Christmas
A girl prepares to hit a pinata during Las Posadas in La Merced neighbourhood in Mexico City on Dec. 17, 2014. REUTERS/Edgard Garrido
My first experiences of Christian sacraments, including baptism and the Eucharist, were mysterious and somewhat confusing. As a Catholic little girl, I didn’t remember my infant baptism and could never quite wrap my head around eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. What’s more, these solemn events happened within the confines of a giant, cavernous church — a place where I had to be still, quiet, and serious. During weekly Mass, I learned implicitly from the nuns that reverence and fun do not go together.
A view shows the deserted area outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Oct. 11, 2023. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
At a vigil for peace in Washington, D.C., this Tuesday, Palestinian Lutheran pastor Munther Isaac spoke about the approaching Christmas season in his home of Bethlehem in the West Bank.
“How can we celebrate when we feel this war — this genocide — that is taking place could resume at any moment?” he said.
Nativity scene with Mary, Jesus, and Joseph. Credit: Unsplash/Mick Haupt.
The following is an act of imagination. It is an attempt to fill in the gaps that are left for us in this story to bring the text to life. My hope is that this could be used as a resource for family Christmas Eve devotions or for congregations looking to creatively imagine the birth of Christ.
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. Photo via NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI
When the biblical writers penned words about the “creator of the heavens and the earth,” they didn’t have the faintest idea of what they were really saying. Yet Christian faith asserts the power that created galaxies full of black holes and dark energy is the same power that became mysteriously embedded in the uterus of a poor teenage girl in a forsaken village in present-day Palestine. The first chapter of the gospel of John describes Jesus’ arrival this way: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (1:3). That defies all boundaries of rationality.
A scene from 'The Muppet Christmas Carol,' directed by Brian Henson. Entertainment Pictures / Alamy
The 1992 classic is full of wonders you can’t find anywhere else: Michael Caine starring in a children’s movie, a ghost of Christmas future that haunts me every time I consider splurging on frivolities, and a drum set at a Victorian England Christmas party. But the movie isn’t just a fun, Muppet-y take on Charles Dickens’ classic novella; it’s also a compelling screenplay with heart-warming, humorous songs that offer a radical Christmas message of “cast down the mighty … send the rich away empty.”
Illustration by Alex Aldrich Barrett
A FEW YEARS ago, I set out to knit a baby blanket as an Advent prayer practice. Knitting is incredibly meditative and allows me to pray with focus and clarity. Knitting a baby blanket seems appropriate as the church awaits the arrival of the “newborn king.” I wish I could say I finished the blanket in time for Christmas. I did not. However, even that seems appropriate, as so much remains unresolved for Jesus’ community at his birth. Their political occupation continued, and even Jesus’ birth story reflects the impositions placed upon his family by the Roman Empire. God’s inbreaking happens under serious duress — but it happens nonetheless.
My favorite lines from the poem “Christmas is Waiting to be Born” by Howard Thurman are: “Where fear companions each day’s life, / And Perfect Love seems long delayed. / CHRISTMAS IS WAITING TO BE BORN: / In you, in me, in all [hu]mankind.”
Thurman reminds us that God was born into our sorrow and among those who are brokenhearted and struggling. That truth is so important to hold on to as we process years of our own collective trauma. No matter how unresolved things are, Christmas is born in us, too! In December we continue our journey through Advent and arrive at Christmas. We might not have received what we’re waiting for by that time, and very little may make sense. Yet, because of who God is, we open our hearts to the improbable, trusting that we won’t be put to shame.
“The Nativity,” from Ethiopian manuscript Nagara Māryām (1730-1755)
IN THE EIGHTH season of Call the Midwife, set in post-war east London, nuns and nurse midwives of Nonnatus House assist a woman with severe complications from a “backstreet” abortion. Sister Julienne says to a young nurse, “The word ‘midwife’ means ‘with-woman.’ A woman in that situation needs somebody by her side.”
I’m pro-choice, which was an unpopular stance in the Catholic community I grew up in. For my views on reproductive rights, people in youth group called me a “baby killer” and “Pontius Pilate.” During Advent, specifically, I loathed the hollow teachings on Mary and childbirth. We sanitized the Nativity into a cute story — the equivalent of a Disney movie featuring a white family and a manger crowded with men. Only recently did I learn that some scholars believe that midwives attended Jesus’ birth. As reproductive freedom and care are further undermined in the United States, this is an apt time to reclaim a more feminist view of the Nativity and rethink Advent as the season of the midwife.
Cover design by Cássia Roriz
Activist Vanessa Nakate on Jesus, erasure, and the climate crisis in the Horn of Africa.
What rekindles our worship and wonder, causing us to reflect and repent, prompting us to hope and rejoice in this particular season of Advent? Perhaps the same spirit that moved abolitionists, advocates, and allies to pen our favorite holiday hymns can remind us of our reasons to rejoice.
Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in Spencer.
Spencer is the ultimate I-won’t-be-home-for-Christmas film. It is Black Swan meets Jackie meets (to a far lesser degree) the The Family Stone. Which feels poignant in 2021, a year in which many of us are afraid to go home. The omicron variant will undoubtedly keep some of us away from our families. But others who can travel home for Christmas may feel anxious about the prospect of returning to houses divided by politics, theology, misinformation, or all three.
