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There was a time when the whole “comfort and joy” idea at Christmas made me…uncomfortable.
Why should we focus on comfort when remembering a story that includes the Magnificat, exhorts us to remember the poor, and “ends” with a young family turned refugees and the murder of the innocents?
Religion is not a narcotic, and high holy days are not occasions for numbing out, I would fret.
That was before 2020.
Before 2020, the highlight of my Advent season had always been seeing Nate sing in Handel’s Messiah. That year, instead, I listened to a recording, and one of the many (many many) arias I’d long ignored stood out to me: “Comfort Ye My People.”
Comfort ye, comfort ye My people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to
Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her
Iniquity is pardoned. The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness
Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for
Our God. (Isaiah 40:1-3)
It made sense to me that day. That day I was in post-exilic Israel, and in 18th century England, and in the second wave of the COVID pandemic, all places where being human is hard, and where God cares enough to comfort us.
Since those days, I’ve done a lot of noticing how we deny ourselves and each other comforts that cost little. The diet culture part of us condemns comfort foods and the environmentalist in us squirms over convenience foods. Online we tell each other to “Do the Work!” but what we mean is, “do the work on my timeline with the outcome that I expect.” Lately I’ve had to remind myself that resting is not procrastinating, because my default is to feel guilty about rest to the point that leisure time is neither productive nor restful.
There is hubris in the unceasing determination some of us have to “get uncomfortable” as if that is a worthy goal in and of itself. There is a sneaky capitalistic attitude in it, that if our trying and trying harder never wane, we’ll somehow get [somewhere?] farther and faster than if we submit to cycles of work and rest. But discomfort is not a status symbol. It’s something we pass through on the way to somewhere better. Enduring it well is a skill, and like any skill it’s best learned incrementally and over time.
In fact, it is in those times of radical discomfort, when we are learning that skill most fully, that we are most in need of comfort. It is fundamental to taming the alarms in our bodyminds that we also experience a basic sense of agency, safety, and selfhood. Without a return to security, “getting comfortable with being uncomfortable” is not actually developing that skill at all. It’s preferring chaos and dysregulation, as a trauma response.
I am always asking myself what it means to be a Christian. I know very few things about being a Christian, but I know that it means being a person of grace. It means trusting that God is not mad at us. It means believing there is abundantly more available to us than we think we are allowed to ask for. It means while we were yet kind of shitty people, Christ came to Earth and eventually died for us and rose again—because our sin isn’t nearly as powerful as we tend to give it credit for. It means God is with us.
And yet, while grace is a beautiful word and a compelling story and a lofty concept, it is a harder thing to actually point to in real life. But in the last few years, to me, grace has most often appeared as comfort. Undeserved comfort. Impossibly simple comfort. A voice of kindness. A moment of softening in my belly and chest. A ray of sunlight and of God’s simple acceptance of me.
I used to be uncomfortable with comfort because I wasn’t really so very sure of grace. I used to think comfort came from Doing Better. Now I believe Doing Better comes from being comforted so often and so thoroughly that we can let go of the lie that goodness and mercy are scarce resources. When we really believe that grace is for us and comfort will find us again, we’re able to endure far more than when we ”do discomfort” in order to win a prize or avoid a punishment.
So, on the winter solstice, in the waning days of Advent, I wish you comfort and joy. I wish you softly twinkling lights and the indulgence of nostalgia. I wish you fuzzy blankets, sleepy kid snuggles, those cookies you look forward to all year, firelight, cozy socks, lazy mornings, a pet on your feet, and $20 found in a coat pocket. I wish you peace. I wish you the utter audacity to fill up on everything good. I wish you just as many hours of sleep as your body could possibly need. I wish you all the good carols and none of the annoying ones.
I wish you friendship even if you haven’t pursued it “enough,” joy even if you haven’t been grateful, help even if you haven’t asked for it, rest even if you’ve procrastinated, pardon even if your iniquity is great.
I wish you the grace of God.
peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey
P.S. If you are using the Menstru-Waiting Advent guide, I would love to hear any feedback you have. “Positive” or “negative,” it all helps as I prepare to submit a proposal for traditional publication next year. You can comment or just hit “reply.” Thanks!