This Christmas morning, I found myself thinking about a quote from Hannah Arendt.
It comes from The Human Condition, in which Arendt outlines the difference between Labor – the things we do to survive, Work – the things we do like art and architecture meant to outlast us, and Action – human efforts to influence society or world events.
All of Arendt’s writings live in the shadows of the second world war, and The Human Condition is in part an exploration of how things happen that shape and change the course of history. In part, she’s trying to understand how certain cultural and political realities turn Work into Labor, transforming culture-making and art into consumption (a worthy topic for another day) and make Action difficult, unlikely, or impossible. Totalitarianism was designed to just such ends.
But near the end of the book, she makes the case that no effort and no system can entirely shut out the possibility of action. Why? “Natality.” The fact that new human beings are constantly being born into the world and bringing with them the new possibilities for world events. She writes:
“The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new [people] and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope.”
She goes on to connect this idea with, of all things, the birth of Christ as announced in the Gospels.
It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their “glad tidings”: “A child has been born unto us.”
Arendt’s religious beliefs, to the degree she held any, were certainly secondary to her political, social, and philosophical concerns. Her interest here is in understanding whether humanity is condemned to destroy itself, given the trajectory of the century prior to her writing. In the arrival of new people into the world, each one unique, she sees reason for hope.
Christians can read the passage and make the obvious leap to our Christmas story and its broad cosmic implications. “A child has been born unto us” is truly the greatest message of hope the world has ever heard. More so, perhaps, than Arendt dared imagine.
But there’s kind of a third space of the Christmas story that I’ve been thinking about this year, one that is in between the immanent frame of Arendt’s reason for hope and the cosmic hope of the gospel. It’s the symbolic hope of Christmas, one that comes as part of the power of story.
We’re meant to play with stories in our imaginations, to pick them up like prisms and examine them on all sides in order to appreciate the many ways the light refracts through them. Arendt is doing this here with the birth of Jesus. The world is never without hope because it is always, in some sense, making itself up over again.
In a similar way, I’m thinking of the birth of the Messiah as a symbol of the arrival of all kinds of hope. Hope for good news. Hope for new beginnings. Hope for fresh starts and hope for surprising joy.
The book of Lamentations was written in the aftermath of the fall of Jerusalem. It reflects on the devastation of the city, the incredible loss of life, and the apparent absence of God. And yet, in the midst of those dark verses comes one that you’re just as likely to see on cheery bumper stickers or on the shelves of Hobby Lobby as you are at a funeral: “His mercies are new every morning.”
Maybe the funeral is the better context, or perhaps the bleary-eyed prayers of someone at the end of a devastating year. “His mercies are new.” I can think of no image so powerful a that of a newborn baby. And so I pray, in the words of Linford and Karen:
I hope that I can still believe
The Christ child holds a gift for me
Am I able to receive
Peace on earth this Christmas
As we arrive at the end of 2020, weary and eager to begin 2021 with a fresh start, the birth of the Christ child is an invitation for hope. Hope in the cosmic sense that all things are indeed being made new. Hope in the immanent sense that the world isn’t inexorably doomed to repeat its mistakes. And hope that we can receive the gifts of mercy that come with the vision of the Christ child.
Merry Christmas, everyone.