It’s Christmas Eve and I can hear the sounds of a family enjoying being together above me. A son helps his mother figure out her latest gadget, a father naps in his chair, all while little lights flicker making the room glow with magic.
Where am I you ask?
I am in the basement. I’m wrapped in blankets clutching my teddy bear on the pullout couch in “my room.” I’m sure they think I’m napping or some such thing. I’ve left them no indication that I’m doing anything else because I want them to enjoy their time together. But instead of taking a nap like I assume they think I’m doing, I’m crying.
I’m crying because my body hurts a lot.
I’m crying because it’s Christmas Eve and I really don’t feel like singing songs about how the world is alright and peace has come. I don’t want to be thankful that God became embodied today. Today I’d like to just be angry.
I’d like to be angry that “Good will to all humans” didn’t happen. I’d like to be angry that while my friends protest, because their lives–according to the justice system in this country–don’t matter, my family fills their hearts and their newsfeeds with racist sentiments. I want to be angry because they passed that racism onto me and it took decades before I could see that it was in my own heart too. I want to be angry because I don’t know how to talk to irrational and hateful people that call pastors “thugs” when they stand up for truth and have the “wrong” color skin. I want to be angry that because I am related to these people I love them even though they make me want to hurl and never talk to them again. I’m angry because after reading about the everyday struggles of non-white-straight people in the “Land of the Free” almost every day for 6 months (because I’ve been seeking out these stories for that long) I’m exhausted and want to hide from it all because I don’t know that to do. I am shit ass angry at myself that that is my internal response to suffering. God becoming a colored baby doesn’t seem to have made a lick of difference to how we treat people with deeper skin pigments.
The angels it seems lied. The prophets it seems haven’t spoken correctly.
And then selfishly there is the matter of my body is in enough pain to stop a freaking horse. Blacking out now has become a monthly ritual. And I’m not sure what good this male savior does for this woman’s body who can’t seem to get through the cycles that so many want to tell me are good and holy.
This embodied God-man doesn’t seem to do me or black America a bit of good.
There seems to me to be a distinct lack of magic this year. Instead of magic, there is anger and pain, often at the same time. So I’m in the basement on Christmas Eve because I can’t seem to stop the tears of anger and pain. They fall like rain in Seattle: silent, steady, and constant. The more I try to stop them the more they seem to come.
I don’t know what to do with that.
I don’t know how to cope.
I know that I don’t want to go to church and sing the carols that seem like lies. I know that in two Christmases I will hopefully be a pastor and they are not allowed to angerly shout “BULL SHIT” during the candlelit Christmas Eve Service. So for maybe the thousandth time I think that God has goofed and called the wrong girl into this ministry.
The Confessional 