“Silent night, Holy night…all is calm, all is bright.”
Just days from now —and like Christians all around the globe— we’ll sing these words on Christmas Eve. We’ll light our candles, hold them high, and experience a brief, blissful moment of “calm.”
There is something in this ending to a Christmas Eve worship that always calms my soul, gives me peace, at a deep and abiding level.
But, of course, all is not “calm” in our world.
All is not still, or silent, or “centered.”
At least, not for long. Not ever longer for a minute or two for these kinds of moments.
— Our world is experiencing not one, but two, deeply horrific wars.
— Nationalistic fever has not yet broken in our own country, and far too many are saber rattling.
— We have major presidential candidate literally using words about “pure blood” that were last used by Hitler.
— Our own state government has passed law that drives fear into the hearts of law abiding People of Color —of all economic classes— that they might be stopped and frisked.
— Women have lost their bodily autonomy.
— The LGBTQ community remains a potent “boogy man” for far too many crass politicians.
— And the planet seems to be burning up, before our eyes.
And all the while, in all these issues and more, people in power drive “wedges” between various “identities,” causing them, far too often, to turn on each other, rather than fight against power and privilege in a common, united front.
And finally of course: our televisions and social media scream out headlines about all of this and more.
“Fear not, for unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior.”
These are the words of the Christmas Angels to those terrified shepherds.
Those shepherds were no doubt ordinary working folk of their day, no doubt pawns in the vastness of the Roman Empire.
Perhaps they were afraid of the angels.
Perhaps they were afraid of their own smallness and insignificance.
It doesn’t really matter.
What matters is: the Angels say…God says…. FEAR NOT.
As many of you know, I have those very words tattooed on my arm.
“Fear not.”
It’s another way of saying the sung words of the hymn: “All is calm.”
This Advent season, as I mediate on all this, I keep thinking about Naomi Klein, and her theory of “The Shock Doctrine.”
The theory goes that powerful interests exploit times of economic and social upheaval —wars, stock market crashes, global pandemics— and find ways to profit from them.
She says it’s a bridge too much to suggest that every cataclysmic events are controlled by small powerful cabals “behind the scenes.” That’s too conspiratorial for the way events unfold. (Although it is easy to see how conspiracies can feel like they must be true…)
But the real truth, she says, is always challenging enough, already….
The truth is that in a time of global or local crisis, powerful interests can and do exploit our fear, our division, even our righteous anger and desire for justice…for their own gain and profit.
Our fear, our division, our anger, can be leveraged against us.
As it happens, during Advent I have been reading Naomi Klein’s new book, “Doppleganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World.” As she always does, Klein has again written a book I wish I could make everyone in the world read. And this one presciently gives us some powerful metaphors to look back at our last few years and see where we have been.
Using the fact of her own personal “doppelganger” (writer/thinker Naomi Wolff, with whom she is often confused…), Naomi Klein takes us on a journey of exploration of how in our world it seems that every thing that happens seems to have a “twin” or “mirror” in some opposite land she calles “The Mirror World.” In my own language, this is very close to the “Whataboutisms” I’ve written about for years… the fact that instead of looking head on at any one issue, our world always somehow produces a “whataboutism” that pulls our focus away from the issue at hand, dilutes our attention, and sometime calls us to question whether or not the facts, science, and logic we think we know really are true.
Think: Pandemic misinformation, and how “I can’t breathe” –a slogal of the Black Lives Matter movement– was somehow copted by anti-mask protestors. That’s the kind of “mirroring” she’s getting at here…and it’s a powerful analysis of where we’ve been the past few years.
Check out the book…please.
But for today, for Advent/Christmas I want to highlight one brief section where Klein talks about, of all things, “Calm.”
Naomi Klein says that her writing often stirs readers up. With good reason! Because she regularly writes about all these kinds of societal ills I’ve mentioned above. Leaning about the vast social inequalities of our world can lead us to vast anger, or deep depression. Or sometimes both at the same time. It can lead us to paralizing hopelessness.
But one reader actually had a very different reaction to all. One reader, responding to one of her earlier books, said that instead of being “stirred up” by her words, he became strangely calmed by them. He said that the way Klein named the truths of our world, didn’t “stir him up,” it calmed him down.
He ended up writing these key lines, which might be the most powerful thing I have read in months:
“When people and societies enter into a state of shock they lose their identities and their footing.
Hence, calm is a form of resistance.”
— John Berger
“Calm is a form of resistance.”
As I read these words, it helped me name the continuing struggle I have personally faced—in preaching, in engaging the Biblical prophets, in being any kidnd social activist— in a time like ours. As I’ve said many times, ever since 2016 I have faced a steady challenge to know exactly what to say about all these destabilizing events of our world.
How can I speak of them, and not simply “stir people up?”
And if things look hopeless, as they often do, how/where can any of us find a message of hope?
As I’ve struggled with all of this, I suppose I’ve also been drawn to the truth of this little phrase Klein has now given me.
In times like ours, “calm is a form of resistance.”
“All is calm, all is bright.”
That’s what we’ll sing in just a few nights from now.
“Fear not.”
That’s what the Angels sing.
There is a calm, there is a peace, that runs deeper than all the societal horrors were have named here, or the additional ones that keep you awake each night. But it’s different, perhaps deeper, than the “calm” our world often tries to sell us. It’s like there’s a surface calm that isn’t really calm at all…but instead, just a tamping down of our thoughts and feelings.
In another place, Klein describes this as the difference between being “calm” and being “numb.”
That’s another helpful distinction. The world seeks to numb us in countless ways…mindless entertainment, shopping, food, drugs, sex, wedge issues that pull our attention and from deeper societal problems.
Our world doesn’t just want us to be “dumbed down,” far too often it wants us numbed down.
The Powers That Be benefit when we give in to division and hate, or just “check out” and numb ourselves.
But God’s incarnational peace rests in some spiritual place that is beneath and beyond all this. God’s peace looks squarely all of the problems of the world, and does not avoid them. This is the heart of what it means to “see incarnationally.”
Instead of being to “driven to distraction,” instead of fearing our divisions, we see God in all things, and all people….beneath all our divisions. We don’t sugarcoat our differences, or make others less than human. We humbly acknowledge our differences, and all continuing injustices. But because we know and understand that God moves inside each human being, our calling is to treat everyone with the greatest of respect and compassion.
As a Christian, this is what it means to see “calm as a form of resistance,” and simultaneously what it means to sing that famous Christmas hymn song with integrity.
So in the midst of it all, let us still light those Christmas Eve candles, and hold them high.
Let us sing that song.
And let us trust in a peace and calm beneath all the fear of our deeply broken world, that actually will help us, with the help of God to heal it.