Giving Light for Christmas 2008

For 2008, the Hillhurst United website (which can be reached via the link to the left) now has a Giving Light page, in the Outreach section. It is a list of ideas from the congregation gathered over the past two years to help us find a way of giving gifts that allows us to demonstrate our appreciation for family, friends and community yet is relatively light on the environment and beneficial for both the giver and recipient. We welcome your additions.

You can contact Greg Powell, the Outreach Committee chair with your suggestions, or post comments to our blog. Last year's Giving Light blog entries can be viewed using the link to the left.

This campaign is not intended to be a matter of moral or theological purity, so don’t let it be another pressure; it is an invitation to see where God has been born into our midst, an invitation to connect with a "transformative compassion for the world", however you may find that.

This year has brought us some forceful reminders of the fleeting nature of material success. What better time to reflect on giving and receiving?

A look at the Gospels and the Prophets will reveal a world in which we can work and hope for abundance if we do not look for it in possessions alone. This is the theme of some of the greatest Christmas stories and carols. Think of In the Bleak Midwinter, The Gift of the Magi – and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Christmas is also a time when we traditionally consider those less fortunate than ourselves and offer gifts to them as well as to our families and friends. Good King Wenceslaus comes to mind, and A Christmas Carol.

These themes are universal and timeless, but they are particularly important for our time and place. Social and economic histories of North America tell us about increasing mass production and mass consumption since the turn of the 20th century; they show that the roots of the current economic crisis reach deep into the 20th century, deep into our culture and deep into our own psyches. We have come to believe that our identity and our self-worth (to quote commentator Richard Florida) somehow depend on acquiring (and by extension, giving) expensive or impressive belongings – much of it on credit.

Our oldest generation can tell us stories about the privations and joys of spending time in the kitchen, rather than in the mall, of listening to stories told or read rather than watched on large screens. We hear these stories, though, knowing that we live in a different world from the one in which they arose.

How can we understand the difference between an earlier, less consumption-crazed Alberta and today’s Alberta? Christian journalist Bill McKibben has said that up to a certain point, “more” is in fact “better”. People experiencing extreme poverty, homelessness and other deprivations certainly need more of what the material world has to offer. After a certain material level has been reached, however, “better” has a different source, and we do not really benefit from more of the same. It’s just that we continue to expect that we will get more joy from more stuff.

(Bill McKibben’s books include Deep Economy and The Hundred Dollar Holiday, which is described in the Books and Movies section of Giving Light)

Advent and Christmas are an important time to look once again at the economic audacity described in the Gospels and the Prophets, and the cosmic audacity of the Christmas story itself.
We hope you will find true abundance this year through Advent and Christmas, and invite you to share your ideas with the rest of us.