Dear friends,

Happy almost Christmas. I am writing to you from a little cafe in Oceanside, where I am about five feet away from the ocean and sipping on an (incredibly frothy and delicious!!!) eggnog latte, made of espresso, milk, and nutmeg. Despite the fact that I’ve only spent three of an undisclosed number of winters in a properly snowy climate, I still find it a little surreal that it’s 72 degrees out, and I’m watching people in shorts and sundresses walk along the sunny harbor.

In the days leading up to Christmas, I find myself returning to a song that I listen to throughout the holidays every year: “7 O'Clock News/Silent Night”, the twelfth and final track on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme by Simon and Garfunkel. This song is a two-part harmony featuring the carol “Silent Night” and a simulated “7 O'Clock News” bulletin documenting the various events of August 3, 1966. The news was actually scripted and read by Charlie O’Donnell, who was a radio DJ and the announcer on many TV game shows, including The Wheel of Fortune.

As the lyrics of the carol are sung in the background, the news items—covering political tensions, violent events, and societal unrest—create a jarring paradox.

It goes like this:

Silent night, holy night
All is calm
All is bright (President Johnson originally proposed an outright ban covering discrimination by everyone)
Round yon virgin (for every type of housing, but it had no chance from the start)
(And everyone in Congress knew it) mother and child (a compromise was painfully worked out)
(In the House Judiciary Committee)

Holy infant (in Los Angeles today, comedian Lenny Bruce died)
So tender and mild (of what was believed to be an overdose of narcotics)
(Bruce was 42 years old)
Sleep in heavenly peace (Dr. Martin Luther King says he does not intend to cancel plans)
(For an open housing march Sunday into the Chicago suburb of Cicero)
(Cook County Sheriff, Richard Ogleby, asked King to call off the march)
Sleep in heavenly peace (and the police in Cicero said they would ask the National Guard)
(To be called out if it is held, King, now in Atlanta, Georgia, plans to return to Chicago Tuesday)

Silent night (In Chicago, Richard Speck, accused murderer of nine student nurses)
(Was brought before a grand jury today for indictment) holy night
(The nurses were found stabbed) all is calm (and strangled in their Chicago apartment)
(In Washington, the atmosphere was tense today) all is bright (as a special subcommittee)
(Of the House Committee on Un-American Activities)
(Continued its probe into anti Vietnam war protests) Round yon virgin
(Demonstrators were forcibly evicted from the hearings) mother and child
(When they began chanting anti-war slogans)

Holy infant (Former Vice-President Richard Nixon says that unless there)
So tender and mild (is a substantial increase in the present war effort in Vietnam)
(The US should look forward to five more years of war) sleep in heavenly peace (in a speech before)
(The Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in New York, Nixon also said)
("Opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single weapon working against the US")
Sleep in heavenly peace (that's the seven o'clock edition of the news, goodnight)

This difficult tension between the beauty of the quickly approaching gift of the Incarnation and the harshness of the world is something I find deeply moving about this song. It challenges us, I think, to acknowledge and seriously wrestle with the profound brokenness of the world without surrendering to despair.

In The Promise of Paradox, Quaker writer and educator Parker Palmer writes, “The way we respond to contradiction is pivotal to our spiritual lives.”1 Paradox requires “both/and” rather than “either/or” thinking (tremendous thanks to the Lutherans for really developing this theology). The Gospels are full of paradoxes like this:

• “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

• “The greatest among you will be your servant.”

• “But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ”

• “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”

• “When I am weak, then I am strong.”

• “The last will be first, and the first will be last.”2

G.K. Chesterton reflected that Christianity is most hospitable to paradox, welcoming as it does the pessimistic and the optimistic, the bold and the meek.3 In this Advent season, we have been invited to embrace these paradoxes, especially as they are embodied in the coming of Jesus in the ultimate display of humility.

There's something deeply grounding in this paradox being offered in Simon and Garfunkel’s song—an invitation not to retreat from the enormity of the world's pain, but to enter into it with our eyes wide open, looking for the places where grace is at work even when it's hard to locate. I feel that we are all called to be agents of that renewal, to keep our hearts tender and our spirits alive to the possibility of change, no matter how discouraging this act of defiance can be.

I’m reminded of a homily that has been particularly precious to me since I first read it five or six years ago: St. Oscar Romero’s Christmas Eve homily from 1979, delivered amidst rapidly escalating political violence in El Salvador. Romero’s words echo the paradox of Advent as he is speaking to a people weighed down by unimaginable suffering. “I congratulate you, dear brothers and sisters,” he writes in the opening of his homily, “not only because it is Christmas but because you are courageous.”4

Romero’s message feels especially prescient today, given the current, deeply troubling sociopolitical climate of the U.S. He advises us:

“Let us not seek Christ in the opulence of the world or among the idolatries of wealth. Let us not seek him in the struggles for power or among the intrigues of the mighty. God is not there. Let us seek God where the angels say he is: lying in a manger on a little straw, wrapped in the poor bit of cloth that a humble woman of Nazareth could afford. There we find resting the God who has become man, the King of the ages who makes himself available to us as a poor little child.”5

In reflecting on the great mystery of the Incarnation, St. Romero is reminding us, as are Simon and Garfunkel, that, in spite of everything, we cannot run the risk of becoming numb to love, indifferent to evil, and paralyzed into inaction.6

This speaks to the heart of the paradox of Advent: a reminder that the Incarnation is not just a beautiful, tranquil event but one that enters into the messiness of collective and individual pain. This is the scandal of the Incarnation: God entering the world as a helpless infant in a place marked by strife and fear. Romero’s homily insists that the birth of Christ is not a distant, sanitized moment but a profound and ongoing act of solidarity with the depth of human suffering.

Romero’s words, and Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics, do not offer either easy consolation or a denial of pain; rather, they demand a reorientation, a refusal to allow despair to have the final word.

This perspective transforms the proclamation of Christ’s birth into a radical call to hope—a hope that does not ignore suffering but stands in its midst, trusting in the possibility of redemption.

Perhaps by nature, it hasn’t always been easy for me to believe. Most days, this feels both like a blessing and a curse- a restless tension that places me somewhere in between the wild, beautiful gladness of being alive and the crushing weight of all that is broken. In the midst of these doubts and questions, I have always sought something expansive enough to hold this world in both its starkness and beauty. The story of the Incarnation is the only story that continues to meet me where I am, with all these paradoxes, and still cradle my heart in hope. In the mystery of God becoming flesh, I find not an answer, but a presence—one that enters into the mess of human life, embraces it, and transforms it.

The Incarnation invites me to wrestle with the tension with which I am all too familiar- to let the sharp pain and distinct wonder of this world be held in something infinitely larger than I can comprehend. It helps me keep my gaze on a fundamental mystery, and it is here, in the heart of this paradox, that I find the resilience to keep seeking, the grace to keep questioning, and the courage to believe.

And, as we near the Fourth Sunday of Advent, I wish this also for you.

Well, friends, that’s all from me for now. I am off to finish an outstanding paper on Pope Pius XII’s apostolic exhortations on film, put on some James Herriot, turn on my (long-awaited!) email vacation responder for the next two weeks, and bake (also long-awaited) sugar cookies. I’m sending you my warmest, cheeriest wishes. May your days be filled with rest, delicious food, and cherished moments with your loved ones. Since I won’t be writing again until next Friday:

A blessed and holy feast of our Lord’s Nativity to all. May we all find him incarnate in our lives, in each other, and in what we have been given.

How are you celebrating the holidays? What traditions do you and yours share?

Merry Christmas!

Warmly,

Julia