Defiant Hope this Christmas?

Carolyn Merry   19 Dec 2024

Lament may seem a strange place to start a Christmas reflection - but that is indeed my starting point. How can we not lament?

• Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, Syria, South Korea, Israel and the Occupied Territories (to name just a few places of concern)
• Rising homelessness and poverty in the UK
• Loss of trust in most public institutions, leaders - including the Church
• Polarisation, fear and increasing mental and physical ill health
• Environmental collapse

This is the world of 2024. Of course, there is love and goodness all around us, but as followers of Christ who are called to love ourselves, one another, our enemies and God - it is increasingly difficult to ignore the unstable and dangerous times in which we live and those for whom these times only mean displacement, exclusion, fear, pain and death.

During this waiting time of advent this year – I have pondered anew that theme of waiting. At Place for Hope we train and mediate on sitting in the messy middle - somewhere between what we grieve as we let go and for what we hope. For me, that waiting of course means turning my eyes to Jesus - that even 2000 years ago, the birth of a vulnerable child in the midst of an occupied land brought light in the darkness and hope.

2000 years on, that hope is diminished somewhat for me. The teachings of Jesus - radical, change-the-world teachings have often been lost in the midst of the violence, power-filled foundations and structures of our world, sometimes even within the Church. 

That is where defiant hope arises for me. 

I became a Christian at the age of 18. Over the decades since then, I have stood among the massacred, comforted the bereaved and tortured, wept with those who could still find tears in the midst of war. Hope was there in those moments, in those tears, in those screams of anger, in the thick silence that descends after the shelling and gunfire cease. In those places it is not pie-in-the-sky hope. Reality in those places is all too real, brutally so - but a hope that was in defiance of that reality for many who witness and survive such scenes. A defiant hope that this reality wasn’t the last word…that there was indeed something better to survive for.

Maybe these are truly Kairos times - lamentable to both God and ourselves and maybe, just maybe - terrible enough to finally shake us out of the complacent status quo that has led us here? Kairos times, where God calls us to defiant hope - a hope that may not be reasonable given everything we see and experience in the world. But a defiant hope that says - everything we know is collapsing, but maybe that will mean we can finally build back better on the foundations of love, peace, faith and nonviolence- not tweaking at the edges but genuinely building a world in which people can live well together and in harmony and respect of the natural world.

That is my defiant hope this Christmas. I wonder what is yours….?

Place for Hope is rooted in defiant hope. We create spaces every day for people to move beyond conflict and dividing lines and seek a future together that previously was unimagined. We are part of a growing (and often unseen) community of people around the world who proactively work for peace and reconciliation. 

Thank you for being people of peace and love….and defiant hope!

Wishing you and all your loved ones a blessed, happy and hope-filled Christmas and 2025.

Peace and Blessings

Carolyn