I needed Advent this year. I needed the time of mourning, the time of lament, the time of honoring loss. I needed to let the ashes lie and not cover them up with worthless glitter. I needed to lean into the waiting. I gained a lot this year, and I am grateful. But I lost a lot too. There has been a lot of leaving. A tribe lost, a waiting extended, and last Sunday was our last as members of a church we have walked with for 8 years.

My word for the year was here, and I was told recently, “It is ironic your word is here, because all of your heres have disappeared on you.”

I’ve spent the last weeks praying for a silver bullet. A celestial intervention. I needed God to do something already.

This year I taught the Greek tragedy Medea for the first time. At the end, right when Medea is about to be put to death, a chariot pulled by fire breathing dragons swoops down and picks her up. The gods intervene on her behalf and she does not have to deal with this world. Lately, I think that is what I have been praying for. Will you please come get me out of this mess?

But I don’t worship the Greek gods. Instead God has gently, and in a hundred private ways, let me know that He is still Emmanuel. God with us.

I don’t know why all the losses came for me this year at the end. I don’t know why God won’t just come down and fix it already. There are moments, I think I will always have, where I certainly wish He would. But I am learning that God is never quite where you expect to find Him, but that He is always Emmanuel.

And I am grateful.

I needed to lean into Advent, and now I am ready to celebrate all 12 days of the miracle that is God, as a baby, just to be with us.

Merry Christmas.

Sometimes when I think I want to quit Twitter, I remember I met Esther Emery there. I don’t know quite how to say that I have never actually met in person someone who has laughed and cried and spoken deeply into my life. So, when she offered to write for me about Christmas and money I was thrilled. Then, I read it. Listen up y’all. Esther is about to PREACH. 

Questioning Christmas

It was the year I was five years old that I got a doll for Christmas. It came in a shiny, domed plastic package. It had styled hair, and a poofy dress. It had real shoes that you could take off and put back on again. I looked at it in absolute wonder.

It was simply inexplicable to me, how that strange thing got underneath my tree.

You see, I was never a child who liked dolls. I didn’t dream of dolls of any kind, but much less the plastic ones with fancy dresses. Surely Santa would know that my radical environmentalist mother didn’t buy things like that, and in the case of the doll I had never begged her to. I wanted toys with wheels, or animals. In my wildest dreams, maybe a microscope.

I don’t know what happened to that doll. I might have cut it up. I have done experiments with it. Most likely I just forgot about it.

It was through a mistake – an adult slip of the tongue, as these things always are – that I discovered we had received the doll along with other gifts under the tree that year – labeled from “Santa” – as charity from the church.

We had been designated a “needy” family. And for that I got a doll.

The year was 1984. My parents were divorcing. There were medical bills, a bankruptcy claim, feelings of failure, loss, regret. For all this I got sweet, sad eyes from grown ups and a gift I never asked for. For all this, I got to feel like one of the ones who need.

Oh, lucky me.   

 December comes around every year, like clockwork. ‘Tis the season, of giving to the poor. Jingle jingle. Merry Christmas!

Don’t be selfish, y’all, be generous! Give! ‘Tis the season of giving! And Christmas belongs to the poor. This is the real meaning of Christmas.

But I want to tell you that I’ve been the poor. I’ve had other people’s gifts for Christmas, and it tasted like someone else’s party. It tasted like it probably made someone else feel awesome. I’ve gone to a lot of work to reclaim my heart from that bitter taste.

You might be calling this ingratitude. I would be accustomed to that. I have often been warned (as the poor usually are) about the dangers of my own bad attitude. I still hear the voice from my childhood that says, “WHERE ARE YOUR MANNERS COME ON AND SHOW A LITTLE GRATITUDE.”

But I am no longer a child. And I have lived a searching, thoughtful path into adulthood. I have drawn the line back and back from personal feelings of scarcity and desperation to our collective compulsion to justify excess…by passing it on to others who “really need” it.

It is easier to spread the disease of too much than to try to recover from it.

‘Tis the season, of compassion. This we translate into: it is the season of buying things, some for ourselves, and some for those less fortunate.

We need so desperately, to give. We need to give, and yet we dare not have less. We will find or manufacture a need that fits the narrow range, that allows us to keep our wealth intact and skim a little off the top to meet our soul’s deep hunger for generosity.

But if Christmas is about being able to give things to the poor, then Christmas is still, really, about being rich.

And I don’t think that’s what Christmas is about.

I don’t buy Christmas gifts for anyone anymore. Used things, sometimes. Homemade things. Cans of jam and applesauce. The time and effort to fill a stocking full of candy, frost a cookie, tell a story beside the tree. There is this one story we tell about a child king who had no roof, no toys, no rattle…

How much would it cost, to buy back an hour of sacred poverty? How much would it cost, to become again the child who can receive?

I know there is resistance. Brave resistance, often. But every act of resistance is assimilated. Tut-tutting over our overconsumption at the winter holidays is now almost as popular as the shopping itself. We switch back and forth like channels.

I’m just done.

My holiday high wire act falls apart at the foot of the manger. My guilt-and-giving dance is ferociously exploded by the upside down miracle of incarnation, in which the empty becomes full, and the profane becomes sacred.

This is what happens to the rich, when we become the poor. And this is what happens to the poor, when we become the rich, not by toys or packaging, but by the pure miracle of starlight.

