At a retreat I attended about a year ago, with a bunch of grown-up spiritual people, the agenda included a “bedtime story” on the second night of our time together. It surprised me when my eyes leaked at that idea.
Last month I was at a different gathering of mostly women, to which we were encouraged to bring a picture of ourselves as children. I hadn’t looked back at my childhood pictures for a long time. I found the one with this post, with my brother, when I was five years old. Gazing at my own face as a little girl made me think about how trusting I was, how safe I felt in the surrounding presence of family and friends who loved me and had my best interests at heart.
People who would read to me at bedtime.
Then I figured out—even before kindergarten—how to read on my own. Which meant the intimacy of being read a bedtime story was no longer needed. It was perhaps the first of many steps toward the independence and complexity we must navigate as we grow up.
My tears last year, remembering being held as a child, were startling because it hadn’t occurred to me that I missed that.
Don’t we all become a bit childlike when Advent arrives? This season that begins four Sundays before Christmas gets us back in touch with decades of Christmases that we recall with deep emotion—love and gratitude, as well as (for some of us) hurting and disappointment. I will have ornaments on my Christmas tree, and decorations around my house, that date from the whole sweep of my life, including my very earliest years. How about you?
There’s aan African American spiritual that claims the “lost child”-ness in all of us.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
A long way from home, a long way from home.
I recently came across a recording of this spiritual by Sweet Honey in the Rock. Whether or not you already know this song, I hope you’ll take the six minutes to listen to this version. What if we came to Advent aware how far we feel from home?
Our worship series for Advent—Words for the Beginning—taps into what we needed and, I hope received, when we snuggled in for a bedtime story. Words in scripture and elsewhere that remind us that we’re a blessing, that we are indelibly connected to others, that hope is real, that we can find our way even when things look bleak. I hope that’s what we got told as children. I hope it’s what we’re telling our own children, and theirs, and theirs.
And others around us that desperately need to know these truths that have carried us.
Because we’re always beginning again. All of us. That motherless child that we are woke up today and will wake up tomorrow and ever tomorrow having to put on the appearance of adulthood, ready to face the gamut of challenges and horrors and memories and possibilities that come our way, because life does include all those things. I hope those beginning words, those words that nourished us as children, will echo bravely in our hearts as we remember them in this season.
