Formed by Certainty, Learning to Wait: An Advent I Didn’t Grow Up With

The Church Without a Christmas Tree

I grew up in the Church of Christ, a tradition shaped as much by its doctrine as by its careful adherence to what we understood as the inspired Word of Truth—New Testament scripture. Christmas—Christ Mass, after all—carried with it echoes of liturgy, ritual, and ecclesial authority that did more than make us uneasy; they were not supported by scripture. It felt too “Catholic.” Nativity scenes, Christmas trees in the sanctuary, pageants, and concerts all felt suspect, as if they edged too close to something we had worked hard to distinguish ourselves from.

Our doctrine emphasized Jesus’s death, resurrection, and promised second coming—the salvation story in its fullest and, to us, most biblically faithful form. That was where the weight belonged. Christmas, when it appeared at all in worship service, seemed secondary. There might be a sermon in December, but it was usually framed as a reminder not to let sentiment distract us from the real celebration: the cross, the empty tomb, and the anticipation of Christ’s return.

Beginning sometime in the 1980s, our monthly church fellowship included a “greedy Santa” party in the fellowship hall—an accommodation that felt almost humorous in its contradiction. At home, though, the birth of Christ was acknowledged and celebrated in quieter, more personal ways. Christmas existed, but it lived more in our houses than in our sanctuaries.

Wonder, Anyway

Even so, Christmas always carried a sense of wonder.

In my family, it was joyful and wonder-full. We celebrated the birth of Christ. We sang the songs, set out nativity scenes, and watched cartoons that made room for the baby Jesus alongside Rudolph and Frosty. I developed a passion for Little Debbie Christmas Tree Cakes that continues to this day. But Christmas was never treated as a central moment of worship. It was present and honored, but it did not occupy the same place in our worship as the cross and the resurrection.

Instead, Christmas lived easily among us. It shared space with Santa Claus and stockings, with family meals and laughter, with the ordinary magic of being together. Faith was there, woven into the fabric of the season rather than standing apart from it or asking to be the center of attention.

We sang Away in a Manger and Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas with equal sincerity.

Some of my strongest Christmas memories are of going to town with my mother—just the two of us—walking down Main Street in Russellville, Alabama. We stopped at Elmore’s and White’s, always went to the bank, and did a bit of Christmas shopping. We also made our rounds to TG&Y and Bargain Town U.S.A. Going to town with Mother is one of the memories that has never faded. She loves Christmas. I suspect that is where I get it.

Perhaps the magic was not Christmas itself, but Mother making it all come together. Daddy—God bless him—was assembling bicycles late into the night, helping Santa Claus eat the cookies and drink the milk when no one was awake, and getting up early to turn on the heater before us kids stirred.

So Christmas has always carried for me the emotions and images of Advent: love, peace, and joy. Yet as I’ve grown older—and as I’ve celebrated Advent more intentionally in churches I joined later—I’ve come to realize something important was missing from my early experience, at least as I have come to understand it now.

Hope.

That missing note, I’ve learned, is at the very heart of Advent: not the anticipation of Christ’s return, but the radical, trembling hope of waiting for Him to come the first time.

Before I go any further, I want to be careful about how this contrast is read. I don’t mean to disparage the Church of Christ or its seriousness about salvation and the life to come. The emphasis on the afterlife was never meant to diminish this one; it was meant to anchor it. There is something steady, even bracing, about a faith formed around the cross and the resurrection, around the somber knowledge of what comes on Friday during Holy Week and the refusal to look away. That certainty shapes the tone. It is sober, resolved, and grounded in knowing how the story ends.

Advent, I am learning, asks for something different. It invites a looking forward that is almost visceral, a waiting marked by anticipation rather than knowledge. During Advent, we do not yet know what is coming, even though we think we do. Christmas and Easter are both joyous occasions, yes, but they are not the same kind of joy. Easter joy comes after suffering we already understand. Advent joy comes before anything has happened at all. It is hope without proof, expectation without resolution.

Perhaps that is why Advent feels so unfamiliar to me. I was formed in a tradition that lingered near the end of the story. Advent asks me to return to the beginning, to wait not with certainty, but with hope.

