our lives with."
This year has been a year of hope for me. Though everything has pressed against it, I find myself clinging to my thin threads of hope all the more. When the first few months were exhausting, full of staff conflicts and friends being murdered, I hoped that counseling and our July staff retreat would refresh me enough to get me through the rest of the year. When I came back to Bolivia still drained, I hoped that six weeks of language school would revitalize my vision and call to the ministry. When those six weeks ended with mob violence against the brothels, I hoped that this would prompt a new direction and focus for our ministry.
My hopes are modest, usually. I hope that my family gets through the new visa process at the airport tomorrow without incident, so we can spend a Christmas full of laughter and decadent food and competitive board games. I hope that my February Servant Team will bond with each other and find Jesus in the faces of our friends. I hope I get to climb another mountain next year. "To hope for more than the possible is a kind of madness," Buechner says. "For people like us, the reasonably thoughtful, reasonably reasonable and realistic people like us, this apocalyptic hope for more than the possible is too hopeful."
But apocalyptic hope is what we're called to, more than the modest hopes I feel safe anticipating. A few weeks ago, we received the last of the funds needed to purchase the Casa de Esperanza. Once the paperwork is signed we will literally own Hope. And as Christians, we own radical hope more tangibly than if we held the actual deed, the certificate of ownership.
So instead of New Year's Resolutions this year, (which I can never manage to keep anyway), I'm thinking of jotting down some radical New Year's hopes. Here's just one: I hope that my friend "Vanessa" finds Christ in jail, where she is being held for murder of another woman.
The prayer that Buechner ends his chapter with:
"Lord Jesus Christ,
Help us not to fall in love with the night that covers us but through the darkness to watch for you as well as work for you…
Give us back the great hope again that the future is yours, that not even the world can hide you from us forever, that at the end the One who came will come back in power to work joy in us stronger even than death. Amen."
Love and hope in Christ,
Cara Strauss