A Christmas letter on love and hope

I’ve seen many discuss how hard it is to go into this Christmas season with all the pain and suffering we are witnessing and have been witnessing in the world.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned after multiple years of social entrepreneurship, activism, and burn out, it is that an important part of resistance is to continue to allow rest, to continue to allow joy, to continue to create beauty.

Pain and injustice exists everywhere, all the time. We must learn to not let it consume us and we must keep placing one foot in front of the other, day by day as we work on both minimising pain and suffering while also creating love and joy and peace. It is the dance on a knifes edge we’re dancing.

It’s not easy. But it’s possible. And it’s a beautiful thing. Turning guilt into gratitude, turning hate into love, turning fear into hope, turning disbelief into faith. That’s the revolution. It begins and ends with love.

I no longer believe in one specific religion, but I still find value in many religious stories and teachings. The birth of Jesus Christ has nothing to do with consumerism and over indulgences. For everyone who’s struggling due to circumstances in their own lives or from witnessing the pain in others I offer you this perspective: Christmas is about love. A love that can give us faith and hope that redemption is possible, that transformation is possible, that forgiveness is possible, that healing is possible. A love that says you don’t deserve this, they don’t deserve this, we don’t deserve this. A love that gives you permission to rest, and to create space for care and compassion in your own life until it’s overflowing enough to spill over into others.

Learning that my own suffering doesn’t minimise the total amount of suffering in the world has been a strange, obvious and difficult lesson. I believe the vast majority of people in this world would contribute to the collective in beautiful and needed ways if they had the chance to be their authentic selves and nourish their own gifts and talents. We are different and we are supposed to be different, and what brings us the most joy is the best thing we have to contribute!

So while we do all we can’t avoid doing, while we’re doing what we can to minimise pain and suffering, we need to also cultivate our own ability to create joy in our own lives, however we can, so we don’t let the darkness consume us, but that we can be a light in it in stead.

I have always been confused about the paradox of evil. How could a loving god also create evil? I no longer adhere to that narrative, but this fall has expanded my understanding of the paradox.

My understanding now is that love literally can’t exist without evil because love is the act of seeing, feeling, knowing the evil, and still actively choosing love in spite of it.

We can’t choose love if there is no choice. However, just because evil exists, in the world, in us, in others, it doesn’t mean we need to let it control us. We can accept it, we can witness it and then remember that it doesn’t define us, as individuals, or as a species, and then choose love.

To me, that is what Christmas is about.

Choose love, choose compassion, choose healing, choose mending, repair and restoration, choose faith, choose hope, choose to believe in, seek out and nourish the good in humanity so it can flourish.

We are and become what we believe ourselves to be.