Dear Friends,
One positive adaptation of U.S. society to our pluralism and diversity is that it is no longer common practice to say “Merry Christmas,” since only just over half of the U.S. population actually celebrates Christmas. The ubiquitous Christmas music played in pharmacies and restaurants, and the many advertisements showing affluent families, usually white, opening presents around a tree, can be not only exclusionary, but alienating, to those who don’t celebrate Christmas.
Additionally, Christmas season in the U.S. is so steeped in consumerism that the greeting is devoid of its original religious meaning. In the Middle Ages Christmas was a season of solemn penitence until St. Frances of Assisi replaced it with the idea that the birth of Jesus should be celebrated with gifts and festivities, as well as homage to sentient beings, which is where the motif of the animals we now associate with the “creche,” and the Christmas, as we know it in most of the western world, came to be.
“Happy Holidays” is a familiar and well-meaning alternative to “Merry Christmas,” and theoretically encompasses many of the winter festivals across cultural groups as well as the new year. But it can also somehow dilute the sacred purpose which such greetings are meant to achieve; a sharing of goodwill that might even transcend the religious origins of the holiday; a blessing.
And now, more than ever, we need a blessing.
Many of us--staff and faculty--remember what it was like being a student this time of year; the energy and focus required for finals when our bodies felt more like hibernating. Excited as we might have been for a break, going back to family can be, for some, complicated and disorienting. Staff are also under pressure now; faculty are grading exams and trying to wrap up semesters; Residence Life is getting everyone safely moved out for the term; and in Facilities and Dining, there is the reorganizing of meal plans, scrambling to finish end of the year projects, and vacation times, making for short-staffed terms and longer and busier shifts. The end of the calendar year makes for intense deadlines in alumnae, development, and budget offices.
On top of all of this, everyone that I talk to says some version of, it’s been a hard fall. We are living in frightening times, always under the cloud of the climate crisis whether or not we feel it as such, the global threat to democracy, the erosion of hard-earned progressive laws and policies, the greed of corporations which have gutted communities and robbed people of agency and hope.
Here at Smith, community members have lost spouses, students have lost parents. Of the greatest significance to the Smith community was, of course, the sudden death of Swetha Donepudi, class of 2024. May she rest in infinite joy and peace. Those who were close to Swetha have been working through their indescribable shock and deep grief; those who did not know her are likely in varying states of disorientation as they come to terms with this unwelcome reminder of the fragility of life.
Over the past few years, all these forces have been like a gale of wind, in which the pandemic has been swept with these other forces into a perfect storm. Emerging adults everywhere report mental and emotional suffering at unprecedented levels, and it is no secret that this is felt right here on the Smith campus. Physician Gabor Maté says this of this “storm:” “… the pandemic actually revealed to us how toxic our idea of normal has been, because it showed us the desperate need for human connection that we all have. But this is in a culture that has been isolating and atomizing individuals for a long time, where loneliness has been an epidemic for decades. It showed the noxious effect of racism and inequality… The normal that we came from, in my perspective, was already a toxic normal. We don’t want to go back to it.”
While the de-pathologizing of mental illness has been a universal good, and a first step in reversing the isolation and atomization and all of our sufferings have different and unique roots, we are all nevertheless on the same ground. It would be short sighted to say “these are hard times” since life has always been hard for some people in this society; people whose ancestors are enslaved Africans, indigenous people, immigrants and refugees to name a few. However, it would be equally short sighted to not notice that, as Maté points out, the epidemics of loneliness and despair have emerged not in isolation but out of the foundations of this society. There are structural influences upon personal lives.
Certainly, we need a blessing.
The winter solstice holiday comes at the physically darkest time of the year, when days are the shortest. The origins of the Christmas we know, in a vision derived from St. Francis in 1223, actually originated well before that from a Pagan celebration of the return of the light. Chanukah, Diwali, and the French Fête des Lumières - Festival of Lights, to note three examples, while they have their own distinctive historical associations, are festivals of light which serve to represent the ways we endure the darkest days by creating our own beams of luminosity. Both the time of year and this moment in time, more than ever, call for a blessing, a way of demonstrating hope and unconditional well wishes.
