Hope

Dave asked me last week what Christmas meant to me. I was on the floor sweeping up pine needles at the time, and I dithered and waffled and didn’t give a satisfactory answer, except to say that one of its significant features is happy memories of family Christmases when I was little. 

But I love the Christmas story with the stable and the angels and the shepherds and the astrologers…and who doesn’t love a new baby? New babies are little miracles. To me new life means hope. I think that’s what the Christmas story means to me - hope. Hope and magic.

I came across an article written by Vaclav Havel the other day. (It was on Bluesky, the friendly person’s answer to Twitter/X.) Havel was writing about hope - something we’re in desperate need of in these dark dark times. This was the last paragraph of his piece:

“Hope in this deep and powerful sense is not the same as joy when things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather an ability to work for something to succeed. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. It is this hope, above all, that gives us strength to live and to continually try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now. In the face of this absurdity, life is too precious a thing to permit its devaluation by living pointlessly, emptily, without meaning, without love, and finally, without hope.”

The view from here

Happy Christmas, and lots of love, Sue.