Advent Heals the Hurt
Friday, December 12, 2025
Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Author Stephanie Duncan Smith writes about her experience of suffering a miscarriage during the Advent season. She recounts how averse she felt to the holiday celebrations in her time of grief:
For the first time in my life, I did not go to the Christmas Eve service. I couldn’t stomach that kind of joy…. I couldn’t participate straight-faced in this remembrance of the ultimate pregnancy narrative, this birth story to end all birth stories, in which God made it from embryo to first howling breath—but my daughter did not.
Cole Arthur Riley writes, “There is no greater exhaustion than a charade of spirituality.” [1] I simply had no energy to keep up the charade.
Duncan Smith describes how Advent honors the darkness present in our lives and world:
When you’re hurting, the only thing worse than the hurt itself is the intimate injury of being told your hurt isn’t that bad, that your pain is somehow unjustified. There is no greater trauma than this invalidation when what you most need is empathetic witness. That’s what Advent felt like to me.
But it wasn’t Advent itself I was bucking against. It was the saccharine, the spin, the half story with the full gloss that rendered this complex coming of God into one-dimensional joy that excludes all other experiences.
The Incarnation always brings good news, but it never minimizes the realness of our pain. Advent declares the hope that a light is coming, but first it declares the truth that the world right now is so very dark. In all the festivities of this season, the threads of Advent and Christmas are commonly confused. The celebration of Christmas only means so much if it bypasses the great waiting, the great groaning, of Advent itself. But this is where the story—and the sacred year itself—begins.
The first language of this expectant season is not bell carols but groaning—the audial ache of a hurting world.
The God of Advent is not a God of indifference, but the God who imagined mirror neurons into existence—the cell network responsible for so much of what makes us human, which is the basic ability to read and respond to the emotional needs of others. Every human encounter of empathy begins with mirror neurons firing in witness to pain.
It is fitting, then, that the sacred year begins with Advent. Human pain is the call—every nerve ending crying out. The Incarnation is the response—every mirror neuron of God firing, volcanic in awakening. God hears the crash and cries of our great fall and, like a mother, comes running. Emmanuel rushes through time and space to be not just near our hurt, but human with us in it.
What I had missed was the very essence of Advent: This is an entire season dedicated to hearing the hurt and naming the night. We are not just allowed to do so, we are openly called to do so.
______________________________________________
John Chaffee 5 on Friday
1.
“Glory to God in the Highest, peace on earth, and goodwill toward mankind.”
Sometimes, I think that we forget how radical the Bible actually is.
God is not some cosmic pharaoh, some divine Genghis Khan, or some holy tyrant. The beginning of the Nativity story in Luke tells of a completely different story, one that completely discredits every previous conception of God.
Yahweh is wholly invested in “peace on earth” and has nothing but “goodwill toward mankind.”
2.
“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
– Earnest Hemingway, American Author
On the heels of the quote above, and in keeping with the insistence that the God revealed in the infant Jesus is peaceful, I would like to offer this one from Hemingway.
Over the past 5 weeks, I have been working with a Mennonite congregation, and have been presented with the topic of nonviolence and being a “conscientious objector” to war. It has honestly been refreshing and quite stirring to have so many conversations about this topic.
Church history contains many attempts by people far more intelligent than I am to offer nuanced takes on whether there is such a thing as a “just war.” In fact, in seminary I had to write a paper on the topic (and I wish I could find it again)!
War often takes vices that would be damnable for a person to commit and then scales them across whole nations, making those vices “acceptable.”
For instance…
Stealing bread is seen as wrong, but starving your enemy’s army to death is not.
Stabbing an innocent person you never met before in the street is absolutely evil, but dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is “necessary.”
Do you see what I mean?
And believe me, I completely understand that this is a complex topic. I have no easy solution or response to the possibility of a just war. All I am saying is that in the past month, I have met some fascinating people who were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War and instead worked in hospitals…
And that is an excellent witness to their faith to do such a thing.
3.
“You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as the persecutor.”
– Rene Girard, Social Philosopher and Theologian
Learning about Rene Girard’s conceptualization of the Scapegoat Mechanism was an utter paradigm shift for me.
Girard helped to show me that the Christian story revolves around the Crucifixion, and how it exposes the destructive ways that we allow “sacrificing/scapegoating” other people on the altar of our own desires.
For me, Girard’s work forced me to confront my own worldview and confess that I may have had the Christian story in front of me for literal decades, but still did not understand this one Gospel truth: Christ became the sacrificed scapegoat to reveal humanity’s shameful addiction to victimizing others.
Essentially, by becoming the victim, God revealed that we are far too comfortable being the victimizers of one another.
I fear I am not making any sense. Or, I am not articulating myself well.
Just go read Rene Girard’s work. It will change your life.
4.
“The false self is deeply entrenched. You can change your name and address, religion, country, and clothes. But as long as you don’t ask it to change, the false self simply adjusts to the new environment. For example, instead of drinking your friends under the table as a significant sign of self worth and esteem, if you enter a monastery, as I did fasting the other monks under the table could become your new path to glory. In that case, what would have changed? Nothing.”
– Father Thomas Keating, Trappist Monk
Last week, we had another Zoom meetup of the Philly chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society. We chatted through ch. 5 of New Seeds of Contemplation, which delves into the topic of sainthood and Merton’s teaching on the true self/false self.
In some ways, Keating’s understanding of the true self/false self teaching overlaps with Merton’s, but at a certain point, they diverge and take on different nuances.
During our Zoom call, we agreed on one point: The best spiritual teachers do not teach you a truth or fact, but rather place before you a question that will haunt you the rest of your life.
For Thomas Keating and Thomas Merton, the question they present us is, “Are you living from your false self today? How can you be more honest and truthful today?”
5.
“Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness.”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German Lutheran Pastor
The Christmas story tells us something quite profound…
If God were to become a king, he would not come to be born in a palace to royalty, but to two poor and homeless young adults.
Not only that, but this God has no interest in grasping after power, honor, reputation, vanity, arrogance, and individualism.
It is a strange, sad thing, then, that some followers of Jesus do chase after those things. It instead tells us that the values of the Christian God have not exactly trickled down to his followers.
Fortunately, every Christmas is a fresh opportunity to say that Jesus reveals to us a God that we could not imagine… and therefore it must be true.
