Almost every year, during the Advent Christmas season, I spend some time thinking of Christmas past and how the past may help us celebrate the meaning of this season in the present and in the days to come. The other day, I sat in the silence of my study rereading my Christmas sermons of yesteryear. Each reading took me back to that particular Christmas with a tremendous sense of crispness and clarity. And as I sat there thinking and feeling . . . I could not help wondering if all those words really made any difference to the people who heard them. Also, I thought of all the different people through the years who were a part of the community of faiths I served. Did the Christmas message help to shape a more meaningful present . . . did it form a more creative future?

And then I came across this small story that I had clipped from an Associated Press article about a little child who was lost in one of those vast corn farms in Iowa. Family and friends searched a day and a night and did not find the child. Another day and night the search continued. On the third day one of the searching party said: “Let’s join hands.” Then a single column of hundreds of people, hand in hand, moved across the field. Later that day they found the child, dead. And a grieving mother said, ”Why didn’t we join hands sooner?”

Coming just before Christmas it made me think of things I might not otherwise have thought of, and the first thing was, how many people there are in trouble every Christmas, various kinds of trouble, from trivial annoyance to dark tragedy.

Every Christmas there are wars being fought; if not world wars, then local wars; and if not wars on battlefields, wars going on in families, in political factions, in neighborhood feuds. There are always wards filled with the sick and the dying, always homes broken or breaking, always aches and pains that will never be recorded. There will never be a Christmas without the needy, the lonely and the lost.

Thinking of the little child and the grieving mother, I remembered that I had just received a poem for the winter holidays from New Hampshire’s poet laureate Pat Parnell entitled Star of David, Crescent, Cross. It is a poem inspired by Bruce Feiler’s book Abraham, A Journey to the Heart of Three Faiths.

The Minnesingers fill Old Whaling Church with Hallelujah Chorus. — Jaxon White

At this blessed season,

Let us celebrate our forefather, Abraham.

Across the abyss of four thousand years,

he leans forward to speak to us, his dark eyes incandescent,

his grizzled beard lifting in the light breeze.

“I claim you,” he tells us. “God promised you to me.

My descendants. Like the sands of the sea,

like the stars of the sky. So many, none can number.

Some of you are mine by blood. All of you are mine by faith.

Christian, Muslim, Jew, you follow One God,

The God who called me and I obeyed.

Read of me in your holy books, Bible and Koran.

Because you share me as an ancestor,

we are one family, joined together by God.

You are cousins. Cousins, lay down your arms.

There has been too much killing. Let us have peace.”

He leans further toward us, his hands raised in blessing.

“There is room for us all on this beautiful earth.

There is room in heaven for us all.”

Why don’t we join hands?

What this season does is this. It joins us together. We all have, some more than others, a tendency to go off in a corner by ourselves. There are times when we want to be alone, we want to be left alone, we need to be alone. If we are in trouble, we want to shed our own tears in private, nurse our own wounds by ourselves, be bitter if we want to be, be stony faced against the world. We say to a well meaning friend, you go your way and I’ll go mine. That is part of our nature as an individual. There are times for that.

But you don’t get very far alone, ever, not if you cut yourself off from the rest of the family. I mean not only your immediate family but the total family. When you do that, the only way you are likely to go is downward. It is the only way I have ever seen people go when they cut themselves off from the rest of the family, withdraw into their own private world of trouble and pain.

If you hadn’t been well and you want to get well, you’ve got to join hands, you can’t do it yourself. You join hands with the ones who can help you ­— a doctor, a nurse, a friend; you join hands with God. If you have lost your husband or wife and you want to get out of that valley of the shadow of death, not to reject it, but to get out of it so that you can give something to other people, you have to join hands with other people who have been through the same thing, who know what it is all about, who can help you get through it and out into the light. And if you have lost a grip on life, as so many people have now, lost your confidence not only in yourself but in life, in the world, in the system by which we operate and which is getting creaky in so many places — if you have lost confidence, you have to join hands with others if you want to do anything about it. You don’t go into a corner and sulk in private or tear your heart out about it in public protest.

