Image: Wise Women Also Came © Jan Richardson
Friends, it is the time of year when I get to wish you a Merry Women’s Christmas and share a gift that I’ve created for you in celebration of the day!
You might know that in some parts of the world, Epiphany (January 6, which brings the Christmas season to a close) is also celebrated as Women’s Christmas. Originating in Ireland, where it is known as Nollaig na mBan, Women’s Christmas began as a day when the women, who often carried the domestic responsibilities all year, took Epiphany as an occasion to enjoy a bit of respite and celebrate together at the end of the holidays.
Whether your domestic duties are many or few, Women’s Christmas is a good time to pause and take a break from whatever has kept you busy in the past weeks or months. As the Christmas season ends, this is an occasion both to celebrate with friends and also to spend time in reflection before diving into the responsibilities of this new year.
It has become a tradition for me to create a retreat that you can use for Women’s Christmas—or any time you’re in need of a space of respite and regathering. This year’s retreat is titled “What the Light Shines Through.” As I continue to make a new life, I’ve thought a lot about the work of mending, restoration, and healing—the ways by which the brokenness within us and around us becomes transformed. This year’s retreat offers an invitation for you to do some reflecting, wondering, and dreaming about how this happens in your own life, and how we are called to do the work of restoration and healing together.
The retreat is very flexible, easily adaptable to your own purposes. You can do the retreat anytime you wish, by yourself or with friends near or far. It includes an introduction with some thoughts about how you might use these reflections.
Clicking the link below will take you to a page on this Sanctuary of Women site where you can download the retreat as a PDF file. There is no cost; this is my Women’s Christmas gift to you! If you wish, you can make a donation in support of the retreat; contributions will be shared with the A21 Campaign (a21.org), which is devoted to ending human trafficking and providing sanctuary, healing, and hope for those rescued from slavery.
(If you don’t see the 2020 retreat when you click the link, just refresh your browser so that you’re seeing the most recent version of the Women’s Christmas page, and the new retreat should appear.)
You are welcome to make copies of the retreat to share with friends. I would be delighted for you to offer this gift to others by sharing this blog post; you can use any of the social media icons at the bottom of this post or simply forward the link to others.
This year’s retreat opens with a new blessing I’ve written for you, which you can find below. As we celebrate the day and enter into the year ahead, I pray that you will be attended by many graces. Merry Women’s Christmas!
Singing to the Night
A Blessing for Women’s Christmas
Who would have thought
the sky could be so pierced,
or that it could pour forth such
light through the breach
whose shape matched
so precisely
the hole in the heart
that had ached
for long ages,
weary from all its emptying?
And what had once been
a wound
opened now
like a door
or a dream,
radiant in its welcome,
singing to the night
that would prove itself
at last
not endless.
Call the piercing a star.
Call it the place the light begins.
Call it the point that tethers us
to this sheltering sky.
Call it the hope
that keeps holding us
to this broken,
blessed earth,
that keeps turning us
toward this world
luminous beneath
its shadows.
Call it the vigil fire
kept in that place
where every last thing
will be mended
and we will see one another
finally whole,
shining like the
noonday sun.
—Jan Richardson
[The image Wise Women Also Came is © Jan Richardson from Night Visions. To use this image or order an art print, please visit this page at Jan Richardson Images.]
Beloved friends, I have a new book! There is so much I want to say about it, even as I feel tender and have the impulse to be strangely quiet about releasing it. But I want to tell you that this new book of blessings turns toward the hard things that each of us knows: the grief, loss, fear, and weariness that we live with in these days. It also invites us to perceive what makes its home here, too: the joy, solace, grace, and, most of all, the love that moves through it all, illuminating and transforming what seems most hidden or hopeless.
