My favourite NZ native tree… the Pohutukawa, metsiderosis excelsa, is known as the New Zealand Christmas Tree. This is exactly the time of year that it comes into blossom, and together with its supposedly Christmas colours of red and green, it is not surprising that it is given that name. I have them growing around my home. This one here is still quite a baby, standing barely thrice my height but expected to reach a good 20 metres or more… provided the local city council doesn’t send their tree-hating so-called “gardeners” out to lop it about!

You could be forgiven for thinking that Judah slept right through this Christmas, there being no other posts to my Journal this month except for the one on the first, but that is not so. I was awake alright!

The days here have been long ones, and busy ones too. The dawn chorus is already going strong by first light, around 5.00 am, with several resident Tuis leading the choir. This lovely native bird, Prosthemadera Novæ Zealandiæ, has reinhabited suburbia now that the culling of opossums, the introduced Aussie pest, has given them back their territories. Much of their song is outside the range of human hearing, but we are given recitals of much chortling, chuckling, warblings, sneezes, and melodious motets that go on endlessly until late at night when the Moreporks, our native owl, takes over to repeat its name through until sunrise.

Living with native bush on my property, there is little chance of remaining asleep throughout summer! But Christmas did come at a rush and was over almost before I could say Hallelujah.

With a few Vicarly words of encouragement, I managed to get myself to the Midnight Communion Service on Christmas Eve, my first for a best forgotten number of years. I’m so glad that I did. It was a wonderful occasion, one that I wont miss again, I promised myself. My first for ages…

In these politically correct days where the words “reason for the season” are barely whispered so as not to give offence (no mind the offence given our Creator!) it takes some courage, or a Christian conviction, to look behind the secular holiday traditions (why red and green for Christmas, do you suppose?) and realize that Jesus was not God’s Plan B for mischievous humans. Our mischief was predicted long before we even came into being, long before the beginning of time. Jesus was born to be killed, made incarnate to redeem, and that was Plan A right from the start.

Sounds engineered, doesn’t it? I don’t personally think so… more like a wise, omniscient Being saw way into the future and arranged His ducks in a row, so to speak. Not just omniscient either, but One who cared enough about His creatures to work out a way whereby love redeems creation. All this can take a bit to get one’s head around, but that is really what Christmas is all about. Lose the occasion under the red and green, silver and gold, sparkles and tinsel, avarice, gluttony, hate, anger and family violence, but it is still there regardless… the Saviour who was born in humble circumstances, was mocked and tortured for our transgressions, but loved us enough to forgive us, sanctify and glorify us with Himself… if only we care enough to follow Him to the foot of the cross, to kneel at the throne of God.

Just recently I read in the newspaper of an incident that happened between a father and son in the city of Detroit, Michigan.

Because of the appalling nature of it, this news item took me deep into the horror of our human condition and haunted me for the rest of that day… and beyond. How could people behave that way? And yet, they do. How could a father do that to his son? And yet, he did.

That teenager’s last moments must have been everything that is the worst one can imagine… and for those who are left, for them as well. And for me, the other side of the world, a story that I really did not want to read. But it was News, and so it was there in my newspaper, there for me and all others to experience some of the appalling nature of human crime and sin.

Yesterday there was another account of a father and son, this time in my own country. The father also killed the son. For some reason we all had to be told about it. What reason?

It is not that I don’t know these things happen. I know it all too well. As time goes on I am finding myself increasingly more affected by this kind of news, by the sad and terrible things that happen in our world, by the terrible and disgraceful things that people will do to each other. We all end up suffering by being some part of it… having it happen to us directly, or else indirectly by the entrance of it into conscious awareness. For me personally, being made aware has me feeling some measure of responsibility for that which I know, as though I should do whatever I can to stop it from happening.

It is very easy to feel quite helpless in the face of this avalanche of evil, overwhelmed by the sheer amount, intensity and hellishness of it all. It is very easy to reach burn-out before the first hour of morning is up. It is very easy to simply switch off, saying that it is nothing to do with me, and nothing I can do to make it stop. It is very easy not to care anymore. Caring is costly. It takes time, empathy, generosity and faith… faith in myself that what I do counts, and faith in the other that they can respond. Caring will share in the suffering, feel the pain and respond to it, but also feel the joy of suffering relieved.

Is it good that we have these troubling images, photos or verbal accounts of terrible things, thrust at us so often uninvited? Should we avoid them to protect ourselves in some way, thus be safely cacooned away from the reality of others who suffer? Should we be party to their proliferation, and for what purpose? Should there be limits on how much, the nature of their portrayal, and the intensity of assault on awareness. All these questions have played themselves out in my mind over the past few days, and I am still none the wiser for their doing so. Part of me wants to run away from the evil deeds of this world, and part of me knows that I am here to live in it, doing whatever I can to improve it for others… including myself.

Also in our newspaper recently was the obituary of the last Kiwi survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. He had been 14 years old when incarcerated and, lying about his age, was assigned to manual labour thus avoided the gas chamber which was the fate of other children. However, he was operated on by the infamous Dr Josef Mengele and suffered enormous deprivations and acts of barbarous cruelty. At the end of the war he gave evidence at Nuremberg, then immigrated to New Zealand and spent the rest of his life devoted to telling others of the vile atrocities which took place… publicizing and informing the rest of us concerning the Holocaust such that we had firsthand accounts, that we would be aware, that such things should never ever happen again. This tireless witness earned him a Queen’s Service medal for community services in the 2006 Queen’s Birthday honours.

These terrible things thrust into our conscious awareness may not be comfortable or pleasant, but may bring about good in alerting us to what must be avoided in future at all costs… if it will work out that way. But they increase our suffering too, haunted as I am by that terrible deed that took place in Detroit. The publishing of some events can lead others into sin… the temptation to dally with evil, inflaming desires, indulging the senses, committing the acts. I frequently wonder how men deal with those junk mail catelogues of women’s clothes featuring a parade of scantily clad young women with such lovely bodies. How often do those images cause someone to stumble (fall into sin) yet are distributed so freely by marketing companies? We live in a world of temptations, of troubling images, and terrible deeds. I would love not to know about them, but yet I do… and it is important that I do. How can I help stop it if I don’t know it is happening?

As a Christian I do have a responsibility to do what I can to obstruct the proliferation of evil, and not to give myself up to it either. I will avoid promoting it, don’t wish to be assailed by it, but cannot turn my back on it either. It exists, and I must deal with that fact. When it barges into my consciousness, I will counter it with prayer to the One in whom I have faith to move mountains, and in my own mind resort to the antidote offered by Paul, himself in prison at the time, to the church in Philippi almost 2,000 years ago. The antidote follows inscribed on the beautiful image of my beloved Southern Alps here below. Try it for yourselves, and praise Him, our Creator, in doing so.