• SOULPRINTS: My Christmas Tree Confession

• SIGNPOSTS ON SUBSTACK!

• A PRAYER FOR A NEW YEAR

• TRACKERS: Pick a topic for 2025!

Here’s a Christmas confession: my family doesn’t believe in Christmas trees—that is, the same one year after year. We’ve deconstructed the piney faith of years gone by.

Maybe Mom started me on this path. A picture from the 1970’s shows a pile of presents under the short, white-frocked, red-balled, artificial tree. (That was the one Dad fought an elderly lady to get the day after Christmas the previous year when it was half-priced.) No more of the old string-popcorn-and-tinsel with big lights for our Midwestern family!

After Jan and I married, we stayed with the plastic décor as we moved from city to city. That is, until the ominous live tree debacle. Who knew all six of us had severe pine tree allergies? The $600 in doctor bills and medicine put a dent in my pastor’s salary for sure. The next year we splurged to buy a magnificent, brand-name, lights installed, 9-footer for the new house. It took every ornament we could think of, plus some red sequined special effects, to do it justice. No warranty on the lights though, and that beauty bit the dust in three years. I wasn’t unhappy, as I once nearly died getting that monster out of the attic.

Another year, with all six of us plus a parade of college friends living in a three-bedroom apartment, we just printed a picture of a tree and hung it on the living room wall. Santa still honored the sincere effort.

Two years ago, with the twin two-year-olds prowling around, we made the move to a thin, tall, Twiggy style tree that was placed on a cabinet out of reach of little hands. To my satisfaction, the lights still work this year and only about 30 ornaments are needed.

Through all the evergreen iterations that have adorned the house, Love has remained the same. The tree pictured, artificial as it was, watched my family come together to exchange gifts and happy moments. Across many years now, the meals, gifts, laughter, some tears, and lots of changes have carried us to once again celebrate the love of God revealed in Jesus. The shape of the tree is far less important than the shape of our mind and heart.

Trees seem to be a little like God. God’s essential nature of love has remained unchanging across 13 billion years. That Presence of love was with our stone age ancestors around the village fire just as it is with our hearts today in all the varied expressions of our Christmas celebrations. But like the many editions of the family tree, God’s experience changes every yoctosecond in collaboration with the evolving universe. God is learning with and loving, without coercion, every entity towards the ultimate Unity.  Even more, as the gifts of family connection will stay with us long after the wrapping paper is gone, so God will continue to gift all with Love that lasts forever. In this divine mercy, we are just beginning to experience, “the breadth and length and height and depth,  and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:18-19)

I hope your tree, whether plastic or real, short or tall, or enjoyed in the community festival, carries you with that Love this Christmas and beyond. 

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Faith Calls Us to Joy by Barbara Holmes and Brian McLaren

“Our current circumstances require resilience and the steadfast belief that joy is a healing inner event and a spiritual practice.…

We have to prepare ourselves to live good lives of defiant joy even in the midst of chaos and suffering. This can be done. It has been done by billions of our ancestors and neighbors. Their legacy teaches us to see each intensifying episode of turbulence as a labor pain from which a new creative opportunity can be born. Life will be tough; the only question is whether we will become tougher, wiser, and more resilient.…”

Read the full and uplifting meditation from Barbara Holmes and Brian McLaren from here: Center for Action and Contemplation

What would help you experience greater well-being in 2025? I’d like your opinion through the survey on the TRACKERS Community Facebook page.

Follow the link to share your choice from 5 possible topics of positive psychology, progressive theology, or community building.

If you don’t see what interests you, email me directly at [email protected]

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