That difference between certainty and waiting is something I didn’t fully understand until I found myself, almost by accident, living Advent rather than merely knowing about it.

Learning Advent by Living It

Just recently, we joined a church that could not be more different from the one I grew up in.

Trinity United Methodist Church sits at the end of our driveway—practically in our neighborhood—and has been there for over a hundred years. We watched carefully last year as the United Methodist Church faced its painful and very public division. We waited to see whether Trinity would stay or go. They stayed. So we went.

Well—I went first.

Returning to church was part of my larger journey back to music. I wanted to sing again. I wanted a choir. So I showed up, and they welcomed me. Then Sarah came. I can say, without exaggeration, that I have never felt so genuinely welcomed in any congregation.

Of course, in a liturgical church, if you arrive in the fall, you don’t ease into Christmas—you begin preparing for Advent.

Trinity has all of it: the church calendar, the seasons, the art, the rhythm of the year itself. And it has a gifted music director, Ben Chumley. Music is not ornamental there; it is formative. Part of Trinity’s long tradition includes a concert series—bell ringers, piano recitals—and on the Sunday before Christmas, a full choir cantata, offered as a concert for the community.

I had never sung in an hour-long Christmas cantata before. It is exhausting—poignant and fulfilling, but exhausting.

At the same time, the sermon series centered on the coming of the Christ Child, and Sunday school was immersed in a deep study of Advent, framed by John Wesley’s theology. I knew what Advent was, of course, at least in name. I associated it with calendars and chocolate, with Advent functioning more as a reference point for Christmas than as a practice, something observed from the outside rather than lived. What I had not understood was Advent as a way of inhabiting time itself, a season that asks something of you slowly, deliberately, and in community.

Then one Sunday after service, Ben approached us and said, “I’m planning the lighting of the Advent candles this year, and I want to represent all kinds of families. I wondered if you and Sarah would like to light the first candle.”

So there we were—new members, still learning our way around the sanctuary—and suddenly we were the first family of Advent.

Our candle was peace.

You had better believe Trinity has a children’s Christmas pageant. There were painted backdrops of Bethlehem, shepherds with headgear slightly askew, stars projected onto the ceiling. Children of all ages belted out The First Noel at the top of their lungs. Candles glowed in the windows. The chancel was full.

From the choir loft, I expected—modern church attendance being what it is—that maybe two-thirds of the usual congregation would show up.

Instead, the church was full. This wasn’t novelty. This was a neighborhood showing up for something it clearly understood as theirs.

What struck me most, though, was how hope was being practiced, not merely preached. Alongside the music and liturgy, the church’s auditorium filled with donations for local children—gifts, necessities, abundance. Hope, in this space, was not about someday escaping the world. It was about showing up for it.

That was new for me.

Hope, in my religious formation, was almost always about heaven—and, implicitly, about avoiding hell. I didn’t have language yet for hope as active, communal, and embodied. Wesleyan theology was quietly teaching me something different: hope as something you do.

I should add that this wasn’t ignorance on my part. I had studied the church calendar before and even took a full course on it in seminary at McAfee. Sarah, who grew up in England, seems to have absorbed it almost by osmosis sometime in childhood. But knowing about liturgy and living inside it are not the same thing. What was happening at Trinity was not instruction; it was formation.

I haven’t left fundamentalism. I don’t think that’s possible, any more than it could ever leave me. It formed me. What I am learning now is not replacement, but expansion. This way of waiting, this attention to beginnings rather than endings, is becoming part of my formation too.

On the night of our final choir rehearsal before the cantata, I walked home through the neighborhood in silence. The street was lit only by Christmas lights and the moon, their glow softened by fog hanging in the air. We don’t get much snow here, but the light did the same work. Everything was hushed. All was calm. All was quiet.

I felt joy. Not only for the coming of the Christ Child, but for the possibility that the world could feel like this more often. That peace might be practiced, not just promised. And that, somehow, I could be part of it.

