Christmas Eve
Suggested Readings:
One Sunday this fall, as I entered my church’s sanctuary, I was greeted by Steve, a resident of the Center for Living and Learning in Franklin, Tennessee, which supports adults with intellectual disabilities and mental-health challenges. He called me Ms. Trey. My husband, Trey, died three years ago, yet Steve never remembers that, nor has he ever called me by my own name. This time he asked, “How’s Trey doing?” With a bit of hesitation, I said, “He’s doing well.” Steve smiled, satisfied with my answer.
That exchange stayed with me. Steve’s inability to grasp Trey’s death is not denial; it is a kind of innocent conviction that love and friendship remain real. Presence is not severed by absence. I have come to think that this is, in its own way, a glimpse of Advent faith — the conviction that what is most real in God endures beyond the boundaries of time and loss.
The angelic announcement in Luke speaks in the present tense: “to you is born this day.” The wording insists that divine presence is not merely a memory from Bethlehem but an ongoing reality. The Incarnation means that God’s nearness continues — that the eternal has entered human time in a way that cannot be undone. Christ’s birth is not a moment receding into history but a declaration that God remains with us.
The shepherds who first heard those words were keeping watch through the night. Their lives were ordinary and uncertain, yet it was within that ordinariness that glory appeared. So, it is for us: revelation comes not as an interruption of reality but as a deepening of it. The holy enters quietly into the fabric of human experience — into grief, remembrance and relationships.
When Steve asks about Trey, I am reminded that divine presence is not bound by comprehension. The love that bound Trey to me, and Steve to both of us, still participates in the life of God, where nothing beloved is lost. In that light, Steve’s unknowing words become a form of witness: Trey is well, as all of us are well, because we are held within the presence that Advent proclaims.
Sally Holt
Professor of Religion
