Holding Hope with Dr. Charisse Gillett
We are in that time of year when school, church, and family can start to feel overwhelming. Holiday season is underway! I was in a store the day before Halloween. One aisle displayed Halloween costumes and paraphernalia. Right across the same aisle Christmas decor filled the shelves.
Gah. This is not merely a consumer problem. This season is structured by autumn rites. Christian and Jewish holy days. The shortening of daylight as the earth tilts toward winter in the North. An approaching end of school semesters. And the close of another calendar and financial year for many organizations. Due dates. Grading. Travel. Meals. Concerts. Gifts. Parties. All of this activity is laced with expectations. Personal, family, and communal dreams, disappointments, and dread.
What do you hold onto in the long holiday season that is upon us?
What grounds you? Keeps you steady? Gives you a touchpoint?
So much more than personal stress
This year, the holiday season is crowded and complicated with other impossible situations. Systems are failing and vulnerable children and families in the US are waking up hungry this morning. Parents are unsure how they will meet basic needs. Millions of federal employees and military personnel are working without pay. Immigrants (and US citizens) are living in danger and fear of being disappeared under polices that enforce quotas for deportation. Ongoing war continues around the planet including the war zones in Ukraine and Gaza. And basic human rights are shrinking in the US.
How do you hold onto hope in this world? In this season?
Here is what my friend Dr. Charisse Gillett, author of That Little Girl, has to say about how we hang on… I asked her to share with us a word of encouragement for seminary students. But first I asked her to talk about “breaking barriers” as the first woman and African American leading Lexington Theological Seminary.
“In our current climate,” she says, “It is very easy to lose hope and to lose site of WHY. Why you’re in seminary. Why you made the sacrifices to be in a theological institution.”
Sometimes when she talks about holding onto hope in our vocation and God’s calling, Dr. Gillett says, people may dismiss her as overly optimistic. But she is talking about something much deeper than “sugar plums and fairies.”
Given the current world situation, and the immanent holiday season, we need what Dr. Gillett recommends: We need “to connected with our WHY.” Staying connected to that irresistible call of our vocation. That will foster hope in the overwhelming world in which we are living.
Writing new future stories
For eight years I consulted with Renewal House, a place of shelter and healing for moms recovering from addiction while caring for children. I worked as a pastoral counselor with individual women and families. And I facilitated spirituality groups. I also supported the staff in their very demanding work. In the last four or five of those years we tried facing the holiday season in a new way. Starting in October we worked with women living at RH to write new future stories.
Often painful events filled a woman’s past stories of her holidays. She coped with trauma, family violence, and profound losses by using substances to numb and escape her pain. This coping strategy could lead to compounding her situation. All of the future stories she told herself were versions of a painful past — on repeat. Or she would have Hallmark fairy tales to dream about — impossible future stories that were almost guaranteed to disappoint and distress her and her children.
So we worked on expanding each woman’s possible future stories. We helped her write multiple ways the holidays could go. A variety of positive paths. She set modest goals and envisioned multiple possibilities. What we know from the work of Andy Lester, is this kind of future storytelling builds resilience and expands the capacity to hope.
How will you hope this season?
May God’s presence and care ground you through the coming days, weeks and months. May you find encouragement by staying connected to your WHY. And may you expand your possible future stories, filling you with resilience and hope.
