My two-year-old daughter is becoming a prolific song-writer, churning out original material on a near-daily basis. My favorite composition of hers (so far) is “Super Kitty,” but a close second is her very recent work, “In the Darkness.” It’s to be sung in a major key, joyfully. The lyrics are as follows: 

In the darkness

In the darkness

My darkness 

And your darkness

Yay!  

“In the Darkness” is, to my mind, a Christmas song, and a masterful one at that. Like all great Christmas songs, it sentimentalizes nothing. The world is indeed a dark place: greed, power politics and tribalism together go a really long way to explaining the twists and turns of human history. Cynicism works pretty well here, and the Herods of the world generally figure out a way to rise to the top. 

But this darkness, of course, does not somehow materialize outside of us from some nefarious entity called “society” or “capitalism” or “the Left,” or whatever, but springs from our own hearts and is woven together in an unimaginably complex and subtle network of injustices, unkidnesses, untruths and betrayals. It is indeed my darkness, and yours. 

“But then tolled the bells more loud and deep,” or as my daughter put so concisely in her monosyllabic “Yay!”, joy is possible – and not as the result of superhuman achievement or self-discipline, but here and now, for slobs like ourselves. Because the truth about the world, about you and me as individuals, is relativized by the Truth who was born as a baby in a manger, the Truth who became flesh and dwelt among us (paying taxes and catching cold viruses), entering into our histories of pogroms and decaying urban landscapes and political cover-ups, somehow going deeper than all of it and absorbing every bit of it into Himself on the tree – the Truth that God is with us, that nothing can separate us from His love.  

One of the Zapatistas once said, “Our aim is simple: to tear a hole in history.” The Zapatistas didn’t, we can’t, but One did. And we can pass through that hole into a different kind of life. We can sing in the darkness, and even about the darkness, with neither sentimentality or fear, but with real joy.