Article
Advent
Creed
Gaza
8 min read

The bleak midwinter: why tears could be the best thing for us this season

In a world of devastation, you can share honest feelings of hopelessness - yet not be overcome.
In front of a collapsed building, a rescuer carries a new born baby by the arms.
The rescue of Afraa Abu Hadiya, Syria, February 2023.

On February 6th 2023, a heavily pregnant Afraa Abu Hadiya, along with her husband and their four children, was awakened in the dark, early hours of the morning by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake violently shaking their apartment building in Syria. Afraa and her husband gathered their children and made for the building’s exit.  However, just as they were nearing the door, the building collapsed upon them, crushing the entire family.  Afraa, however, seems to have remained conscious for some hours because she did the unthinkable and delivered a baby girl while trapped beneath the rubble.  Then, tragically, she died and her baby was left alone buried beneath a building in the middle of winter. 

This year we have read too many such stories.  In places such as Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, and most recently, Israel and Gaza, thousands of women, men, and children have suffered and died and grieved as a result of natural disasters and armed conflict.     

For those of us who live in relative safety, it is difficult even to begin to comprehend such tragedies.  Yet despite our advantages, many of us are struggling in our own ways. According to the CDC, between 25 and 30 per cent of adults in the US are currently experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression.  And it is no secret that mental distress levels have been steadily climbing for years in the UK as well, especially amongst youth

It can make the joyful, merry, jolly, happy, cheerful, peaceful Christmas spirit encouraged at this time of year strike a discordant note with the actual state of our minds and hearts. All is not well inside many of us, but we sense that Eeyore is an awkward personality to bring into a room, so we tend to conceal the parts of ourselves that are anxious and hurting.   I confess I’ve become pretty adept at keeping parts of myself out of sight. 

I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world.

I met up with a couple of friends recently.  We talked about our children and their school and our plans for Christmas.  I said we were going to keep Christmas simple this year.  What I didn’t say was that we’ve been keeping Christmas “simple” for several years now.  I didn’t say that, a few years after my brother died, my parents and my siblings and I agreed that we would no longer see each other at Christmas because the hole my brother left is too acutely obvious when the rest of us are together.  I didn’t say that we don’t keep our Christmas tree up for long because the crystal star we hang near the top is in memory of our son who never saw his first Christmas, and while I love to make him a part of the holiday in this way, I also can’t live with the visual reminder of that pain for long.  I didn’t say that although we make an effort to give our children a happy Christmas, my husband and I are just trying to make it through to the other side of the holidays because we’ve twice in recent years painfully and unexpectedly lost our household income right before Christmas and the season now triggers within us the fear and confusion and hurt of those Christmases.   I didn’t say that sometimes I feel like everything beautiful and good is always, sooner or later cornered, caught, and hauled away by the destructive forces in the world. I just told my friends that we were going to keep Christmas simple.  Maybe you have your own lines you trot out on such occasions. 

If you do, the season of Advent is a welcoming space for such as us.  Advent is observed during the four weeks leading up to Christmas and marks the beginning of the Christian church year.  Traditionally, it is a time when Christians remember how their spiritual ancestors, the ancient nation of Israel, spent roughly 600 years being conquered and enslaved successively by Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and then Rome.  The God of Israel had, however, promised that he would, one day, send them a deliverer, a “messiah”, to rescue them from their bondage.  And so, the Israelite people, in their suffering, waited and looked and prayed for the coming of their deliverer.    

Christians believe that Jesus, whose birth is celebrated at Christmas, was that messiah, and that (spoiler warning) he ended up delivering not only Israel, but the whole world in a very different way than anyone was expecting.  (But that’s the story of Easter, and we’re not there yet.) During Advent, Christians remember the centuries of Israel’s powerless waiting to be rescued, and how, true to his word, God sent them a messiah.

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air. 

However, Advent is not just for looking back.  It is also a space for acknowledging all the myriad ways in which darkness still rules over us today.  How we still suffer and hurt and die.  How we inflict these things on each other.  How it seems like, no matter how we try to make the world better, it’s still always in a tragic mess.  And then, while we’re acknowledging all of that and feeling its great weight, Advent asks us to do something that feels preposterous at times: to believe the promise Jesus made that he will, one day, banish darkness from the earth and make it completely and irreversibly whole and new.  In short, we’re asked to continue to wait hopefully for light to break while we live in the darkness.   

