Hiding Behind the Christmas Tree

Decembers are so predictable: holiday cheer and holiday blues, perky music and glitzy decorations and the pursuit of the 'true meaning of Christmas'. And of course in the background, day after grinding day, the bad news doesn't stop just because it's December. With bombings in Aleppo, rockets landing on Beersheba and alleged mass murders in Colombia, the headlines read like the sickest kind of ABC book.

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But then one day - last Friday to be exact - Americans took notice. People who didn't seem to care on December 13th about thousands killed in Syria or tens of thousands killed in Mexico suddenly reacted on December 14th when 28 were killed in Connecticut. It was, undeniably, a horrific event. It was shocking, gruesome and inconceivable. And so were all the other times people were shot to death, bombed to death, starved or crushed or raped or tortured in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Haiti, Mali and elsewhere - including, of course, other locations in the United States.

I'm deeply disturbed by the Sandy Hook massacre, as I'm deeply disturbed by every instance of violence I hear about. But what disturbs me much more is the reaction I'm seeing - or, I should say, the lack of reaction. When on Friday my Facebook and Twitter feeds erupted with comments about violence after months of silence on the subject, and Google put a memorial candle on its search page where none had been the day before, I had to face a terrible truth. These people were not, as I had thought, deeply pained every day by the preventable suffering and pointless loss of life that never stops. They were not freshly goaded to hard work by each new headline. They had been looking the other way.

But hold on; it gets worse. A lot of the comments, thankfully, were attempts to brainstorm for a crowdsourced solution. But a surprising number of people actually appealed to the rest of us not to try to stop the killing. They said they needed us to let them focus on their feelings, and that there would be time for such talk after it was all over. Of course there was no reasoning with them, either, because they weren't interested in reason. They weren't motivated to stop the killing. They wanted to go back to looking the other way.

And then there were the people (I have to assume they meant well) who suggested prayer or "spiritual revival" was the answer. Now if prayer is a method of harnessing some cosmic or mystical power and directing it to accomplish specific goals, and if spiritual revival is an evil-erasing phenomenon we can simply wait for, then of course those are good answers. But the people who suggested these things are Christians. They believe in the Bible. And of course the Bible teaches that prayer without faith is useless, and 'faith' that's not demonstrated in action is nothing but hypocrisy.

Some people, it seems, have religion in their lives like they have Christmas trees in their houses. They display it where you can't help but notice, and it looks beautiful. And maybe it is a beautiful, natural thing, full of life and strength, but they've cut it off from its roots and removed it from its context. They've covered it with a variety of baggage taken from elsewhere, very attractive and eye-catching but cheap and fake on close examination. And there's probably nothing wrong with that. It's a tradition and a pretty one; it can add beauty and a sense of magic to daily life. But it's no substitute for living. It can't replace getting out of the pew and actually doing things and caring about people.

This Christmas season, though I desperately wish the terrible events of last Friday hadn't happened, it's my prayer that through this tragedy many people - especially my fellow Americans - will wake up and choose to look at what's happening to so many human beings just like us all over the world, and will choose to help stop it. If enough of us make that choice, I know we can succeed.

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