This is Christmas.

Bio: Esther Emery used to be a freelance theatre director and playwright in Southern California. These days she is pretty much a runaway, living off grid in a yurt and tending to three acres of near wilderness in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. She writes about faith and rebellion and trying to live a totally free life at www.estheremery.com. Connect on Twitter @EstherEmery

The Christmas lights are everywhere. The decorations are taking over. Even on the highway I find cars with elf ears, wreaths on the front bumper, a red-Rudolph nose. Even when it all sort of blends together, there are two tiny narrative voices let me know what I have tuned out.

“Look! White lights”

“I see Santa!”

“A Santa hat light up dinosaur, that’s weird!” (Juliet is right though, that is a little weird.)

Our stockings are hung. Our tree is up. We even have a train around the tree-skirt that the girls keep knocking off the track because they cannot resist touching it. (Even they have been told repeatedly to keep their little hands off the tracks.) The nativity set has been set up and yesterday Priscilla was having the angel and Mary protect baby Jesus from a flying dragon.

But I’m not ready.

I’m not ready for the sparkles and the sugar and the general holiday cheer. I am just not ready. I read somewhere that Advent, the time leading up to Christmas, used to be a lot like lent. Somber, thoughtful, sad even. The Jewish people waited a long long time for the savior to come, and  Advent is a season to remember the waiting.

And aren’t we all waiting? Waiting for the very things we light the candles for, for hope, for peace, for joy, for love.

How long, Oh Lord?

And some of us are waiting for things we have been promised, hopes whispered into the air, dreams buried deep into our hearts. Another year is coming to a close and still there is no…… How could that be?

How long, Oh Lord?

Some of us are just waiting for this life to hurt a little less, to be a little easier, for space to breathe. We need something to give and we are afraid it might just be us.

How long, Oh Lord?

I am done fighting the darkness with fake cheer and a light up dinosaur clad in a Santa hat. I am leaning into the darkness, the waiting, the lament.

How long, Oh Lord?

And I am lighting the candles, of Hope, of Peace. I am choosing to say, I know the end, and this is the waiting. We are waiting, but we are lighting the candles anyway, because we believe that the Lord will come.

But you can hear us crying in the darkness,

How Long, Oh Lord?

I didn’t cry when my parents dropped me off for college. And I didn’t cry when I went to sleep that night or the next day or the next. I wasn’t sad, I was just excited. I didn’t cry about leaving home because I didn’t feel like I had left home. It felt like the times I had stayed at a summer camp, or a youth rally. Even when I started going to classes and managing my own food, it still didn’t hit me that I was not home.

It took until the first Sunday that I cried. I walked across the campus and into the church that mother had gone to when she had been on the same campus years before. I walked into the unfamiliar place, and suddenly realized I had no idea where to sit. There were lots of open chairs. The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t a place for me to go; the problem was that I didn’t already have a place to belong.

I am writing for You Are Here Stories, a new collective blog that has put out some really high quality stuff. I am honored to be a part of it. You can read the rest there.

Yesterday was the first Monday of Advent, and already I felt as though I have missed it. I got sick over Thanksgiving and I was seriously just trying to make it through my first day back at school. I turned the heat up and the lights off, but my nose wouldn’t let me nap. I had to blow it too often.

I was weary. I am weary.

I could tell you that it is the illness, the long drive home, the too little sleep. I could tell you that and it would be the truth, but not all of it.

Every single one of my plans for the significant future shifted beneath my feet this fall. The landscape of my summer, next fall, beyond, became unrecognizable and impossible for me to navigate. Where I once had a solid three-year plan, I now have a lot of questions.

I was, for a while, trying not to be angry, but have learned it is best for me to be hospitable to my own emotions, to feel whatever it is I want to feel. I have learned that anger is almost always my way of defending against a grief I am trying to avoid.

I am so weary.

Of promises not  kept, of dreams deferred, of disappointment.

I am wondering how long, not yet really is. How much longer will not yet last?

I’m asking these questions for myself, but also for the world.

How much longer will violence prevail, will kids be shot, will death win out?  How much more can our world be ravaged, can our communities be broken, can our souls take?

How much longer? How much more?

As I begin this season, the slow and steady walk to the manger, I can’t be shake my head a little. The balm the Lord has to offer seems a little thin.

We have a world need rescuing, and you sent a baby? Born to a poor woman? In a manger that is not even in her home town? Are you serious?

I am weary, thirsty, and so very tired, and you give me….hope? What good is that going to do? I need a PLAN! I need ACTION! I need HELP! and I get a baby, in a manger, and the promise of hope.

Isn’t that just like God? Isn’t it just like God to give me the solution that I am sure is not going to work. Isn’t it just like God to give me a baby in a manger and an invitation to the whole world to come, when what I want is some sort of Rambo figure coming down to take care of the pieces I don’t want redeemed? Isn’t it just like God to offer me hope to cling to when I am wishing for a binder full of the plans for the rest of my life.

Last night, we didn’t decorate the tree, or even finish unpacking. I got pizza, and noticed a candy coated sky. Then I fell asleep at 6:30. What I wanted was to do all the holiday things, but what brought me healing was rest.

A baby, a manger, a promise of hope. Okay. Let’s try it this way.