Iin his end-of-the-year op-ed in the Washington Post at the end of 2021 Michael Gerson wrote that
The right sees a country in cultural decline, stripped of its identity and values. The left fears we are moving toward a new American authoritarianism. Both are ideologies of prophesied loss. In a society, such resentments easily become septic. So many otherwise irenic people seem captured by the politics of the clenched fist. A portion seem to genuinely wish some of their neighbors humiliation and harm.
Michael Gerson: This Christmas, Hope May Seem Elusive
Michael Gerson died at the age of 58, eleven months after the op-ed above was posted. He was a politically conservative evangelical Christian who, among other notable achievements, was a speech writer for George W. Bush. I often used his essays as a jumping off point for my own essays on this blog, as I described in a post in his honor the day he died in November 2022.
Gerson writes that when one is suffering from a terminal illness, the time comes when hope for the future becomes impossible.
There is a time in the progress of a disease such as mine when you believe that you will recover, that you will get better. And I have passed the point when that hope is credible. Now, God or fate has spoken. And the words clank down like iron gates: No, it will not be okay. You will not be getting better.
For those for whom such a individual place has not been reached, just basic human existence raises challenges to hope that cannot be dismissed with platitudes.
Some questions, even when not urgent, are universal: How can we make sense of blind and stupid suffering? How do we live with purpose amid events that scream of unfair randomness? What sustains hope when there is scant reason for it?
As he often did, Gerson turns here to his faith. I’m sure that such turns had little effect on people who did not share Gerson’s faith, but I often found them compelling. This time was no different.
The Advent and Christmas seasons are seasons of anticipation and hope—but, as Gerson points out, the context of the Nativity story is misunderstood hope. The Jewish people and their prophets had waited for centuries for the Messiah, a promised deliverer who would free Israel from exile and occupation. Hope always is energized by the belief that something different is possible—this particular hope was shaped by very specific expectations. But these expectations did not anticipate what actually happened.
The context of the Nativity story is misunderstood hope . . . the long-expected event arrived in an entirely unexpected form. Not as the triumph of politics and power, but in shocking humility and vulnerability. The world’s desire in a puking infant. Angelic choirs performing for people of no social account. A glimpse of glory along with the smell of animal dung. Clearly, we are being invited by this holy plot twist to suspend our disbelief for a moment and consider some revolutionary revision of spiritual truth.
The problem with hope is that it needs to be directed toward something—there is no such thing as “hope in general.” But when we get too specific about the object of our hope, we can easily miss something entirely different that addresses our hope in unexpected ways.
During the holiday season, Christians (and perhaps others) are reminded that although there is reason to hope, there is also every reason to expect that hopes will be addressed in unexpected, often unrecognizable ways, frequently seemingly insignificant and random ways. Christmas reminds us that despite all appearances, hope wins. As Gerson writes,
It is a story that can reorient every human story. It means that God is with us, even in suffering. It is the assurance, as from a parent, as from an angel, as from a savior: It is okay. And even at the extreme of death (quoting Julian of Norwich): “All shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Toward the end of his op-ed, Gerson quotes the final lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather.”
With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.
During 2025 I invite you to join me in learning how, better and better, to see these “spasmodic tricks of radiance” that so often are buried under the daily debris of our individual and collective lives. Mary did not expect to be the subject of that angelic “rare, random descent,” but she recognized it for what it was and responded in kind. May we learn to do the same.
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