Christmas Angels and Demons

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This summer, for no apparent reason, a vicious bout of anxiety hit me, knocking me off my normally sturdy emotional feet.  It persisted for a full four months, resisting all my tried and trusted coping mechanisms.  I'm still thinking about the experience and learning from it.  Once I had thoroughly dissected and analyzed it, I decided the reason was probably an overall angst about the state the world is in. 

 
Evil news invades our hearts and minds in this information age.  There seems no place to hide from it.  Just when we think nothing worse can happen, a new media revelation bursts upon us. 

So maybe anxiety is not so unreasonable after all?

I am tempted to think the world is getting more evil, but I suspect it's not.  As I begin to come out of my funk and start thinking about Christmas, I realize evil has been around for a long time.  The Nativity Story is full of it.  And when I realize this, the age-old question comes back at me again. 

Why? 
Why is there evil in the world? 
Why, if there is a good God, does He let it happen?

This morning I'm reading a book by Carolyn Arends called, Wrestling with Angels.  In it she talks about the Mother of all Mysteries--the Incarnation. 

She says:

Of all the paradoxes in the New Testament, there is one more impossible than all the others, and the contradiction is not in something Jesus says but in what He is . . . . fully God and fully man, together.  A crazy (and ultimately violent) collision of human and holy, somehow contained in ordinary flesh and bone.  It is the Mystery of Mysteries, and it starts with--of all things--a baby. 
(p. 193)

She goes on to point out that this "violent collision of human and holy" happened for a very deliberate reason.  It happened for Love.   And then she gives us one of the most lucid and engaging answers to this question about the problem of evil that I've seen:

If this is the whole quest of God--that we should love Him as He loves us, that we should become His friends--we must be free to reject His offer.  This is a terrible freedom, and I suspect it is at the heart of most of the terrors in this world.  We cannot love God unless we are free not to love Him.  Many of us don't.  He does not override our wills.  He does not move us about like pawns in a cosmic chess game, always ensuring an agreeable outcome.  We are free to bring hate into the world (and indifference too, which is really hate in its most lethal form), and so we bring also disease and pollution and crime and death.  If God were to force us to stop the hate, He would eliminate the opportunity for us to choose love.  (p. 202)

I'm going on a Carolyn Arends binge this Christmas.  I'm going to fill my house with her Christmas music.  Her unique and vivid song lyrics follow this theme of the violent collision of the human and the holy, with an underlying echo of God's love that Christianity claims will one day swallow up all the evil.  

If you're looking for a reason to believe in the Good this season--if you want something that will counter-balance the Bad you will continue to hear in the media--I heartily recommend you check out her music.  You will find in it thought-provoking reasons to hope in the midst of the mess we humans have made of the world.

Her message--the message of Christmas--is an antidote for anxiety. 

Check out these clickable samples of her music:  
Long Way to Go, the Christmas story in a nutshell.
The Power of Love, an old song but a good one.

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