The pressure to be loving at Christmas time is intense. We feel like we’re supposed to love the holiday season itself. Love the music. Love the lights. Love the parties. Love the worship services. Love the gifts.
We feel pressure to get together with our loved ones. All of them. Even when our schedules are full and our bodies are exhausted. Even the loved ones we don’t actually like. Even the ones who don’t like us. We feel pressure to show our love to each other through gifts-the shinier the better. Love is supposedly just all around us, infusing into us and out of us in the form of perfect Instagram photos, sparkly decorations and homemade gifts.
The truth is that for many of us, love is the hardest emotion to deal with around the holiday season. We feel a lot of things, but love seems out of our reach. We feel the ache and longing for a friend of family member that has died. We feel the pain of a relationship that is broken. We feel the disappointment of unmet expectations and crushed dreams. We feel the fear of uncertain futures. We feel a lot of things this time of year, but it’s possible that none of them are love. Maybe we even feel the opposite.
I discovered this week that there is apparently a raging debate on the Internet about what the opposite of love actually IS. Many people hold the traditional view that the opposite of love is hate. That animosity, cruelty, ill-will are the farthest you can get from true love. And those emotions can certainly come into play at Christmas time. I’ve seen and heard of families doing some cruel things to each other around the holidays. And as sad as it is, hatred in the form of wars, massacres, battles and murders are certainly no stranger to the holiday season.
Others tend more toward the thoughts of holocaust survivor Ellie Weisel, who said that the opposite of love is indifference. That the farthest thing away from the energy of love is the emptiness of apathy. I think many of us have experience with this around the Christmas season as well. We don’t feel love, but our hearts aren’t filled with hate. I mean, who even has the ENERGY to be hateful this time of year? Instead, what we feel is nothing. To protect ourselves from pain and loss, and uncertainty and loneliness we instead choose not to feel anything at all. We can’t care about anyone or anything because it hurts too much. We are too hurt, our world feels too dangerous, our future seems too scary and so we fall into numbness, to apathy, to indifference to protect us from it all.
Perhaps both are true. Perhaps the opposite of love is simply “not love.” When you are exhausted, apathetic, wounded, fearful, hateful, angry or mourning, love can feel beyond your grasp. Because actually loving each other, and loving ourselves. is hard. Really, really, really hard. Nothing makes that more apparent than the sparkly, glitzy, consumeristic, eat-drink-and-be merry, Faux Love we find peddled so heavily during the holidays. Because when we are surrounded by fake love, it is easy to see where real love is lacking.
Because real Love is patient; real Love is kind; real Love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Real Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; Real love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. (Sound familiar?)
It’s an incredible description–bordering on impossible.
Last week my kids and I watched Charlie Brown Christmas Tales on Netflix. In one scene Lucy comes up to Charlie Brown and Says “Merry Christmas Charlie Brown! At this time of year I think we should try to put aside all of our differences and try to be kind.” And Charlie Brown, looking at Lucy who bullies him most of the year says “Why does it have to be just this time of year? Why can’t it be all year round!” And Lucy balks “What are you? Some kind of fanatic!”
And that’s the truth isn’t it? Unlimited kindness and unconditional love is fanatical isn’t it? It’s why “let’s just smile and get along for the holidays” feels so awful–because love is never meant to stop and start.
Love is meant to be unrelenting., never ceasing, never failing. The Gospel, the Good news is that God is LOVE. That Jesus Christ came into the world as Love Incarnate, Love in the flesh to show us what a life of Love–what a kingdom of love looks like. And we need it now more than ever. In ourselves, in our families, in our churches, in our communities and in our world. We need Love as a radical act of resistance against the false gospels of power, wealth, pride, selfishness and winning.
Love will be the hardest thing we ever do. It will be the most vulnerable thing we ever do. Nothing makes you more open to hurt than being patient, kind, humble, caring, and peaceful. Ask Jesus. Love got him killed. But love is also what has saved and is saving us all.
It can feel all too big though. How can you love in the midst of all the chaos, all the anti-love, all the exhaustion, all the pain? How can you love when you don’t feel loving or even feel loved? As it turns out there is only one way to love, no matter if we are talking about loving our broken families, our rotting political systems, our fractured countries, or are wounded selves. We can only way in small ways. We can only love by choosing to do the next right thing. By choosing kindness, choosing peace, choosing patience, choosing humility, choosing to put others needs before own. Or as Mother Teresa said, “We can do not great things–only small things with great love.”
We cannot protect ourselves from pain. It is a universal part of the human experience. But the good news of the Gospel is that pain and love are NOT opposites. They can and do co-exist in this life. Mother Teresa called it a paradox. “I have found the paradox,” she said, “that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love.” The radicalness of true love is that it can co-exist with our pain. The good news of Christmas is that the God who is Love Incarnate is with us in our hurt, in our loss, in our indifference and in our suffering– in the holiday seasons of Advent and Christmas and always.
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