We all want to be seen and known, greeted with a recognition of who we are as individuals, not merely as members of a society or community. For a greeting or a blessing to be meaningful, we need to feel it is sincere and can be sincerely received. But perhaps it is significant that salutations in the U.S., especially here in New England during the long nights and short days, seem to be one of the few ways we have of greeting one another in which we acknowledge not only our common humanity but our shared experience—whether it be the darkness of the days or the frailty of the world, and the respective light and strength.
So how can we bless each other, when well-intentioned holiday greetings can have the opposite effect, and for those who do not feel happy, these statements can only reinforce alienation. How can we bless each other through our differences, sometimes our disagreements, and even sometimes our antipathies? How can we bless each other when, in such a diverse environment, some among us even need to shy away from increased social contact, as a way of coping with the intensity of living in community?
Perhaps what holiday greetings do is assure us we are in a world of blessers, surrounded by others who long to bless and be blessed. A blessing not only betokens goodwill or gratitude, but eclipses, if even momentarily, the strife or hardship from which we wish others to be delivered.
Happy Chanukah, a blessing given for the Eight-day Jewish Festival of Lights, commemorates the rededication during the second century B.C.E. of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, after a revolt which successfully put down colonizing powers. Diwali, also a festival of light, celebrates the liberation of the god Ram and his wife Sita from captivity with the help of lantern lights to light their way: May the brightness of lanterns always remain in your life making your life bright and full of happiness!
All these blessings signify victory over darkness, hope in the midst of despair, faith transcending doubt, the strength of a steady boat in the midst of a storm. And perhaps, that is what we are all looking for; not the perfect thing to say but an assurance of a community to hold us in the sea wherein we are all trying to stay afloat.
In her essay Letter to A Young Activist During Troubled Times: Do Not Lose Heart, we were Made for These Times, Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses the images of storms and darkness to refer to the psychic effects of suffering, and how we most powerfully mitigate and ultimately overcome them. She says, "One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. Soul on deck shines like gold in dark times. The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires…to display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these - to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity."
For the light from the lanterns of our souls to be unobscured, we must clear the way, as much as we possibly can, of meanness, harsh judgment of ourselves and others; pettiness, can extinguish the otherwise luminous rays of our own unique humanity. This is not to say we need to be indiscriminately saccharinely sweet, but rather acknowledge that we are all in the same sea, even if not in the same boat. The sea is stormy and dangerous--and we only have each other to stay afloat.
Given all the constraints and complexities, maybe there is very little we can say to each other by way of holiday greeting. But to “bless” also means to show gratitude. Psychologists, ministers, and teachers encourage gratitude: not because we should “count our blessings” in the midst of deprivations, fear has less space within us, we are bundling up gratitude within us.
Perhaps no greetings have the perfect power to bless. Better perhaps that we trust and be trusted; to assume the best, not the worst, of others. All of us who can see, can recognize a smile; all of us who can hear, can pick up a positive tenor, and in the absence of sight or hearing we can sense another's feelings, regardless of the neurological strengths and weaknesses that make up our interpersonal or cultural vantage point. A smile, a nod of the head, sometimes the subtle attitude of another can say it all. Some start conversations, some perform small acts of kindness or assistance, some open doors or put down phones while walking a sidewalk in order to make eye contact.
Pinkola Estés says our souls send out sparks, and that those tiny bits of heat light up the massive flares. Thus, each of our smiles or nods can illuminate a whole world of human relationships.
I think the lantern of my soul shines most brightly when I admit bewilderment, when I don’t pretend I know, or, by contrast, when I speak fiercely my strong conviction, even where to do so might be embarrassing, inappropriate, or offensive. It is often easier to avoid a blessing because we think it will be the wrong one, be intrusive, or misinterpreted. But the common factor, for me anyway, is courage—some things come easily, but other things feel hard. Courage emanates from the lantern of our souls. This time of year, let us surprise ourselves, and one another, with our blessings, however we deliver them, the ones we really mean, the only one we know we cannot live without. However we greet each other this winter season, in between holidays and hard times, let’s do it bravely, with conviction.
Matilda Cantwell is the Director of Religious and Spiritual Life and College Chaplain.
