Tidings of Discomfort and Joy

by Dr Raymond Perrier · January 11, 2023

During the festive season, one of our regular carols encourages us to sing about “tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy”. Joy is an important Christian word — Pope Francis has even dedicated a whole apostolic exhortation to the “Joy of Love” (Amoris Laetitiae). But I am not so sure how Christian a concept comfort is.

Dom Christopher Jamieson, an English Benedictine abbot, once challenged Christians to shift from “the comfort of pessimism to the discomfort of hope”. The phrase strikes me as having particular resonance for us in South Africa at the moment. The temptation is to succumb to the comfort of pessimism; the challenge is to live in the “discomfort of hope”.

Of course, we have some fairly obvious discomforts here which I know we can all reel off very easily: loadshedding, failing infrastructure, poor service delivery, safety concerns, the price of fuel, political toyi-toying. And we might seek various material comforts to help shield us from these: a generator, tighter security, opting out of government services, living in gated communities.

But I think that it is not the material comforts or discomforts that the good monk is referencing. The “comfort of pessimism” is that which permits us to write off a situation as hopeless, which lets us simply rest back with that easy answer. By contrast, the “discomfort of hope” means that we have to look at the situation, see how it could be better, and decide to do what we can to contribute. Altogether, a less comfortable answer.

The comedian John Cleese captures the same idea, if less piously, in the wonderful 1986 film Clockwise. He plays a school principal who is fastidious about punctuality and is on his way to a very important meeting. But everything seems to conspire against him, and even though he keeps trying, there are further setbacks.

Just as he finally decides to give up, a possible solution appears on the horizon. Except this makes him even more despondent: “It’s not the despair; I can cope with the despair! It’s the hope that gets me down…”

Christmas gives us a break from thinking about the difficult stuff in life: being with family and friends, perhaps eating and drinking more than we usually do, maybe travelling away from home. The day-to-day discomforts are put on hold for a while.

But in January, all those problems that we had stopped thinking about have returned. Perhaps they feel even worse now without the cushion of a December bonus (long since spent) and with the prospect of credit card bills arriving.

Not just for Christmas

Some years ago in the UK, it was a regrettable fashion to give children a dog as a Christmas gift — with the family then waking up to the realisation that, come January, they had a pet that needed looking after. The RSPCA had a publicity campaign: “Remember a dog is for life not just for Christmas.” An ad-savvy priest, trying to get his Christmas congregation to stay into January, tried a similar line: “Remember God is for life not just for Christmas”.

Let me try a slightly different take on that. What happens when we think about the Incarnation as something which lasts beyond the 12 Days of Christmas? After all, God chose to enter the world as a human being and knew it was not just for the choruses of angels and the gifts of the Magi, but also for the smelly animals, the flight into Egypt, and the struggle of growing up in Nazareth.

Emmanuel — God is with us — is a message not just for the festive season of Christmas but for the whole of our year. Jesus’ coming into the world may have been heralded by hope, but the shepherds soon had to go back to the discomforts of their everyday lives. Their encounter with Jesus did not give them comfort — but it did give them hope.

As in most South African cities, the streets of Durban seem to be especially full of homeless people begging these days, even despite the work of the Denis Hurley Centre and our partners. Some municipalities think that the way to address homelessness is to remove the beggars — though, of course, this does not solve the problem, it just hides it. Moreover, in a strange way, I think that beggars do us a service; they remind us of the ongoing injustices and inequalities and lack of basic services in our very wealthy society. They cause us discomfort.

As Christians, our response must be not to turn away and seek comfort but — like the newborn Christ — to face the discomfort and create hope in it. Our project for helping the homeless in Durban is called “Nkosinathi”, which is the Zulu version of “Emmanuel”, the name of our cathedral.

When youngsters from our Catholic schools come to help us, I tell them that God-is-with-us in three different ways: God is with us because without God’s help we could not do all that we manage to deliver (for example by serving 180000 meals in 2022); God is with us because each of the volunteers is choosing to be the hands of God on that day; and God is with us because we get a chance to see God in the face of each of the people we serve.

See the face of God

The face of God might be harder to see in some of the people who present themselves — because they are poor or dirty or addicted or from a different background. But let us not forget that the face of God incarnate was hidden to all but a few of the people who encountered Jesus in Bethlehem 2000 years ago. Nevertheless God is with us — and that is a reason not to give up hope.

I pray that long after you have forgotten your celebrations for Christmas, the New Year will continue to bring you tidings of discomfort and joy. The discomfort of recognising that the world is far from perfect and in need of salvation. The joy of knowing that each one of us has the opportunity to contribute to that plan of salvation. All we have to do is bring some hope to those we love, and to those we do not love, and to those we choose not to see.

In that hope, God is with us.