We live in dark times, my friends. Not only is the darkness of the night reaching its full effect in the rhythm of our days, but the news from every corner of the globe seems increasingly grim and foreboding. Without question, ours has become a time of overwhelming fear, giving rise to levels of anxiety, worry, apprehension and distrust. The possibilities, if not the realities of war, famine, destruction, disease and death assault our minds, hearts, and our bodies with every news report or opinion piece we encounter either directly or indirectly.
Sadly, with the relentless onslaught of the Covid-19 pandemic raging everywhere we turn for now two full years, killing millions of people the world over, and showing no signs of abating despite our frantic efforts to thwart its advance, our individual lives become increasingly fraught and fractured, and the fabric of our common life frays into tattered bits as the sins of pride, arrogance, selfishness, greed and hatred fan the flames of our own destruction.
Faced with the enormity of such a relentless adversary, coupled with our collective ambiguity in addressing its advance, driven as we are by confusions, fallacies and lies, suspicion and distrust of one another have not only taken hold, but spread like wildfire through the exploding number of avenues of communication now available to every person who carries a “smart” phone.
I firmly believe, based upon the record of Our Lord Christ’s time of great temptation in the desert, that evil’s most powerful weapon is confusion, thereby blinding us to the truth about ourselves and our world. “Alternative facts” rather than difference of interpretation or perspective, give expression to the insidious power of evil to twist, corrupt and destroy, prompting us to deny the truth before us and to subvert any effort to address or challenge them.
And yet, God remains faithful and true as only a God who loves us unconditionally can possibly be. As we will hear once again from the Gospel of John, “What has come into being in God’s Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Seek and find those myriad of places where God is acting to banish the darkness in and around us, and follow the call to be Children of Light serving selflessly to give voice, strength, time and effort into being the Incarnate Body of Christ in our darkened world today. After all, that’s what the “Christ” in “Christmas” is really all about.