On Christmas Eve Eve we woke to a feathery snow covering the brown slush and crusty ice of the last couple weeks. A gift from the magic realm where the skies know what you need and the wrens tell you secrets, where invisible hands on my chest press in and say “quiet, breathe.”
The snow cover seems to me a grace, a reset of sorts, in the middle of this strange winter of “meh” we are having. Not cold, not warm but hovering around zero with the skiffs of ice and the brown dust of the prairie and gray tracks of our cars inevitably revealed a few days after a snow.
This Christmas, like all Christmases perhaps, one cannot dare pretend all is calm or bright. This Christmas, like all Christmases, we could list the ways destruction and revenge runs rampant on the earth. We could list the pain of our human hearts, our human bodies, our finite earth, the losses that gut us, the wounds that keep reopening. It is foolish and immature at best to pronounce peace when there is no peace. It becomes a blinding, damaging, alienating trait at its worst. Demanding a certain response when it is time to grieve splits a soul, divides humans from their own experience.
And still, sometimes the skies cover the dirt with snow and the sunlight makes diamonds out of the road in front of your house.
As always, I wonder at Christmas if it is not a season to forget troubles but a season to bring them up into your own hands, name them wholly and hold them close to the light. Could we let them be seen? Could it be a moment, a morning, a minute of reprieve where you could speak out loud the pain and know it loved anyways. It seems like a silly thing to say. And yet our souls cannot keep going without stopping to breathe. So this year maybe we stop and breathe so that we can keep naming the pain, grieving the loss, repairing the ruptures, healing our little-kid souls, and then acting in those ways that bring life. Maybe we let a bit of snow give it a new light.
I have found myself reading a lot of Howard Thurman in this quiet season. Thurman, a Black preacher, teacher, theologian was born 1899 in the southern United States, led a desegregated church congregation in the 1940’s, well before the Civil Rights Act. His words refused to give into the dehumanization of the times but never forgot or glossed over the pain of them either. So I find I keep coming back to them. He lived inside a hope that was beyond comprehension but was not abstract, not reserved for some sort of "afterlife” and not dependent on some secret knowledge or perfection. His was a joy that, like Berry’s, was joyful though he’d “considered all the facts.” He was honest.
Here are four meditations/prayers he wrote and are found in Meditations of the Heart, a collection of meditations written for use by his congregation. These were first compiled and published in 1953 - a few years after the horrors of WWII came to light and years before the Voting Rights Act. I remind us of this context so that we remember that this hope does not emerge from spiritual bypassing or privilege or denying the past, or insisting that everything is alright but born from the depth of a longing and truthful soul.
If you need something to ground you this weekend, maybe read one meditation a day until Boxing Day.
“Merry Christmas”
There is a strange irony in the usual salutation, “Merry Christmas,” when most of the people on this planet are thrown back upon themselves for food which they do not possess, for resources that have long since been exhausted, and for vitality that has already run its course. Despite this condition, the inescapable fact remains that Christmas symbolizes hope even at a moment when hope seems utterly fantastic. The raw materials of the Christmas mood are a newborn baby, a family, friendly animals and labor. An endless process of births is the perpetual answer of life to the fact of death. It says that life keeps coming on, keeps seeking to fulfill itself, keeps affirming the margin of hope in the presence of desolation, pestilence and despair. It is not an accident that the birth rate seems to increase during times of war, when the formal processes of man are engaged in the destruction of others. Welling up out of the depths of vast vitality there is Something at work that is more authentic than the formal, discursive design of the human mind. As long as this is true ultimately, despair about the human race is groundless.
I Seek Room For Peace
I seek the enlargement of my heart that there may be room for Peace.
Already there is enough room for chaos. There is in everyday’s experience much that makes for confusion and bewilderment. Often I do not understand quite how my relations with others become frayed and chaotic. Sometimes this chaos is a positive thing; it means that something new, creative and whole is beginning to pull together the tattered fragments of my relationship with a person and to fashion it into that which delights the spirit and makes glad the heart. Sometimes the chaos is negative, a sign of degeneration in a relationship once meaningful and good. There is enough room for chaos.
But the need of my heart is for room for Peace: Peace of mind that inspires singleness of purpose; Peace of heart that quiets all fears and uproots all panic; Peace of spirit that filters through all confusions and robs them of their power. These I see NOW. I know that here in this quietness my life can be infused with Peace.
Therefore before God, I seek the enlargement of my heart at this moment, that there may be room for Peace.
Look to the Growing Edge
Look well to the growing edge. All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. The fruit ripens on the tree, the roots are silently at work in the darkness of the earth against a time when there shall be new leaves, fresh blossoms, green fruit. Such is the growing edge! It is the extra breath from the exhausted lung, the one more thing to try when all else has failed, the upward reach of life when weariness closes in upon all endeavor. This is the basis of hope in moments of despair, the incentive to carry on when times are out of joint and men have lost their reason, the source of confidence when worlds crash and dreams whiten to ash. The birth of the child - life’s most dramatic answer to death - this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!
Now the Work of Christmas Begins
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.
This Christmas, may you have enough space to hold the tensions between the real life going on - in the world, in you - and the few feathery centimeters of hope that come without warning. May this sort of hope not cover up but adorn the real stuff - not to pretend the hard isn’t there, but to remind us that the hard is not ALL that is there. This Christmas, may there be a sense that something more lovely than we could dream up is at work, descending upon and pushing up from within, this good earth. For you. For them.
And if you are looking for a place to lean into Thurman’s work and gifts, you could look here for some background and a list of his works. Or you could go further with this interpretive project by Dr. Shively Smith whom I got to hear present on this work in 2021.
Thank you Jacqui! You are so gifted and your words brought tears to my eyes and hope to my heart! I am so thankful for you !!!