Choosing this hope sometimes feels naïve and even dangerous. I want to have hope, to hold it like a banner against the forces of destruction and pain whirling about in the air.  But, in the face of the anguish of Israel and Gaza, and the wounds I’ve experienced in my own life, do I dare live as if everything will come right in the end?  I would like to, but when hope ends in disappointment it wounds deeply.  I’m not always sure I can afford to risk hope.

If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome. 

Advent urges me never to stop calling for help, but if calling for help isn’t exactly the same thing as summoning hope, it’s perilously close.  Is it possible to call for help if I don’t believe, if I am afraid to let myself believe any help will arrive?   

Well, apparently it is.  I learned this from Afraa’s tiny daughter buried in rubble.   

After the earthquake, relatives and friends rushed to the ruins of the collapsed apartment building in order to try to rescue those who had been inside.  As they dug through the debris, one of them reported hearing “a voice” from beneath the rubble.  The rescuers followed the sound and eventually uncovered the baby, still attached to her mother by the umbilical cord.  She was pulled from the wreckage of her house and family, and sped to hospital where she miraculously made a recovery and was adopted by her aunt and uncle who gave her her mother’s name.    

She was rescued because someone heard her voice.  The journalist does not specify what kind of noise she was making, but given that she was injured, suffering from hypothermia, and barely breathing it seems it must have been weak crying or whimpering.  And considering that she was surrounded by her dead mother, father, and four siblings, and that the entirety of her short life outside her mother’s body had consisted of the noise, terror, chaos and pain of the building falling upon her, it seems impossible that she was hopefully and consciously calling for help. How could she imagine what help might be?  Her mother had not even had the chance to hold her in her arms. What could she know of a tender face, gentle hands, warm blankets, nourishment in her belly, soft fabric against her skin, the healing of wounds?  She was not waiting or hoping for any of these.  She did not even know they existed.  She was simply weeping for the terror and pain and loneliness of her little life.  But the weeping was enough to save her.    

As I consider tears, it seems to me that they can, in themselves, be reason for hope.  The person who weeps has accepted neither that things are the way they should be (as do those who cooperate with or advance the destructive forces in the world), nor that things are the way they must be (as do those who, however understandably, give up and surrender themselves to being destroyed).  If you still weep and mourn for what is wrong in the world, however powerless and wounded you may feel, you are not yet overcome.  In fact, unless we grasp how grievous our wounds are, how can we begin to seek out the right physician?  How will we choose to make the changes within our power to make?  A world that is lamenting its own brokenness, as Advent encourages it to do, seems to me to be a world for which there is yet hope.    

I have never experienced the trauma of a building collapsing upon me, but I’ve spent plenty of time trapped beneath the twin wreckages of a life I once had and the one I was hoping to build.  Maybe you’re buried in rubble too.  Maybe you’ve survived an earthquake and its aftershocks, but you’re not sure you’re glad you have because you’re bleeding and crushed and in the dark and you can’t imagine how you will rebuild and survive in such a world even if you do eventually emerge.  Maybe you’re not even sure you want to be rescued because it’s all, all broken now – your home, your family, your bones.   

This Advent I am trying to gather the strength to call for help for myself and for the world although my heart and my faith are bruised.  Maybe you will call too.  But if we are too afraid and confused and wounded to do even that, then let us weep, friend, together in this darkness.  For although this is a world in which much breaks and dies, it is also one in which rescue has been known to arrive unlooked and unhoped for.  And if the memory and the promise of Advent hold any truth, sometimes the hand outstretched unexpectedly to deliver turns out to be, beyond all imagining, the hand of God. 

Essay
Aliens
Belief
Creed
Film & TV
10 min read

Who do you think Doctor Who is?

Why the Doctor is (and isn’t) like Jesus

Barnabas Aspray is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology at St Mary’s Seminary and University.

Doctor Who and River Song converse
Doctor Who and River Song ponder metaphysics.

After two series with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, the future of Doctor Who is uncertain. It may be time for the world’s longest-running sci-fi show, with 892 episodes to date, to come to an end. Or it may not.  

Doctor Who is one of the few sci-fi shows with an appeal that reaches beyond typical sci-fi fans. It ranges across every conceivable genre – romance, horror, period drama, epic – to name but a few. The Doctor’s time-travels may take you to Elizabethan England or the year 400,000 C.E. on a planet made of diamond – you won’t know until you start watching. The secret to the show’s longevity is the Doctor’s ability to ‘regenerate’ whenever he (or she) dies, reappearing with a new body and personality. Gatwa was the fifteenth actor to play the Doctor since William Hartnell’s inaugural performance on 23rd November 1963. (However, I secretly suspect that C.S. Lewis was the ‘zeroth’ Doctor, since he died the day before the first episode was aired. Coincidence?) 

