Reckoning With Christmas During Unstable Times

It’s hard to know what to say on Christmas Eve, when Bethlehem is under siege, when the weather in Boston has been as weirdly warm as the weather in California this week because of climate crisis, and when, even though Jesus is still my favorite, all my spiritual bypassing recovery means I no longer identify as Christian. That said, we’ve still decked the halls with boughs of eucalyptus and participated in the ritual of giving gifts that are all wrapped under the tree now.

It’s early as I write this. Not a creature is stirring…except I think I just heard a mouse. My partner Jeff is spending his first Christmas in California, his first Christmas not working at the hospital in several decades. My daughter is now a senior in high school, so this is likely her last Christmas with business as usual. And change is afoot.

What strikes me most when I take a moment to reflect on what I want to say about Christmas is that Christmas gives us a ray of light in the time of darkness (at least in the Northern Hemisphere.) With the Winter Solstice behind us and the days lengthening just a little now that we’re past the hump of the darkness, Christmas gives us an excuse to compartmentalize a lot of what’s happening in the world, to try our best to suspend the realities that feel overwhelming to face and to participate in the ritual of family, holiday music, feasting, and fun.

There has been so much trauma in all of our lives recently- me, my partner, my daughter, my housemate, and most likely, all of you. Because nobody has been spared lately. Some are suffering more than others because various unearned privileges protect some of us more than others, which is unspeakably unfair. But we’ve all been touched by the pandemic, the various wars in the world, Black Lives Matter, the MeToo movement, the rifts in families who split over political views, the growing awareness of how narcissism is destroying our country, and the pain of a deepening distance between the have’s and the have not’s.

It’s no wonder that we might have nostalgia for simpler times, before we were so aware that colonization, genocide, land theft, unrestrained capitalism, international bullying, and ecocide had so tainted the world. But I cling to a strange gratitude that at least now we know, at least there is a ray of light in the dark, even if it’s just a spotlight that won’t let us unsee what we now see.

Sometimes I long for the days before I realized I was spiritually bypassing, before IFS therapy, before taking off the rose-colored glasses so I could spot all the shiny narcissists in my midst, before learning about boundaries, before choosing to be healthier in relationships. I reminisce about the time before realizing I had to take a firm stand if I wanted to claim any moral high ground, when I was so comfortable in all my unearned privilege that I could get away with trying to accommodate both sides so I didn’t upset anyone or lose anyone’s approval.

Now the sides have been declared and the stands have been taken, the haters have left, therapy is working, and life is simpler, even though it hurts more. The good news is that my heart has been burst open and I find myself paradoxically capable of both understanding and extending compassion to the people I don’t agree with- and also not being willing to collapse my firm stand for the moral compass of human rights, just to win the approval of those who believe some lives matter more and others matter less.

I know many of you also have hearts that are more open than they might have been a few years ago. Trauma forces our hand, squeezing us like a womb in labor until we either die or make it through the birth canal forever changed. Many of us are still in the birth canal, still getting squeezed. If you’ve made it even part way into a more spacious opening, maybe you can take this holiday time to look around, to reflect on how far you’ve come, to celebrate your survival instincts, to honor your resilience, to appreciate those who are laboring with you and haven’t given up on you, to take a deep breath and enjoy a silent night if you can, and to keep fighting for what you know is right in the world if you don’t have that luxury.

During the Christmas season of 2020, I almost gave up the fight. 2020 had been a brutal year. I had lost a good half of my friends to QAnon, anti-vax propaganda, white supremacy, spiritual bypassing New Ager beliefs, and “Trump is a lightworker” nonsense. Since the pandemic broke, I had been fighting for social justice, for human rights, for public health guidelines, for Black Lives Matter. There were death threats against me, I kept working in therapy on my parts that were scared I was going to get myself murdered, and I wondered if maybe I had taken my social justice activism a step too far.

Then I watched the documentary The Fight, about the brave, steadfast, relentlessly unflinching ACLU lawyers who fought Donald Trump all the way to the Supreme Court, over and over. I watched the hate mail they endured and saw how much their hearts cared about those they were fighting to protect. And I decided that it was okay to take a short breather- and then get back to leveraging my privilege to stand up and protect those with less, including my own oppressed parts.

So now I’m able to take better care of my activist parts and balance the giving and receiving, the outward focus and the inward one, the righteous parts and the parts that still hurt people. And I’m better able to stand back and know where I stand without dehumanizing people who stand somewhere different.

Last month, my partner Jeff and I went to Virginia for his sister’s funeral. While we were there, we spent two days at Harper’s Ferry, at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers, where West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland’s borders meet. Harper’s Ferry is where the Civil War started after the white abolitionist Christian John Brown led a raid on the National Armory because he intended to arm Black men and white abolitionists so they could free the slaves.

Jeff has spent most of his life trying to make sense of the white supremacy and fundamentalist Christian nationalism of his family. It was a watershed moment when we stood together at the confluence of those giant rivers and Jeff said, “If my family had lived during the Civil War, they would have been slave owners, and I would have been an abolitionist. And there’s no way to resolve that kind of disparity, is there?”

No, there’s no spiritual platitude that will resolve the two sides of a polarization when one side is white supremacy and the other side is like the ACLU, fighting to uphold our imperfect Constitution, which is trying to find its way to supporting equal human rights for all.

Now we are in similar times, with rivers between us in terms of political ideologies that divide those of us in the US, those who are fighting in Israel and Gaza, those in the Russia/ Ukraine war, and those who want to keep bypassing their personal trauma and the world’s trauma with religious and spiritual beliefs that oppress others.

And yet, it is Christmas. And there are rays of light in the dark.

May you find a spark of radiance inside your own heart. May you allow that light to spread to the heart of someone who needs a lift. May you open your heart to be lit from the spark of someone who might have just a tad more brightness to share. And may you have a silent night if you can- to just breathe, settle your nervous system, and prepare for a New Year full of mystery.

*A holiday gift? If you feel called to give yourself or someone else a holiday present, Harvard psychiatrist and master IFS trainer Frank Anderson, MD, who has written three books about IFS, including his latest memoir, will be co-teaching a 6 week Zoom writing class that starts in January. It’s called Write To Heal: IFS + Memoir Writing. We’ll be teaching you how to deepen your IFS practice by writing memoir material, and we’ll be teaching you how to more safely and effectively write your memoir by working with protector parts and unburdening exiles as part of the memoir-writing journey. This class is for anyone interested in memoir writing as a therapeutic practice, so you don’t have to be a doctor or therapist to attend. It’s not technically an IFS training, but if you’re in the helping professions, you will learn tools that may help you help others.

Learn more & register here.

May your holidays be full of joy…and if Jesus is your favorite too, Merry Christmas.