To The Lonely and Devastated on Christmas

I read a “tweet” on X today- an individual’s account of saying goodbye to his parents on Christmas somewhere in the U.K. This person has a serious physical disorder and must live in a medical facility and his parents came to celebrate the holidays for an hour. After his parents left, he felt devastated to be in a clinical setting, a cold, depersonalized place, devoid of the features of home, comfort, familiarity and without the prospect of future in at home.

Countless people are throbbing in pain today, on Christmas.

Whether they are living in social isolation without having words to describe it or whether they lost someone they loved. Whether they are living in traumatic grief as so many who have lost friends and family to gun violence or to the opiate crisis.

Many are looking at the atrocities being committed across the world, whether most visible in the news or the least visible in the news.

I grew up in a family with a lot of trauma from a lot of different sources. From war, from poverty, from addiction, from rape, you name it. The world created it. I can’t blame my family, not for one moment. But I remember those days keenly in my own life and the particular deep souled sadness on Christmas Day that comes from broken life in a broken world.

I look at this world and the one thing I think is that I hope that we can share safety together. We can’t be safe without each other and we can’t be safe in isolation. Safety is something we hold…