It feels both overwhelming and anticlimactic, the grey of January after the twinkle lights of December. Other than a few stacks of gifts that haven’t yet been assigned cupboard space and a Christmas throw pillow or ornament overlooked in the frenzy of boxing up, my house is back to normal. The kids are back in school. Life has picked up again, and I’m staring down the barrel of a new year.
Despite the mild winter, January feels particularly dreary this year, made heavy by the weight of a broken world, the inauguration of a divisive president, and the stress of personal resolutions and failings. The magic of Christmas, which made the seasonal cold and dark and even stress bearable, is gone. If December was largely a reprieve, from these cares at least, January is a reckoning.
The universality of post-Christmas letdown was probably part of the inspiration behind the poem The Work of Christmas by Howard Thurman:
When the song of the angels is stilled,
when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people,
to make music in the heart.
Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman (1899-1981) was one of America’s greatest mystics and activists. He was an African-American theologian, a gifted educator and author, and a prominent civil rights leader, mentoring many of the civil rights leaders of his era, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was Thurman who introduced nonviolence to the civil rights movement as a response to racism and brutality.

When I feel despair at the civil rights ground we’ve lost recently, ground that was gained through the work and sometimes blood of people like Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, I remind myself that even though things feel bleak, they are nowhere near as bleak as they were in Thurman’s time. He knew, in a way I will never know, what it was to look hate in the face and choose love. He knew the work of justice was hard and sometimes backfired, and he did it anyway. He knew progress moved slowly, when it moved at all. He had every reason to preach retribution or sit in despair, but he didn’t. He chose hope.
The words of Thurman’s poem lodged deep in my heart this Christmas season as I contemplated my impending annual January malaise, compounded this year by the distress of another Trump presidency. Phrases from the poem floated through my mind unbidden like gentle directives. As inauguration day crept closer: Rebuild the nations. As quiet panic over New Year’s resolutions set in: Heal the broken. As I felt rising insecurities and aimlessness: Feed the hungry. As I was overcome by helplessness at the scale of injustice and suffering in the world: Bring peace among the people. As I grappled with despair that so many people idolize Trump and what he stands for: Make music in the heart.
These next four years, I’ve decided that I’m no longer going to fall prey to the outrage bait of “can you believe this shocking/false/offensive thing Trump said” because of course I can believe it, and I can finally see that it doesn’t matter because it’s all a distraction meant to keep us so keyed up in righteous indignation that we become unable to act. I am going to focus on outcomes instead of bombastic red herrings and do what I can in my own sphere to mitigate harm to vulnerable populations.
There is big irony and pain in Trump, the dismantler of DEI initiatives, the fomenter of racism and xenophobia, being inaugurated on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It feels like acid in an already raw wound. But it also feels like a reminder: the marginalized groups living 60+ years ago alongside Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King had it much worse then than they do today, and they had it much worse 60+ years before MLK’s time than they did in the tumultuous 1960’s. Despite the ground we’ve lost, despite the additional ground we may lose in the next four years, Black people and other people of color, LGBTQ people, women, and others have had it worse, much worse, in the shockingly recent past. The US has faced injustice and hate and devastating setbacks before. Today feels dark, but it is not even close to the darkest days this country has seen. Trump and his ilk are a step back, but perspective shows us, and I believe Howard Thurman would tell us, we have a robust precedent for hope.
The Christmas star is gone. The song of the angels is stilled. The shepherds are back with their flocks. The world feels lone and dreary without the lingering light that suffused the Christmas season. But the work of Christmas has just begun.
To learn more about Howard Thurman, you can watch the 2021 PBS documentary Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story.
US Capitol Photo by Heidi Kaden on Unsplash
Photo of Howard Thurman from Smithsonian Digital Archives via Wikipedia
5 Responses
This is beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing it.
I needed this so much today. Beautiful words and beautiful ideas that heal and inspire. Thank you. Thank you.
So perfectly said. And perfect words to live by through the next four years and beyond!
Thank you for reminding me of how long the work of change takes and how I can focus my energies in this mess. Dan Forest put the words of Thurman’s poem to music and I have sung it more than once in January at church. It’s a beautiful piece of music for the words that are so meaningful.
That was how I discovered the poem–we sang it in my choir. It is a lovely piece. I’ll have to add a link to the song.