We long for Silent Night in crowded pews, by candlelight.
May we who stay at home now find your Christmas blessing.
I don’t live with the illusion that the holidays are cheery for everyone. Many of us find ourselves interacting with family and friends who do not have the same values we do. Here are four tips for navigating difficult relationships over the holidays — without compromising on dignity.
So as we participate in Advent this month, the Old Testament story of Job may be a helpful text to explore. Job addresses the enigma of suffering head-on, mincing no words but also not really answering the question of why we suffer. Perhaps, though, the simple freedom to question God and mourn our losses is just what we need this Christmas.
Though Thanksgiving 2020 isn’t canceled—like just about everything else this past year—it needs to be different. Because of this, it is currently not safe to travel or gather in the ways many of us typically do. This need to do differently has left many Christians split and pitted against one another.
Misinformation is widespread, and it can be dangerous. And while correcting misinformation can feel urgent, a team of experts told Sojourners that challenging our loved ones’ beliefs is a difficult and time-intensive undertaking. This is because misinformation about politics, religion, and health often ties into our deepest beliefs about ourselves: Challenging them isn’t just correcting facts, it’s resetting an entire worldview.
Illustration by Ric Carrasquillo
WE HAVE COME through a turbulent year in which health concerns, weather concerns, social unrest concerns, and more have been at the center of our thoughts. From the first time we heard “COVID-19” to the last storm of hurricane season to the deaths of many significant cultural icons in the U.S., we have found ourselves reeling—or at least I have, and so have many people I know.
Advent and the beginning of the Christmas season give us an opportunity to recalibrate and take a breath. We are into the new Christian calendar, and for Christians that reality should mean something. Expectation, hope, joy, and peace are just some of the Christian ways of leaning into life. Advent allows us to flex those faith muscles. And we need them, because, as the texts for the first days of Christmastide notes, the struggle under which we live does not dissipate. We live our Christian faith most often amid social crises. “Calm” and “peace” are aspirational at best. The reflections for this month try to make sense of how we flex those muscles I mentioned earlier. How do we participate in God’s desire for us to live together in just, holy, equitable ways? How do we hold ourselves and each other accountable to building the commonwealth of God, in which we each play our part, great or small, so that all are made whole?
From the album 'God's Son' by Nas
IT'S ALMOST DECEMBER, and in a few weeks we may gather with our families (potentially via Zoom) to sing “Away in a Manger” and “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.”
Each of these songs depicts baby Jesus in a different way, from a poor, defenseless child to a newborn king. Each contributes to our faith in a different way. That tiny baby reminds us of Jesus’ humanity and his solidarity with the poor, while the incarnated Lord reminds us of God’s splendor and glory.
From these hymns to the latest Hillsong chorus, most songs about Jesus have been written by Christians for their fellow believers. Over the past 50 years, however, this has changed. Songs about Jesus no longer show up just in church, but also in discos, honky-tonks, blues bars, and strip clubs. Over the past 50 years, Jesus has appeared in hundreds of songs in every secular genre. These artists explore in their own unique ways the question that Jesus asked his disciples: “And who do you say that I am?”
Photo by Nancy Wiechec
Jennifer Guerra Aldana helps organize the annual Posada Sin Fronteras in San Diego/ Tijuana. She spoke with Sojourners’ Jenna Barnett about the tradition, which reenacts Mary and Joseph’s travels as described in Luke’s gospel.
“Las Posadas is a Catholic tradition in which community members set up a pilgrimage. People go door to door singing songs, wanting to be let in. And at every door, the innkeeper does not let them in. At the last home, the people do get let in, and there’s a party with tamales and candy. Posada Sin Fronteras [The Inn Without Borders] takes place at the San Diego-Tijuana border. We treat San Diego as the innkeeper and Tijuana as the one who is asking to be let in.
Illustration by Michael George Haddad
When I was in labor with my third child, my older sister was bewildered by my pain. As I walked the hall of our two-story row house in southwest Philadelphia, seeking moments of comfort between birth pool and bed, couch and floor, she said to me, “But, you’ve already done this before. Why is it so hard?”
“I haven’t birthed this baby!” I cried out to her. Then I settled into a deep silence, preparing myself for the next wave, the next earth-shaking moan.
Our souls are crying out this Advent of 2020. We want to call this season the coldest, these times the most hostile, this ache unbearable.
And it is true. We are saturated with the names of the dead, no longer shocked by callous leaders or the collective amnesia that refuses responsibility for ongoing systems of oppression.
Though history and our theology will remind us that empires fall, that pandemics cease, that justice will prevail, such awareness doesn’t diminish the pain of raw grief, this collective lament. We haven’t celebrated Christmas this year; how can we even begin?
I do not know how hope still shivers through my bones. I do not know how to unclench rage-tight teeth. I do not know how to look at this war-soaked, warming planet and believe that the Author of Peace is weeping and raging with us and making straight these deeply crooked and corrupt paths.
Mary - Annunciation Full, Will Humes. Flickr
Mary’s example is an especially powerful one in these troubled times when people insist that their truth is the only truth.