Science fiction has the unique capacity to do thought-experiments without limits. What if you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he rises to power? What if we could transfer our brains into machines that would enable us to live forever? What if one small act of violence was the only way to save the human race from destruction?  

This article draws attention to just one of the numerous metaphysical and ethical lessons that can be drawn from the show’s stories. I do not discuss the compatibility of its moral ideology with Christian morality, or the place it gives to religion in a world with a scientific explanation for everything. My focus is on a single feature: how the Doctor’s immeasurable power places him in a position like that of Jesus according to the Christian tradition. I shall point to three ways the Doctor reminds us of Jesus, and one way in which the Doctor does not look like Jesus, going down a path that Jesus was tempted to take, but refused. 

A bloke who puts everything right 

In ‘Twice Upon a Time’, Bill Potts asks the first Doctor why he first left his home planet, Gallifrey, to embark on his many adventures. After a few false starts, the Doctor responds like this:  

Doctor: “There is good and there is evil. I left Gallifrey to answer a question of my own. By any analysis evil should always win. Good is not a practical survival strategy. It requires loyalty, self-sacrifice, and love. And so why does good prevail? What keeps the balance between good and evil in this appalling universe? Is there some kind of logic, some mysterious force?” 

Bill Potts: “Perhaps there’s just a bloke.” 

Doctor: “A bloke?” 

Bill Potts: “Yeah. Perhaps there's just some bloke wandering around, putting everything right when it goes wrong.” 

Why does evil never get the upper hand? That is the Doctor’s fundamental question. Is there some logic, some mysterious force, or is there just a ‘bloke’ who keeps putting things right? All three, from a Christian point of view.  

The ultimate triumph of good over evil, according to the Christian story, is thanks to a ‘bloke’ named Jesus who conquered death and rose again so that we might rise again with him at the end of all time. But for Christians, Jesus is not only a ‘bloke’. The Gospel of John equates Jesus with the Logos, a Greek word (where the English word ‘logic’ comes from) to name the rational principle that orders and upholds the universe. The Apostle Paul, in the letter to the Corinthians, also describes Jesus as one ‘by whom all things were created’ and ‘in whom all things hold together’. A ‘mysterious force’ indeed! 

To answer the Doctor’s question, then: there is only one thing that stops evil from getting the upper hand. It can be called a logic, and it can be called a mysterious force. But the logic and the force are not impersonal. They are other names for a bloke named Jesus who wanders around putting everything right.  

A better way of living your life 

After an encounter with the Doctor, nobody is ever the same again. It is not primarily the thrill of adventure or the sight of things more wonderful than can be imagined that changes the Doctor’s companions. It is the example of someone who has devoted their life to save, to heal, to confront evil, and to sacrifice for others. 

These features are brought into sharp focus in a moment when Rose Tyler, one of the Doctor’s companions, believes she’s lost the Doctor forever. Her mother tries to comfort her, and this leads her to reflect on what had been so amazing about her time with him: 

 “It was a better life. And I don’t mean all the travelling and… seeing aliens and spaceships and things… that don’t matter. The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. That you don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.” 

Like his other companions, Rose saw something in the Doctor which challenged her to live up to a higher moral standard, a standard of courage, compassion, and self-sacrifice.  

Being with the Doctor puts you in extreme situations where your character is tested and refined. You are forced to face your fears and make crucial decisions about what kind of person you are going to be. Those extreme adventures are rarely the end, however. When his companions return to their lives on earth, they have to decide how to handle normality. Will they wistfully pine after the thrills of the past, seeing normal life as dull and boring, or will they use the wisdom and virtue gained from their adventures to bring peace and justice into the world amidst daily life. 

In a similar way, Jesus called his disciples to a higher moral standard, one that prioritises humble, loving service and self-sacrifice. Life with Jesus can be an exhilarating adventure, such as when he calls someone to move and live in a foreign land or to embrace poverty as a lifestyle. But many Christians feel called to follow Jesus in ordinary ways that do not draw attention, and to put his teaching to practice in ordinary everyday life in a way that slowly transforms the world.  

