(Read with apologies for a few stammers and some background sounds.)
It is snowing; a soft, silent, snow deep enough to cover the lawns and shallow enough to show all the bumps and clumps of the sleeping perennial beds. It is beautiful. It will usher in frigid air with “feels-like” temperatures in the single digits Fahrenheit tomorrow.
Today is the third Sunday in Advent; I will be lighting the pink candle, the candle symbolizing love. It will burn, with its sisters, hope and peace, on the table with the nativity scene so thoughtfully constructed by Granddaughter, and then partially deconstructed by one of the two-year-old twins last week. The candles will glow within my sight as I roast the last pumpkin for pumpkin bread and make some Christmas cookies to ship, share, and save for our Christmas Eve celebration.
I will spend my day warm, quietly busy, and intentionally creating what love and nourishment I can in our aching world. I will do this with full-knowledge of the fears of my Jewish sisters and brothers as they celebrate light in dark times. I will do this in the aftermath of mass-shootings. I will do this as friends, neighbors, and millions of sister and brother citizens, realize they can no longer afford medical care in these not-so-United-and-teetering-on-a-precipice States. I will do this as traumatized people starve, as oligarchs feast, as sexual predators of the world’s children escape accountability, as systems fail, the seas rise, and a whole litany of outrages fills our media’s headlines.
Yesterday, Granddaughter and I went to a local downtown with wonderful shops to finish up our holiday purchases. We happened upon a toy-drive run by the local police department, and an old-fashioned hayride up and down Main Street. We spent some time choosing gifts in an independent toy store, we browsed an independent book store, a shop with candles and crystals (she wanted a black obsidian to add to her collection,) and a gift shop run by a friend of mine. We took the hayride and befriended the man driving the team of horses. He and I reminisced about the town and the slow resurgence of Main Street; he told Granddaughter about the horses, and we imagined a Christmas long ago where horses would have pulled wagons as a matter of course.
My gift-shop friend whispered her concerns for next year’s inventory to me. A daughter shared that a second hand shop proprietor told her they are “desperate” for toys this year as consumers try to make Christmas for their families amid rising prices and fewer goods.
I am reading (and recommend) Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. I am about three quarters of the way through the novel now, and I am thinking that the protagonist, a woman who worked with and for all sorts of social and environmental justice organizations before joining a small community of nuns, has realized what I have realized in my own real life … that healing and justice begin in our own hearts first, and then, when their roots are deep and real, they spread out through simple (though not always easy) acts of faith, love, kindness, and compassion; acts of justice that heal whatever situation we find ourselves in. Now, I am not done with the story, and maybe I am projecting (as we humans do,) so I will let you know without spoiling the ending for you. That said, whether the story winds towards that ending or not, I do believe that our work in the world begins within us, first.
The world is hurting and weary; many of us are hurting and weary right along with it. Yet, within our sacred hearts there is a “thrill of hope,” for what can be: a world of justice based on love; a world of enough for all; a world of peace; a world in which we do not harm or hate one another. “Do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:19) Become that world, birth it.
Courage my dears. Tend your sacred hearts. Love one another.
