Advent & Christmas 2024: Star Stuff

A downloadable Advent calendar to make the season stellar, sidereal, shimmering

Hiiiii and Merry Thanksgiving everyone! Do you need a little spiritual practice that will help you both touch grass and put your head in the heavens? Why yes you do? Well in that case, click here for this year’s Alternative Advent and Christmas Calendar (#26!).

Print it on pretty paper if you have any (I love gold vellum), stick it on your fridge, and give yourself and anyone you live with an EASY way to kindle a Christmas spirit every day, from the First Sunday in Advent (Dec 1 this year) through Christmastide. It’s OK to skip a few days/peek ahead/do them all at once in a splendid scavenger hunt!

And feel free to *share this widely* with friends, with your church or other communities—just please give me attribution if you do.

✨

When I look at your heavens, the work of Your fingers,

    the moon and the stars that You have established;

what are humans that You are mindful of us,

    mortals that You care for us?

Psalm 8:3-4

The wise ones set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 

Matthew 2:9b-10

✨

When our son was about 4 years old, we visited a friend in the country. Dusk found us all snuggling around a campfire. Sitting on his father’s lap, our city kid looked up at the stars winking on one by one above him and said, “Daddy, what are those tiny silver things up in the sky?”

Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. Kamala Harris preached this line in her concession speech after Election Day. It was borrowed from the last speech Martin Luther King ever gave. Here’s more from MLK’s original: 

“The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That's a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.”

He could have written these words for us, living in late 2024 as we await the start of the Trump administration 2.0 and the evils it portends for immigrants and BIPOC people, women, poor people, queer people, the Earth itself. 

How will we respond? What is ours to do? Can we even see the stars in this current dark night of the soul, or are they hidden behind a thick, immoveable cloud? A cloud of unknowing (at best), or nuclear winter (at worst)? We sense that postcards and protests won’t cut it this time around. 

I am in the dark as much as you are (in spite of the ridiculous amount of news I read). But I know this: it’s time to cast our eyes up. Like my erstwhile little boy discovering that epic silver-strewn weighted blanket above, we look up in wonder. The light of heaven–some of it from ancient, already-dead stars–are both a message in a bottle and an encouragement to go on, gifting us their light for the way forward.

The first part of our assignment this Advent and Christmas: be the magi. We see through the schemes of an unhinged king. We follow our own moral compass and a star that leads to “overwhelming joy.” Joy is our job.

We’re also Mother Mary in a cobalt robe strewn with stars, singing about God casting down the mighty from their thrones (cf. Dec. 12!)

But we are not only star-gazers like the magi, or star-bearers like Mary. We are, in fact, stardust: made of the same stuff as those ethereal, enduring bodies. Every cell of our body holds an ancient memory of our origins. We contain within us all the light of heaven, all that explosive energy, all the capacity for wayfinding that the constellations offered the ancients and still offer us when human technologies fail. Despair is not an option.

Don’t just see the stars – be the stars

We well wonder (like the Psalmist) how the God who made the stars can have any regard for us weeny little wayward humans, always bumbling around and breaking things. Stars remind us of how insignificant we are against the scale of the universe. But they also remind us that something that appears infinitesimal is actually huge, and hugely influential (um: newborn baby Jesus, anyone?). It’s just that it’s so far away from where we stand that is seems small.

So here is the second part of our Christmas assignment. This season, do something small that might turn out to be huge, you star-strutters. Throw a neighborhood holiday open house–especially if you live in a purple neighborhood. Volunteer for Planned Parenthood, or read banned books for your local library’s story hour. Join an immigrant rights org and help pack the court at a deportation hearing. Small moments of connection with strangers who become friends, getting into good trouble, practicing holy mischief and nonviolent resistance feels good. It also ripples out and up. 

It’s been a year of cosmic wonders…

A full solar eclipse that got even atheists looking up at heaven and saying “oh my God!” A temporary second moon, and aurora borealis taking its roadshow as far south as Florida. These signs and wonders don’t predict our future. But they do remind us us to keep our gaze up, to shine back in silent communication with other celestial bodies.

So shine that tiny light of yours into what looks like darkness. You will be surprised how big the light might turn out to be after all.  Here’s a benediction lifted from Joni Mitchell’s classic song Woodstock:

We are stardust

Billion year old carbon

We are golden

Caught in the devil’s bargain

And we’ve got to get ourselves

Back to the garden

Much love (as I throw a little glitter over you),

✨ Molly ✨