HOPES AND FEARS
AWRITER in the Guardian recently quoted the lines from the Phillips Brooks carol which go The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.
and pointed out what a travesty they are of our real feelings this Christmas. Our hopes and fears, and especially our fears, are centred not upon Bethlehem but upon a handful of statesmen who have an intolerable power over our future. Are we, we wonder, to die appallingly within a few years and to see all the people we love most die with us? Are we to suffer perhaps a worse fate and to live on in a world that has become, in Robert Jungk's phrase, 'one vast field-hos- pital': a world filled with mutilated and diseased human beings, a world in which the young date not conceive and in which the old long to die?
The mind reels from the horror of it to face the frightful alternative. Suppose we induce our leaders to follow the prescription of CND and turn a defenceless cheek to Mr. Khrushchev? Might not this, apparently moral, gesture be as irresponsible a sanction of evil as Pilate washing his hands? For it would not be long before the Soviet machine began to roll westwards, rending lives in its contempt for truth, its cruelty and its insistence (which, makes it, if possible, even more devilish than Nazism) that men should not merely show token obedience to the system, but should, at whatever price, believe in it body and soul. Many intelligent people have suggested in the past six months that for all its lies, per- secutions and its fury against nonconformity, a Communist empire would be better than a sick and dying world population. The temptation to yield to this line of thought would be greater if there was not the third sickening alternative. the one that we have chosen; that of maintain- ing the balance of power at an agonising cost of tension in the hope that by perpetually postpon- ing the moment of action we may also postpone the tragedy. and by some as yet uncalculated method perhaps avert it altogether. Sitting ex- hausted upon the tiger's hack we can at least
comfort ourselves that we are not actually being eaten.
But hope? This is a luxury in which we scarcely dare to indulge, in case it warps our judg- ment and gives a .final bitter twist to our suffer- ing. In the past thirty years we have watched the worst happen to too many people to suppose that somehow we ourselves are magically ex- empt, and there seems little left beyond waiting and seeing what happens next with a sour sense of our own vulnerability and cowardice.
Christians, however. still doggedly celebrating their festival in the teeth' of commerce and pagan high jinks, have no choice but to go on hoping in the face of whatever intimidating circum- stances the world provides. The hopes and fears of most of our contemporaries may lie a very long way from Bethlehem, but for the Christian for whom the birth of Jesus is not a pretty legend, but an austerely precise statement about God, the hopes and fears of 1961 lie strewn about the -incongruous cradle. It is not simply, of course, the birth that they are celebrating, but, by means of the birth and the life and death that followed, the utterance of God on the subject of human fear and pain and loneliness and sin. It does not explain suffering--nothing has so far done that—but the Christians say that for those who will accept Christ, it allows it to become transformed. Before Christ there had been only the powerful but barbaric revelation of Job, the revelatiOn that God continued to exist in His majesty however miserably man might suffer. With Christ comes the statement that God is not suSlimely indifferent to human agony, nor is He a sadist having his dirt:, sport at the expense of the helpless and the terrified. For the believer He is the lover who never stops caring, who is Himself hurt by human suffering and sin, but who nevertheless uses his omnipotence to bring love and goodness out of the worst things we d a to ore another.
It is not fear of hell or hope of heaven or nervousness of dying which demands the
allegiance of Christians, but this sweeping, irresistible gesture of God's love. `Set on fire as we are,' said Peter Abelard, `by so great a benefit from the Divine grace, true charity should fear nothing at all.' True charity is baffled and stricken by much that confronts it—by natural disasters, for example, and by the heartbreaking bias to evil demonstrated throughout human history—but it will not be utterly dismayed by these things any more than by H-bombs or dic- tators or by the constant fears that bombard the mind. Perpetually struggling both to overcome the evil and to alleviate the suffering, as well as to understand the intractable problem of why both occur, its main preoccupation is still the answering of Love with love. This is the function of Christians in the world and it is this of which Christmas reminds them.
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