Guilt and Sorrow and Obedience and Love

Last week, I took my toddler with me to buy some presents for a church toy drive. I thought we’d have fun picking gifts for kids in need. 

Instead, seeing him in the cart made me sad. I thought of everything he had at home, his boxes of blocks and books and racing cars, the sand pail and shovel I’d just ordered him for the holiday. I started to pull more from the shelves: a basketball, a wooden puzzle, bath toys. We had to do penance for all that we had. Literally, I considered, this was the least we could do, a few presents tossed into the box by the altar. It struck me that this was such an insignificant and ultimately ineffective solution to the injustice that gives my child so much and other children so little.

Christmas has always made me feel this way—a little shaky, a little sad, exposed to the world’s cruelties and bewildered by them. I don’t think I’m alone in that. This time of year, neediness imposes itself via giving trees and canned food collections and end-of-year mailers. “The Christmas Shoes” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” play on the radio. We hear of the dying mother, the soldiers at war. Tiny Tim isn’t just a poor child; he’s a poor child oncrutches. Jesus isn’t just born as a baby, utterly helpless—he’s born in the cold, in the dirty straw. It’s all too much.

And so, like many Christians, I practice charity in December, moved to action (or, at least, purchases) out of some inevitable combination of guilt and sorrow and obedience and love. There’s always someone who has more; there’s always someone who has less. Thus, the toy drive. The quarters in the Salvation Army kettle. The year-end donations. We send up a few prayers for the troops and for the grieving. Scrooge brings over a big turkey. 

Then the month is over and the new year, with its resolute demands, is upon us. What did any of it matter, this flurry of generosity? Anything less than Jesus’ radical call—Sell what you have, give to the poor, and follow me (Matt. 19:21)—feels like too little. What good is a basketball in a world like this?

Recently I went to see Small Things Like These, the new film adaption of an acclaimed novel by Claire Keegan. The movie presents a few tortured days in the life of Irishman Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy), a quiet father who makes his living as a coal merchant in the 1980s. In a coat with worn leather shoulders, he shovels and scrapes; at night, he scrubs soot from his hands and eats his hot plate of dinner and pours over homework with his five daughters. In the living room, a Christmas tree glows. 

But suddenly, Bill’s good, solid life is shaken by tragedies. There’s a child, collecting sticks by the side of the road. There’s another child, drinking rainwater from a dish. There’s a girl, in the neighboring Catholic home for unwed mothers, with a desperate look on her face.

Bill is moved. Bill is disturbed. And nobody can quite understand why. His wife wants him to save his coins for his own family. The nuns pour hot tea and encourage him to forget. All around swirls the festive atmosphere of Christmas—decorated store windows, snow, a choir, cake soaked with alcohol. Enjoy, it all insists; leave the trouble alone.

But Bill cannot. A combination of personal trauma and plain benevolence compel him to action: Coins are given anyway, nuns defied. He weeps in the night. “Do you ever get worried?” he asks his wife. In church, he chews on the words of the liturgy: “The Lord is compassion and love.”

Small Things Like These is about speaking up in the face of injustice, being the conscience that draws attention to corruption—in this case, the abuses of the Magdalene Laundries.

But it’s also about profligate generosity, irrationality, even irresponsibility. We don’t get to see what happens when Bill does what he does (which, you’ll see if you watch, is far from the least he could do). Even so, he helps only a few people. He does not—cannot, does not try to—dismantle the whole unjust system. He’s not even thought through all the consequences of his actions. The boy to whom he gives the coins, his wife warns, has a father who’s a drunk. Bill doesn’t have a plan, exactly. 

That doesn’t matter. Bill acts; Bill answers. Bill does something small, and that something small gives him the courage to do something larger. God will handle the rest. 

Familiar details, carols, and legends around the Nativity story emphasize this giving out of nothing, these extra gestures in service of the Lord. The little drummer boy strikes his instrument. The lowly donkey carries a pregnant Mary, the young, unwed mother who says yes to the child in her womb. The shepherds follow the star and just … show up. 

Later, the wise men display their gifts. Why would the baby Jesus need gold and frankincense and myrrh? The God who made everything is offered a few jars of perfume and precious metal. It’s absurd. “What can I give him, poor as I am?” asks one of my most beloved songs. “If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; / If I were a wise man, I would do my part; / Yet what I can I give him: give my heart.”

In a new essay published in print this month, the Catholic philosopher Byung-Chul Han meditates on the future-oriented nature of hope. “Hope looks ahead and anticipates,” he writes. “It affords us a power to act and perceive of which neither reason nor understanding are capable.” 

Hope doesn’t need a justification. Hope also doesn’t need a sure outcome. “The substance of hope,” writes Han,” is a deep conviction that something is meaningful, independent of any concern for whatever actual results are achieved.” The toys and the coins may not constitute a measurable, quantifiable remedy. But they still mean something.

Perhaps my Christmas feelings amount to sentimentality. (Listen to the saccharine “Christmas Shoes” again and you’ll know what I mean.) Perhaps they are motivated by shame. Our family still has so far to go in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, in combating the persistence of our greed. 

But who cares how the feelings have come up? This tenderness—it’s right. It’s truer than reason. It’s the correct response to the wound at the center of the world, a response that is no less real for its seasonal wavering. I press my finger on the sore spot, press and press, in a meager way doing as Bill did, as the wise men did, overwhelmed by compassion and awe at the Christ child, throwing their paltry riches at the Savior’s feet, trying to remedy the shock of his birth in the straw. 

We press where it’s tender, and when we think we can’t bear it, there comes hope. Hope, writes Han, that only ever emerges from despair: “It confronts the world in its full negativity and files its objections.” Files its objections. One basketball. One puzzle. And then: Lord, let us give one more, give beyond the sensible, even and especially our hearts.

Kate Lucky is the senior editor of culture and engagement at Christianity Today.

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