Hope, meet fear

"The hopes and fears of all the years
are met in thee tonight."
---Phillips Brooks
"It starts when you're always afraid..."
---Buffalo Springfield

Confession time. This line from Buffalo Springfield has always resonated with me. Or has it haunted me? Something about it is a little menacing, insidious, creeping. Something about it is true. Because it DOES start when you're always afraid: your life begins to shrink; your desires become all about security; your fears crowd out any concern for others you once mustered. Your world is tiny and self-consumed when fear rules it. And you know something else? This world will make you afraid. Look out your window or on your homepage, or maybe into your family room, and you see there is plenty of reason for fear.
But. But. If "For What It's Worth" has always struck a chord in me, so has the plaintive American carol "O Little Town of Bethlehem", most especially the line quoted above. "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight." Brooks, writing at the end of the Civil War, certainly was acquainted with fear. When he looked toward Bethlehem, though, he saw the warm glow of hope faintly lighting its silent streets.
Is hope a thing that can meet our fear head-on, and come out standing? Does the hope born so long ago in Bethlehem, a little backwater town unaware of its destiny, have 'legs'? Staying power? Can that hope, realized in a simpler world, stand up to the fears that crowd our complex, evolved lives? Can the hope of  the Christ Child take on the fears of a very adult world, like yours and mine?
Maybe so. I feel it in my life. Or as Buffalo Springfield put it, "Something's happenin' here."
Hope, meet fear.