Adapted from “When the Holy Dances with the Ordinary,” by Chris Keating (copyright 2025, CSS Publications)
One year, an unseasonably warm week before Thanksgiving prompted more than a few in our neighborhood to get an early start putting up their Christmas lights. But does the week before Thanksgiving even count as early anymore?
I’m not sure.
While a fair number of houses seemed to switch seamlessly from Halloween to Christmas, some of us were wondering how to quietly remove the Valentine’s Day wreath, which was still on the front door.
Advent can feel like that: someone turns a switch and SWOOSH, we move from Trick-or-Treat to Santa. We turn straight from relaxed, pumpkin-spiced days of autumn to the breakneck pace of Christmas. There is a race to be the first to plug in your lights, to send cards, to wrap packages, to bake cookies, and to mark off all the other items on your holiday bingo card.
As the Christmas carol reminds us, “For lo, the days are hastening on,” — and so are we. And when the holiday spin cycle feels as if life’s crushing
load has fallen on us, we do well to find ways of slowing our bodies down. That is especially true for those who are grieving or who are experiencing a different sort of holiday. Perhaps there is an empty place in our hearts or around our holiday tables this year. Or perhaps our memories of Christmas are just too much for us. “I’m just not feeling it this year,” someone said to me, and I understood what she meant.
We’ve explored the ways the holidays interface with personal and institutional grief, but lamenting the grief from the world can prove hard. For one thing, not everyone we know will share our perspective on which social and global issues cause us to grieve. For another, many feel uncomfortable talking about political and social issues in groups—particularly in these corrosively divisive times.
Yet God’s people have always lamented injustice, oppression, and systemic evil. Those held captive to jackbooted oppression trusted in the power of lament to name the grief they experienced. Indeed, the promise of Advent arises out of the knotted, cut-off stumps of hopelessness. Confronted with certain defeat, King Ahaz is visited by the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah points Ahaz toward signs of God’s presence. While Ahaz turns away from God, Isaiah keeps preaching. He tells Ahaz to watch for a woman about to give birth—for that is where Immanuel, God-with-us, will be found.
It is exactly for these reasons that each year, when the night is longest, we take a breath. We take a moment to pause and to remember, honoring the many different emotions and feelings that we may be experiencing. We take time to listen for a word of hope and dare to name the grief inside of us. In many churches, these “Blue Christmas” liturgies are offered to help us name the grief we see around us and the pain we feel within us.
For it is then we may dare to recall that there is a Light shining in the darkness. Blair Gilmer Meeks reminds us that “in this season when we are expecting the joy of Christ’s coming…we know that for some members of our community every night appears endless, and the prospect of a new day seems dim.”
While we may hope that the lights of Christmas will brighten our lives, but the reality is that we often awaken feeling as deflated as our neighbor’s
blow-up sleigh and reindeer when the power gets turned off. Instead of plunging into that weariness, we are called instead to the sort of honesty with ourselves found so often in the recovery community. Advent seems to function much like those first steps offered by Alcoholics Anonymous: “we admitted we were powerless over alcohol — our lives had become unmanageable.”
So, cry out to God. Offer your lament. Resist the mindless push and pull of the season. Instead, light candles. Pray with friends. Lean into the robust declaration that our God will indeed come to us, even as chaos threatens our existence.
Rev. Dr. Chris Keating
Pastor at Woodlawn Chapel Presbyterian Church
Chaplain, St. Louis County Police Department, West County Precinct (7th)