7 Things Giving Me Nourishment This COVID Christmas
“Baby, it’s COVID outside,” reads a new Christmas ornament I bought. Another celebrates 2020 as “our first pandemic Christmas.” For many of us, this holiday seems to offer little good aside from new opportunities for snarky humor.
But as I reflected in a recent Christmas letter, I’m starting to see new growth in the limbs it seems this pandemic has brutally pruned. Helping that growth? Some of the practices and encouragements giving me nourishment amid Alaska’s vanishing light and increasing snow.
Biola University's daily Advent series, which combines music, visual art, poetry and scripture.
The music of Porter's Gate, which I can't recommend highly enough. This year they released albums on Justice and Lament (those links go to Spotify, but find more listening options on their website).
Regular prayer with friends.
Thrift-store shopping: find a few of my repurposed garment stories on Instagram.
Seeing a counselor.
Costco's dried mangos (since I can't get the unsulphured Trader Joe's apricots here; *sniff*).
Watching the growth of a plant I started a few weeks into the pandemic. It began as just a bare stem above several leaves from a cutting that dated back to a silent retreat I spent napping. But after some time in just the sun and a bottle of water, that bare branch has sprouted nearly a dozen leaves.
I cling to the hope that's a metaphor for this season in which it sometimes feels like most of life has been pruned away from us. Toward the end of Alaska's winter (the pandemic's start), the bare-branched and lifeless-looking trees I passed on walks struck a deep chord in me. I, too, felt pruned of almost all the had been living. But with time, nature cloaked those trees in new garments: buds that gave way to leaves, then flowers and sometimes fruit.
Often as I've looked up at the glorious mountain ranges encircling Anchorage this past year, I've thought back to the Bible verses that speak of one's help coming from the mountains. Those peaks remain impervious to this pandemic. Sure, the slopes may have gotten fewer tourists this summer, but they haven't changed one bit. Try as we might, much of nature defies our efforts to disrupt it — mountains in particular. Though life often feels out of control these days, I find a lot of comfort in the mountains' reminder of my smallness and the limits of what humans can do, for both evil and good.
As the writer and philosopher James K.A. Smith wrote recently, "I am convinced that our best hope for better politics is to resist ... the broader temptation, of late, to let the political override every other aspect of being human. Pretending we are always and only political animals is its own form of reductionism. In such a flattened world of politicISM, attending to other facets of being human is its own act of resistance.
"...While the political fanatic castigates anything else as either trivial or irresponsible, an incarnational humanism prizes the multifaceted richness of being-in-the-world: that I am made for more than voting or emoting; that I am made to make and revel in beautiful things; that I am most fully human when I am also delighted and mesmerized, provoked and caressed, when I dissolve in laughter with friends and weep at the end of a novel."
Perhaps gazing at mountains and plants, too, fosters that fullness of humanity. May you laugh, weep and revel in beauty this holiday season, and find your sense of self expanded alongside the pruning this strange 2020 has brought.