The fact is that at this time of the year we begin, at least most people do, to reach out to others and others reach out to us. That is, messages come on cards, telephone calls, people we meet on the street we greet; and we feel a little freer communication between them and us. Even families reach out from one generation to another, children to the older ones in the family, fathers and mothers to the children. And as you get older you reach backward through your memory to all the celebrations that have gone before. I can’t help doing it now. I think of the Christmases 25, 50 years ago; how different they were, and yet how much the same. Of course, I’m different too! You are bound to be different as you get older, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse; but you change.

In other words, at a season like this we begin to join hands. We don’t get back exactly what we lost, not often. We get something else. We get — at least what I get — is a new perspective on things. I see things from a broader view, a more inclusive one than I had before. We get a new vitality, energy, and at some point along the way we come to the conclusion that life is a journey, and on that journey there are many rough spots and some smooth places, bright and dark, happy and sad, all kinds of things, and anything can happen, anything. We are not guaranteed protection or insurance against anything that can happen, and you know it.

At Christmas we continue the same old journey, but a little better prepared to meet the changes that are bound to come simply because we have joined hands with a few other people. We have given up the idea that we can go it alone.

Why is this? Is it trumped up? Is it all a pose? Is it a fake? Is it a result of all the artificial sentimentality that is deliberately cultivated by various commercial interests at Christmas? I don’t think so. This happens because we remember and give thanks that once upon a time God reached out in a person very much like us, with many of the same trials and tribulations we have, with the same need to go off at times by himself and work it out alone, with the same moments of joy and ecstasy. And what he did when he came was . . . he reached out to everyone and said, join hands, join hands with me; help me find the lost child.

Now, the lost child may be a grown man or woman who has lost his or her way, and there are scores of them; we needn’t go far to find them. We know them; we don’t always succeed in helping them to find their way. But what I am thinking about more now is that it may be the lost child in you and in me, and in others. There are many things, of course, that a child can well afford to lose as he grows up. But there are two things that he has when he’s a child that he must recapture as an adult — his trust and his wonder. As a child, he has them naturally. Then as he grows up, he begs to lose that spontaneous trust. He says, l’ve seen too much. And the wonder begins to rub off because he says, I’ve heard it all before. That lost trust and wonder he must find again.

That, I suspect, is what Jesus meant when he said that unless we become like a child we haven’t a chance to see the kingdom of God, to know what it’s all about, we have to recover that natural innocence, having been through “the works,” and we have to find again that trust and wonder after we have lost it, so that we trust not blindly as a child trusts, but knowingly as an adult trusts, and we wonder not because we know so little, but because we know how much there is we don’t know.

We sometimes think we have seen too much. The truth is that we haven’t seen enough; we haven’t seen the broad sweep of things. Sometimes we see the clouds but not the stars, the pollution but not the purifiers, the war makers of every description, but not the peacemakers, the wreckers but not the reconcilers.

We are impacted daily with bad news, but you know and I know that there is a lot more good news in the world . . . in fact, so much good news that there is not enough time to write and report it. There are many more people who can see the stars . . . many more who are purifiers, peacemakers and reconcilers! There are so many of us: Jews, Christians and Muslims who are peace-loving people. As Parnell writes in her poem . . . so many, none can number. Like the sands of the sea, like the stars of the sky . . . all of you are mine by faith . . . Christian, Muslim, Jew, you follow the One God . . . There is room for us all on this beautiful earth. There is room in heaven for us all. Each celebrates in its own unique way the messages of wonder, light, life, faith, hope, love, joy, and peace. And, our various celebrations seek to join people together.

So you want to find the lost child . . . the excitement that you once had and have lost. Some of you still have it, I know. Every once in a while I lose it and I think that it may be gone for good; but it hasn’t because it always comes back when someone else appears on the scene, comes into the picture and takes me out of myself.

We cannot do it by ourselves. Not until we join hands will we ever find that lost child; and when we do find the lost child, the child is not dead; the child is alive.