Oh Love,

Advent Letters to Light

Oh Love,

Good and evil. Right and wrong. Day and Night. Heaven and Hell. Birth and death. Love and hate. Or love and fear. Or love and grief. Or love and shame. I’ve long wrestled with the idea that everything has an opposite, and that one side is better than the other. This started in church. And was magnified around the holidays.

Love, I feel sometimes that I only know you in comparison to what you’re not. And that I know you in separated sides. Like your romantic side, that I met when I was 20 on the face and in the arms of my first love. She was soft and beautiful and you were written in glowing letters across her peach skin. Self-hate, fear, grief, and shame pushed me to fade away not only from her and myself, but also from you. I’ve danced with you since, but always stopping just shy of falling deeply back in.

I remember all the people who thought that my coming out and leaving ordained ministry behind was because I wanted to get married. Like the only way to be acceptably queer and christian was to be in a committed legally recognized relationship. Many of these same people who couldn’t understand why I would want to come out if I wasn’t in love, also scoffed when I said, I’m doing this so I can begin to love myself. In the church, my worth and my love-ability were dependent on my connection to another or the credentials I held. I was only lovable if someone else (romantically) loved me and if I earned the full title “reverend.”

Do you remember the year I thought I broke you? As a kid, the holiday decorations were stored in an old cedar chest in the basement. Everything we pulled out smelled like moth balls, including—my absolute most favorite thing— the nativity set.

We had a wobbly wooden stable. Old stale hay kept in a torn sandwich bag. My grandpa made most the figures. Ceramic, hand painted Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, sheep, a cow, and shepherds. The wise people were plastic, bought at the craft store. I always set up the nativity. With careful attention to details, arranging and rearranging, making sure everything was just right.

Throughout Advent, the nativity became a play station. Re-enacting stories I learned in Sunday school. Making up new ones. Re-creating movie scenes. Once I turned the nativity into the set of Going Ape, the 1980s movie starring Tony Danza and Danny DeVito who inherit three orangutans worth millions. In all that excited imaginative play, I broke Mary. The blessed virgin, the mother of Jesus, the bearer of love, that my grandpa made, her head was no longer connected to her body. I cried. I felt horrible. I tried to hide what I did. I tried to fix Mary and love with scotch tape. It didn’t work.

Eventually, I told my dad. I don’t remember anything he said, only anxiously watching as he superglued Mary’s head back on. I didn’t touch her again that year, worried that the glue might not hold. When I put her away after the holidays, I wrapped her extra tight with double layers of newspaper and made her a special bed in a shoe box. I never stopped thinking of our Mary as broken. I treated her with tender caution. To me the glue line on her neck was painfully obvious. I worried that someday I’d get to the pearly gates and have to explain to God how and why Mary’s neck snapped. For years when I saw a nativity, the first thing I was drawn to was Mary, paying close attention to her neck. Was she broken?

This year, perhaps for the first time ever, I look at all the Marys of the world and wonder, is she loved? Are we loved? Do we believe we are all love-able? In this world of intense pain and suffering, suddenly and finally broken feels less magnificent than love.

My grandpa, a gifted artist who made the nativity figures, also had a beautiful voice. Each year growing up we went to Mid-night Mass, where he was part of the choir. They always sang, Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming. This is still my favorite Christmas song. I hear it, no matter who is singing, in the tune and tenor of his voice.  Reminding me that like my grandpa’s life, love is born through both through the work of our hands and the songs of our heart.

“It came a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter, when half spent was the light.”

Oh love, this season I embrace you fully and expectantly. I watch in awe as you, I, we unfold and bloom and grow. I’ve spent too long thinking of myself as still broken, despite the healing I have known. I’ve lived so cautiously and carefully. Fearing others will see the glue lines on my body and spirit, and that one day I’ll break again. I wrapped my heart in double newspaper and placed it in an old shoe box in the basement for protection.

Oh love, I welcome you. All of you, not compartmentalized parts or sides of you. I sit with you beside the fire, nativity scenes lining the piano top, remembering all the ways you have always been here, and how you show up unexpected and anew on cold nights when the light is quickly fading.

Deciding together life is for living and loving not hiding in cedar chests and smelling like mothballs when we dare come out. Drinking hot cocoa. Nibbling sugar cookies. Gazing at the tree. Listening to my grandpa’s hymn. Giving thanks for all the lessons we learn from Mary and the baby, and the gifts we all receive at this birth.

I’m unwrapping the miraculous, life-giving, star blazing realization that we can break without becoming forever broken. That love is limited when broken into pieces, treated as something to be earned. That we are unconditionally loved for who we are and not for what we hold. That the dance of love begins when we courageously step into loving ourselves, attuned to sacred music and rhythms, undeterred by those who laugh and judge us from the stands.

Lovingly,

Rebecca & 10 Camels

Above is your invitation to unwrap love. May this letter guide you to releasing all that leaves you feeling broken and/or unloveable. May it help you hold the pain of the world without breaking from the heaviness of it all. I’d love to hear your thoughts on love. Comment here. Or email me directly at 10camels@substack.com. I will write back.