The spirit of Christmas brings hope amidst change and suffering
As one enters his eighth decade of life, he has long since reached that point where he takes what Sherwood Anderson called “the backward view of life.” The greater part of everything one will experience is behind him. The “sadness of sophistication” takes evermore time sorting out the procession of souls and events one has ever known or will know.
At Christmas, this sadness can grow more intense, or it can abate. Helping it abate for others is among the greatest gifts one can give in this holy season.
For my wife and me, this Christmas will require deeper digging into our sleigh of giving. In this past year, we lost our precious youngest son. We have heard from, read about and talked to so many others, inside our family and without, who have borne similar losses. Those losses may have happened years ago, but they are as present and piercing as the first icy winds of winter.
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Looking out onto the scenery of a nation now so deeply unmoored and rancorous, it is hard not to look back with unmixed nostalgia. We were blessed, my wife and I, to be born into loving families. Jim and Mary Donovan had 10 children in a three-bedroom home in Cincinnati. My wife was one of 11 born to Charles and Rita Short, who operated a seven-day-a-week newspaper delivery business in rural Rhode Island. The Shorts had only those bedrooms the family built with their own hands.
We were part of the Baby Boom (not quite all of it, though there were 21 of us!). We came into this world in the aftermath of World War II when families that had been delayed took flight. People were making up for lost time, building neighborhoods, refitting industries to domestic use, filling churches, expanding schools, and starting youth sports leagues.
It was a brief interwar period, as things turned out, and it is fashionable among today’s intellectuals to deride the era for its shortcomings. The civil rights movement was advancing against centuries-old injuries and indignities, and the war in Vietnam was splitting generations. Revolutions in sex and drug use were dawning, attempting to spread the gloss of liberty over the most ancient human failings.
Problems aside, there was a glimpse then of a different life than what we have now. Materially, our families had a fraction of what families have now. Happiness was more common. Dozens of kids roamed fenceless neighborhoods at night, playing Ghost in the Graveyard and Ditch’em with real people, not glowing metaforms. Nearly everyone went to church. Almost all kids had two parents. Divorce was rare. A miscreant boy could not get away with deeds or words in a neighbor’s yard they couldn’t commit or utter at home.
Boys and girls could get on a bus in urban Cincinnati and ride downtown to go to the Library or record store. No parent would worry about what they would read or see there. Woe betide you if you disrespected a woman with child or an older gentleman on that bus by not giving up your seat. The neighbor lady, like Miss Marple, was a “noticing kind of person.” At holidays, especially Christmas, whole neighborhoods were lit up with bulbs and tinsel. And, yes, Christmas carolers would appear at your door in the rain or cold.
This 2022, America would do well to think about ways to restore such scenes and themes. We need a renaissance. Habits are born in the hearts of people who learned from birth to love those close to them as the prelude to loving others. Our fall from grace is witnessed in the daily scenes of violence everywhere. Our news is of guns, euthanasia, theft, exhibitionism, street violence, and abortion. For all its faults, that was not America in 1960.
What do we wish it to be now? Yes, we have deep moral and social policy disagreements. I sit comfortably at age 70 on the conservative end of the cultural and policy spectrum. I welcome debates both civil and strenuous. But as to violence, verbal or physical, this Christmas is another opportunity to gather as family and friends and discard these tactics. It’s much too early to take down all the fences and jump on the crosstown bus, but we can still aspire.
This Christmas our family will gather with mutual love and strive to offer the same to others. We will go forward with our missing face from the dinner table, as so many other families will do. We pray for them. We thank God for choosing, despite all sin, to come to dwell among His people. We celebrate that He is not separate from us and that He wills us all to be joined with Him this Yule in heavenly peace.
Charles A. “Chuck” Donovan is president of Charlotte Lozier Institute.
