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(Listening more closely this Christmas)

I was listening to old Christmas songs today—the oldies, the ones that have lived in the background of a thousand Decembers—and something stopped me cold.

A single line.

From O Little Town of Bethlehem:

“The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

I don’t think I’ve ever truly heard that verse before.

And yet I must have sung it.
Over and over.
Year after year.

🎄 When a lyric finally finds you

This isn’t a sweet or sentimental line.
It’s vast. Archetypal. Almost unsettling in its honesty.

Not hopes fulfilled.
Not fears erased.

But hopes and fears met.

All of them.
Across time.

There is something profoundly mature—psychologically and spiritually—about that framing. It doesn’t promise rescue or resolution. It doesn’t banish fear in the name of light. Instead, it allows the full weight of the human experience to arrive at the same threshold.

Hope and fear together.
Desire and dread.
Longing and uncertainty.

Present in the same holy moment.

🕯️ A deeper listening

To meet something is not to conquer it.
It is to face it.
To stand in its presence without flinching.

This line doesn’t speak of triumph. It speaks of containment.

From a Jungian lens, this feels like a moment of psychic wholeness—where opposites are not split apart, but held in the same vessel. Where incarnation doesn’t happen after fear is resolved, but precisely where fear and hope coexist.

That feels… startlingly honest.

And maybe that’s why it takes years to hear.

❄️ Why this line arrives now

Many of us were taught a version of spirituality that insists fear must be cast out before something can be sacred. That light must overpower darkness. That holiness requires certainty.

But this lyric quietly says otherwise.

It suggests:

• fear belongs in the holy moment
• hope is incomplete without it
• and incarnation happens where both are welcomed

You don’t really hear that until you’ve lived long enough to know that life doesn’t separate things so neatly.

Some verses don’t reveal themselves until we do.

🌟 Closing Thoughts

There is something deeply comforting about the idea that nothing in us has to be excluded for the moment to be sacred—not our longing, not our trembling, not the questions we still carry.

Maybe holiness isn’t about having fewer fears…
but about being willing to meet them, hand in hand with hope.

🔔 Invitation

As you move through today, I invite you to sit gently with this question:

Where in your life right now are hope and fear arriving together—at the same threshold?
What if nothing needs to be banished for the moment to be meaningful?

Sometimes a lyric doesn’t change.
We do.

And when it finally reaches us, it stays.

With devotion and wonder,
The Inspired Imaginative | The Devoted Mystic

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