Comfort and Joy

Comfort, comfort my people, says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed, that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord;

make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low;

the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all people will see it together.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

(Isaiah 40, the lesson set for the second Sunday of Advent in churches that follow the lectionary.)

Amidst the very real gloom and darkness of this present time, let us hope and pray that we Christian writers will be able to touch and affirm the ‘comfort and joy’ of Christ’s Advent.

If we can manage that, even perhaps feebly and faintly, we should go on to think how we can by our writing send forth the message of comfort to the people around us.

Like the Advent message, the present pestilence is a wake-up call. The environmentalists are right that it should wake us up to the wanton destruction we are inflicting on the planet we all share. But that vital perception doesn’t go quite far enough. We don’t know whether we shall save the earth or whether it will become uninhabitable, but either way, our selfish destruction of God’s creation is a major symptom of the fact that we are a sinful species. 

In the most recent issue of Together magazine, J. John writes tellingly of the way in which the pandemic has exposed the hollowness of the ‘world’ in which so many of our fellow creatures have put their trust. As he says, this is an opportunity to present the Christian alternative. Not that we should do this in a triumphalist way, of course. We are storytellers alongside our readers on a shared planet, not projectors of simplistic drama from the security of Planet Saved.

Isaiah’s message of comfort came to a people who had suffered the trauma of exile from their homeland. This exile was the result of bad choices. To appreciate the comfort that God is offering, it’s necessary to appreciate deeply the effects of our bad choices. We writers can help people attain this awareness. Historical, biographical, and fictional narratives all have a special power. They can show people making good and bad choices; they can show the effects of those choices on themselves and others; and, most importantly, they can show people acquiring the gift of awareness, the understanding of the drives and habitual responses which underlie their choices.

It is enough for such narrative to display the process. Well enough presented, it speaks for itself. No moralizing or preaching is necessary. Nor are happy endings. Even ‘redemption’ can be absent. When the reader is given a satisfying as well as disturbing sense of self-recognition,  the capacity to receive God’s comfort can take root.

Philologus