Letter from Lindy Dec 5

Beloved Pilgrims,

How was your Thanksgiving? I pray the day met you wherever you wanted to be with whomever you needed at your side. If it did not, I hold you tight. Sometimes we just don’t know, do we, what we want, what we need? Confessionally, I longed for a solitary Thanksgiving, so I could open my heart in the way it needed to, without putting on the mask of being “ok” for those who love me because they worry so.

Because Thanksgiving always falls next door to Advent, Lanny and I rarely traveled to be with family, doubling back so quickly thereafter could be such a hassle. Nor did family travel to us, knowing the work demands just prior and just after, wanting to honor space for me to “do” church. So the Wood thanksgiving ritual became quieter, more intimate, over the years, especially as Thompson grew older and had boyfriends whose families had large raucous gatherings of many layers. She tended to get absorbed into those festivities because let's face it, lots more fun than her weird, anti-social parents. Thanksgiving became a quasi-ritualistic 24 hour date where we would spend the day cooking together (our favorite) and then sharing a late candlelight dinner, closing the night out with some inventive pumpkin dessert Lanny concocted.

I had asked siblings in June to holidaysurround my mom to recognize my year of “firsts,” but alas that did not unfold. So my plans shifted to wanting to create Thanksgiving for my mom. My sister, Leslie, and my niece, Cassie, did calendar gymnastics to come back to Durham, even though they had just been here during NOLA’s evacuation, and Cassie staying on, so I could meet Lennox. Although only a brief visit, it became kairos time. The three of us together caring for my mom post-surgery (even giving her a haircut) and having a girls-only thanksgiving meal that was beautiful and lovely and easy and full of stories, as if we had been doing it for years. We actually sat down for dinner exactly when we planned.

A first!

Friday offered grace and space for my sister, niece and me to deep-dive our grieving, exploring some of the complicated emotions that ensue with an untimely death. It was as if God planned to hold sacred space for us to fall into all along, even in our unknowing. This threshold allowed us to touch, if but for a moment, these words from Jan Richardson’s Advent devotion,

“Advent reminds us that the deeper we enter into the love that God holds for us, the more difficult it can become to distinguish our endings from our beginnings. When an end comes, it can feel cataclysmic. This knowledge does not always come as a comfort.

We see this repeatedly in the scriptures that Advent and Christmas give to us. As we travel our own path over ground that can suddenly fall away, the question Mary poses to the archangel in Luke 1 becomes our own: How can this be?

But the sacred texts tell us also that when God shows up, God intends for us to know that loss and change are not where the story stops. In the endings upon endings, in the chaos, in the lostness and helplessness we often feel, what appears to be absence proves to be something quite other than that. The emptiness unfurls and unfolds itself to reveal a presence that holds love at its heart.”

For now, a touch was all I could bear, but Advent will beckon us further if we dare to follow its star. Advent invites us to trust God’s love that continually makes its way toward us. “A star,” Richardson concludes, “that holds a light that remains with us amid every change. This light may remain hidden from our sight for a very long time. Endings sometimes have a way of confounding our vision, of stoking fear and uncertainty that can make it hard to find our way.

And still (and still) this season tells us of a God who comes to us even by paths we cannot see, a God who meets us in the deepest darkness, becoming the light that goes with us from here.”

I pray for God’s light for each of you through the movements of this season: hope, peace, joy and love,

Pastor Lindy (she/her)whypronouns matter

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Susan Barco