The ultimate sacrifice for the least important 

The Doctor not only calls his companions to live this way – he leads by example. When Wilfred, the grandfather of one of the Doctor’s companions, gets trapped in a control room about to be flooded by radiation, the Doctor realises that there is only one way to save him. He must replace Wilfred in the control room and be exposed to the radiation instead. Wilfred protests that the Doctor should let him die instead of sacrificing himself to save him, and the Doctor responds with frustration:  

Wilfred: “No really, just leave me. I’m an old man, Doctor. I've had my time.” 

Doctor: “Well, exactly. Look at you. Not remotely important. But me? I could do so much more. So much more!” 

Wilfred is not a national President, a scientist about to make a breakthrough in cancer research, or a famous artist whose paintings will enchant the world. The Doctor complains that Wilfred is not worth saving – not by a logic that looks at the worldly ‘importance’ of an individual. Why, then, should his life be spared, especially in exchange for the life of someone far more powerful and ‘important’? 

The Doctor’s frustrated words reveal the moral battle within him. But it does not last long. He knows his duty: to give his life for anyone, no matter how small or unimportant. Every life is worth saving simply because it is a life. He enters the control booth, enabling Wilfred to go free. 

This story combines two features central to Christianity. First, it shows the principle that every human life has equal value. God does not measure people by their ‘importance’, their ‘potential’, or their ‘talent’. There is only one measure for a life: the fact that it is created in God’s image and is therefore loved by God. Every life matters, from the greatest down to the very least.  

Secondly, this story shows the Doctor giving his life in exchange for another. Christians believe that this is what Jesus did for every human being on the cross. Many wise Christians over the centuries have said that Jesus died for each of us as if there were only one of us. As the Doctor did for Wilfred, so Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. 

The temptations of unlimited power 

Doctor Who often raises the question ‘how should good people wield power?’ The Doctor’s time machine gives him the ability to prevent all catastrophe and evil from ever occurring, yet often he refrains from doing so. At times his companions get angry with him for not using his almost limitless power to save, cure and free everyone throughout history. Once, a companion tries to coerce him into going back in time to prevent the death of her boyfriend. He frequently tries to explain that “some things have to happen this way.” There are fixed points in time that cannot be changed. 

That may sound like a cheap explanation – an escape clause for the script writers. But sometimes the show goes deeper, and then we find out what happens when the Doctor gives in to the temptation to fix everything by force. In one episode, compelled by the desperate need of his closest friends, the Doctor for the first time engages in warfare. After a violent and bloody battle, he saves his friends, but it becomes clear that he has done so at the price of his innocence. When River Song arrives at the end, she accuses him of compromising his moral values to save his friends. He responds defensively: 

Doctor: You think I wanted this? I didn’t do this. This… this wasn’t me! 

River: This was exactly you. All of it. You make them so afraid. When you began, all those years ago, sailing off to see the universe, did you ever think you’d become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name? Doctor? The word for healer and wise man, throughout the universe. We get that word from you, you know. But if you carry on the way you are, what might that word come to mean? To the people of the Gamma Forests, the word “Doctor” means mighty warrior. How far you’ve come! 

This powerful speech reveals two important things. First, using violence against evil is a path that leads to ever-increasing violence. Eventually the once innocent, pacifist Doctor has become a tyrant, imposing his will on the universe. In a similar way, the Gospel of Matthew describes how Jesus, after fasting for forty days in the desert, was visited by the Devil who tempted to use coercive power to establish his kingdom of justice and righteousness: 

The devil took Jesus to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour; and he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’  

Where the Doctor gave in to temptation, Jesus resisted. He refused to impose his kingdom of peace by violence, because to do this is ultimately to worship a principle and force in direct opposition to God’s will and his ways. Instead of raising an army and conquering the world to save those he loves, Jesus chose the way of the cross. The path of self-sacrifice is painful and slow. But it is the only way to bring about an everlasting kingdom built, not on coercion, but on free and loving submission. 

Secondly, River Song’s speech shows that the Doctor’s actions change the very meaning of his name. Will that name come to mean ‘mighty warrior’ instead of ‘healer’ or ‘wise teacher’? Likewise, those who bear the name ‘Christian’ have the power to determine what that name means to the world. The actions of Christians shape the meaning of the name ‘Christ’ to those around them. Christians do not always live in such a way as to make the name of Jesus mean what Jesus would have wanted. What does Jesus want his name to mean? 

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