Christmas Eve Prayer

2025

Loving God

Living God,

God of the after-hours Walmart lot,

of the dumpster dive and the needle exchange,

God of the mutual aid network and the trans life line

God in detention,

God in solitary,

Baby God in the rubble of Gaza,

God with long Covid because we would no longer mask,

God who hides migrants and organizes sex workers,

God who is water who is life

God who streams past discarded tires in the half-frozen Delaware

and like a scraggly winter deer,

picks Your way perilously along the icy highway,

You frighten us.

Can we be honest?

With your strange beauty and terrifying tenderness…

How easily broken,

You take us aback.

You are too fragile,

A baby, in this world!

A tender green shoot in the snow.

It is too much.

Too little.

It is easier to take refuge

amid the pine-scented air fresheners and the too-bright lights,

amid the too much sugar and not enough silence,

amid the same old songs sung the same old way,

in the blaring merriness of the season.

But some part of us knows

what passes so often for holiday happiness is hollow,

the gaiety gaslighting,

disrespectful of the desperation in which we actually sit.

We are hiding from you.

Please don’t let us miss you.

Please don’t let this night pass in bleary cheer

And leave us to face the collapse

Of everything

Alone.

We need you.

We fear you, not the way we fear a tyrant.

We fear for you for you remind us of us—

the helpless, hungry, desperately loving parts of us.

Deep down we know that

to love what is mortal

is what we are made for

and that makes heartbreak inevitable.

We fear you and we long for you.

Forgive our tentative approach.

Accept our awkwardness.

Uncle us until we unmask,

Unclench fearful fists.

Break our hard hearts, God.

Break us open.

Break us the way a laboring person’s water breaks.

Crack our hearts the way their heart cracks

when they first hear their baby cry,

Splintered by a love so overpowering,

willing to go to any lengths to keep you safe.

Come and break us open tonight.

Break the yokes.

Break the warheads.

Break the ICE and the prison walls.

Break our certainty and our urgency.

Break the too-fast vehicle passing too near the deer.

We can’t do it anymore.

Not like this.

Swaddle us in your tenderness

And teach us a new way.

Amen.