A Christmas Reflection
Editor’s Note
This reflection includes a personal account of a visionary experience that arose within a ceremonial prayer context. It is shared as lived experience rather than belief, theology, or instruction, and offered as witness — symbolic, embodied, and meaningful within the moment in which it occurred.
The holidays are a threshold. A pause in which the body has just enough space to feel what it has been carrying, what has been endured, what has been lost, and what quietly asks to be set down.
As I write, I am holding both grief and gratitude. The past year asked more than I expected, for myself, and for many I love. It was within this landscape that I encountered a form of support I can only describe as being held; a steadiness that arrived without effort and asked nothing of me in return.
Two months ago, I attended a women’s prayer retreat held within a ceremonial plant medicine context. Although I have worked with this medicine for many years, the days leading up to the retreat affected me differently. A sadness surfaced that felt older than circumstance; quiet, pervasive, and resistant to reassurance.
I met it in the familiar ways. I breathed. I oriented. I stayed present.
Still, something in the body remained tight, as if waiting.
There comes a moment when familiar strategies fall quiet, and something else asks for attention.
As I packed to leave for the retreat, an unexpected inner prompting arrived with unusual clarity: “Pull out your crosses”. I had not worn a cross since childhood, nor do I consider myself religious. Still, the message carried a gravity that felt important to honor.
I found a rosary blessed by the Pope 30 years ago and a cross I had purchased years earlier in Armenia, at Etchmiadzin: the oldest Christian cathedral in the world. I brought them with me without understanding why, only aware that something in me was listening.
During the retreat, as opening prayers were spoken, a single phrase landed with unmistakable force; a call for the Divine Mother to reveal herself. Almost immediately, a vast grief moved through me. Tears came without story or explanation. When I asked inwardly what this grief belonged to, the answer arrived simply: the mother wound.
This was familiar terrain. It is a wound I have known for most of my life, and one I have met through years of therapy, somatic work, and spiritual practice. Yet in that moment, its weight felt complete. Exhausted, I asked, from a place of surrender, to be shown how healing might unfold.
What followed is difficult to translate without diminishing it. I experienced a sudden and unmistakable presence; Holy Mary, experienced as a mothering presence beyond words. It arrived as warmth, safety, and release. The body softened. Something long-held loosened, without effort or analysis.
For a time that felt outside ordinary awareness, I rested there, held.
There was no need to interpret or understand.
Nothing was resolved.
And yet something essential shifted.
It reminded me of a line my dear friend Lisa Littlebird sings; words that have stayed with me over the years for how simply they trace the arc of surrender:
“In desperation, we found freedom.
In freedom, we found love.
In love, we found devotion
In devotion, Spirit found us.”
That night, those words felt less like poetry and more like a lived sequence; not a path I chose, but one I was carried through.
We are taught many ways of caring for ourselves, ways of regulating, coping, and building resilience. These capacities matter. And there are moments when what is needed is simpler and more elemental: to be met, to feel accompanied, to rest into a presence that stays.
Across cultures and centuries, this experience has been named in many ways. What matters is not the name, but the easing that arrives when we no longer feel alone in what we are carrying.
As Rumi wrote:
“Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows
a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.”
For some, this sense of holding arrives through another person. For others, through the living world, the ocean, the night sky, the quiet intelligence of trees. And for some, it comes through prayer or communion with Spirit, in ways that cannot be planned or summoned.
I left the retreat without a new belief system or conclusion to defend. What changed was my relationship to prayer. What had once felt effortful softened into something more like leaning, a way of resting into support that did not depend solely on my own capacity.
Once the body knows this place, it does not forget. It becomes a reference point, not something to grasp for, but something to remember how to return to.
Gently.
Without urgency.
By allowing ourselves, again and again, to be held.
This season, my quiet prayer is that each of us, in whatever language or silence feels true, may encounter a love capable of carrying what we were never meant to carry alone.
