1st Day of Christmas: Bring your heart.

Even if you do not feel like Hallelujah choruses.

A heart in the snow at the shores of Lake Superior. © AF 2024

This is the first of our 12 Days of Christmas Contemplations. If you only see a preview here that means you are not yet on the list. If you would like to receive our daily contemplations in your inbox you can still do so by upgrading to a paid subscription below. This allows us to create a private sanctuary for the journey. If you are in active ministry or service or if you are in need for a special gift this Christmas please use this gift of appreciation or send me email and I will comp you in for free. Thank you to all who make this possible through their generous gifts.

Dear fellow traveler,

This letter is meant to gather us together for a journey to the heart of Christmas. So picture us arriving at a lovely venue in the woods, perhaps a monastic guesthouse, overlooking a frozen lake. Sitting down with a warm cup of coffee or tea, waiting in gentle anticipation.

And so we begin:

Dear friends, here is my heartfelt

Welcome and Willkommen and Merry Christmas to you.

I am honored and humbled you decided for this venture this year. Some of you have traveled with us before, some of you have recently stumbled upon us, and some are still wondering what this is all about.

What ever path you have taken, you are welcome here. By today we have grown to a group of 80 Christmas pilgrims from across the globe who long, like us, for a deeper way. For a movement of the heart.

And it will indeed become a movement, an opening, of the heart. Our 12 Days of Christmas journey is your journey to your own heart, I am just the facilitator. Walking with you the quieter roads, and the ones less traveled.

So thank you for being here. Before I say some more about what to expect and how to travel along side each other, let me start with a little story:

I once gave a sermon in a psychiatry ward during my internship. The assigned psalm began like this: Hallelujah, praise God in the heavens, …

Really?

“Hallelujah?”

In a psychiatry ward?

I could not get myself to write a smooth sermon until time was running out. And so I did what I felt was laid on my heart right then and there.

I looked at the people in the room. I read the first paragraphs of the psalm.

I read: Halleluja. I tried again a little louder: Hallelujah! I sighed. I paused.

Upon my sigh and pause I saw earnest faces which had been locked down in pain be lifted and now looking at me in surprise and wonder.

“Do you feel like Halleluja choruses today, dear ones?” I asked them still holding their gaze.

And then I saw them slowly shaking their heads in a communal sigh.

O dear friends, in a world of pain and brokenness where we all carry a hefty burden, we so often do not feel like hallelujah choruses.

And so in starting this journey towards the stable I want to gather us together in this communal sigh, holding the pain we carry and the pain of the world. And together take courage to open our hearts in longing.

You are welcome here. Come as you are. You need not feel like Hallelujah choruses. Because, thanks be to God, Christmas is when God godself sends choirs who sing into our pain and for our broken hopes and within our meagerness. When the Divine enters our meager stable looking for shelter, but holding the whole universe. Christmas is seeking you today far more than your most earnest longing can recognize, yearning for you and for your embrace.

So, dear friends, let’s gather together at this threshold between the old and the new year, let’s hold each other, let’s walk with each other hand in hand, into the depths of this mystery.