Good Questions: Healing Relationships at Christmas, A Child of Privilege, and Truth in the Christmas Story

Healing Relationships at Christmas

Dear Dr. Tom: When a relationship has been strained, injured from words or action, is Christmas the time to try and heal it?

—K.K., Online Submission

Dear K-K: The holidays are indeed a great time to celebrate with family and friends, but I would caution against trying to leverage Yule Cheer into a redemptive encounter.

When I was a young idealist, I acted like all I needed to do was pour love and good tidings onto every shattered relationship, and—Hosanna in the highest!—healing, peace, and goodwill must promptly follow. Now I think, if human history is any indicator, people are pretty good at defending their mindset and behavior.

So, today, as an old idealist, I recommend the following formula: Say a kind word when opportunity presents itself but accept the broken pieces and move beyond their cutting edges.

Love and good cheer can be passive affirmation that in God’s universe, everything is working together for the good, no matter how elusive the results may appear.

A Child of Privilege

Dear Dr. Tom: I have nothing but happy memories about the Christmas season when I was a child. I bless and thank everyone who was there for me. Yet not everyone is as fortunate, and I struggle with the question of having grown up a child of “privilege” in an underprivileged world. I don’t need absolution because I don’t feel guilty. I am sad that not everyone enjoys freedom from hunger insecurity, or lives in a safe place without wars raining down on their neighborhood. Your thoughts?

Praying for World Prosperity

—Seattle

Dear Prosperity Pray-er: When it comes to availability of resources and opportunities, humans very definitely live in an asymmetrical world, and always have.

Basic needs we take for granted are luxuries in some lands: Access to clean water and sanitation; adequate nutrition, quality education, and reliable healthcare; affordable, safe housing; free speech, an independent media; freedom from oppression, and the ability to choose who governs us.

It seems to me the goals of a just society must include expansion of those basic rights and resources to everyone, especially educational opportunities so people can lift themselves to greater prosperity.

Beyond the limits of national boundaries, a truly just society will support other homelands to grow their economies as well. The world is an interdependent place. When my neighbor prospers, I benefit from the flow of trade and information.

I encourage you to enjoy the benefits of your “privileged” life without guilt. You are not an oppressor, and you do not assist the poor by lamenting the fact that you haven’t joined their ranks. Do what you can to transform the patch of ground you stand upon, by whatever means available to you today. Let God handle the long game.

Truth in the Christmas Story

Dear Dr. Tom: You’re a religious scholar, so tell the truth. Isn’t the Christmas story a lovely fairy tale? None of it happened, did it? In your book Jesus 2.1: An Upgrade for the 21st Century, you wrote, “Jesus was a human male … He was not born of the union between deity and virgin mother …” Why then do we put out the stable, baby Jesus, mother Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, wise men, animals, and manger even though it never happened?

—Dismayed in Dallas, Texas

Dear Dismayed: “Religious scholar” is a generous assessment of my work. Thank you. But let’s talk about why your historical broadside—which is spot on—is hitting the wrong target. Rule number one for the Christmas season: Don’t Scrooge yourself. (Insert “Grinch” if that fits better.) The ahistorical nature of a story doesn’t detract from its truth. Here’s why:

Take Aesop’s fable about the fox and the grapes. Mister Fox is hungry, and he makes several energetic leaps to snatch a bunch of high growing grapes. Failing, he mutters that the grapes are probably sour. Great lesson in human behavior. “She broke up with me, but I didn’t want to keep seeing her, anyway.” Right.

Now let’s get literal. The fable falls apart if somebody gripes, “Yeah, but foxes can’t talk!” Aesop might have fired back at the heckler, “Dude, if the fox doesn’t deliver the punch line, I’m out of business!”

The Nativity of Jesus is a story. Take away the Virgin Mary; her amazingly tolerant, betrothed husband, Joseph; baby Jesus meek and mild; wise men, star in the heavens, animals, and the shepherds, and Yeshua ben Josef is just another poor Jewish kid born in a cold, Roman world.

It’s the miraculous, impossible scene which conveys the truth that unites common folk (carpenter, unwed mother, shepherds) and kings from the East (biblical word Magi, meaning Zoroastrian priests). We can find a place around the manger of the Christ, who dwells in everyone. Even lovely people from Dallas, Texas, like you.