The Old Man and the Coon, or, Tales of Daddy and Popeye

I am not a phone talker. Nobody in my family is, but it occurred to me today that I had not spoken to my parents in a while. So I called them. Daddy is 83, and Mother is 80. My son Daniel lives with them and they all take care of one another. Mother and Daniel have an English Bulldog named Boo Baby, and Daddy has an 18 year-old Rat Terrier named Popeye. In dog years, he’s older than Daddy. Now, when the phone rings at the house, Mother picks up the downstairs phone, and Daddy picks up the extension in his room simultaneously. He waits his turn patiently for me and Mother to catch up, and then he will say something like, “Well, I’m still here.” That’s Mom’s cue to turn me over to him. So, I went through my topics–work, weather, how I’m doing, more weather, and the proper name of Grandpa’s Whiskers (it’s Cleome). Then it was time to talk to Daddy.

He eventually asked, “Did I tell you about Popeye nearly getting hit by a car the other day?” I said no, what happened? Popeye is deaf and blind and has already been hit by a car once in his life when he was much younger. They keep him in a pen outside with a box fan beneath a beach umbrella continuously running to keep him cool in the Alabama heat. Daddy lets him out in the yard when he goes outside, and that day he followed Daddy to the mailbox. While Daddy got the mail, Popeye stopped in the middle of the road to wait on him. A car came speeding around the curve–Daddy is very attuned to traffic these days–and Popeye didn’t move. My father then steps out into the road and attempts to slow the oncoming car, which did not stop but veered into the other lane, barely missing Daddy and Popeye.

This is Daddy’s story about the Raccoon, which he and everybody else in my family calls a coon (I come from a family of coon hunters.). Here’s how he told it.

Last night, me and Pop went out to close up the barn. He went down the back of the barn and started barking. I thought ‘uh-oh’ he’s treed something. And I looked up and there was a big ol’ coon hanging from the rafter by his hind legs reaching down towards Popeye! I thought that if he got him, he’d tear Popeye up. So I said, c’mon Pop, let’s go get the shotgun. I come in the house and got the shotgun and told Daniel and your Mama that I reckon I was gonna have to kill that coon. Popeye had come up to the gate by the house, and he was ready for me and him to go back and get the coon. So we went out there, and there was the coon, but when he saw us, he slipped out the back of the barn. So I said alright Pop, let’s go back in the house. Now, can you imagine an old man and old dog out in the dark at the barn with a shotgun gonna shoot a coon?

I told him that I wondered about that but decided just to let him tell it. He got a chuckle out of that. My dad is very proud of me, especially of me getting a Ph.D. He kids me about how far I’ve come from Littleville, Alabama, and has modified my nickname of “Miss Bean” to be more formally “Dr. Miss Bean.” As we were hanging up (Whitlocks do NOT stay on the phone), he said, “You need to write a book about that. Only thing, nobody would know what you were talking about.” I bet I could tell it so they would, I thought to myself. So, that’s what I did. Before I moved away from Alabama for the first time, Daddy gave me some advice my great-grandmother gave her son as he went off to war: “Don’t forget who you are.” That was it. Daddy knew that I knew what it meant. Who I am is of that place. I come from a patch of land in Littleville where my dad and his little dog put up the chickens every night and my mom and my son work their little flower garden and fill 10 hummingbird feeders every day. Where we will have barbeque and fried catfish from Swamp Johns and homemade ice cream when I go to visit. Daddy, I haven’t forgotten.

For Bob

Robert Daniel Hyde, April 11, 1960-March 14, 2023, Russellville High School Class of 1979

My children’s dad died yesterday. My ex-husband. I did not expect to feel these feelings.

I had not seen Robert–the more distant, formal name I called him after I left–since one Sunday 10 years ago when he pulled into my parents’ driveway and asked me to come outside. He wanted to make amends, apologizing for not being a good husband for all those years. I thanked him and told him it was a long time ago. I didn’t hear from him very often–didn’t think of him very often. He chose a different path, and part of me envies him for giving up trappings that didn’t mean anything to him so that he could move home. He and his mother took care of each other until she died. He loved his kids, and if they wanted to come see him, they could. But he was clear that his life was his own–take it or leave it. When they would see him, they did not describe their visits to me. So, I don’t know much about Robert’s life outside of that. I do not know yet how he died–whether he was alone at home or in a hospital. I know he was sick for a long time.

We were together for almost 20 years, married for the last 16 years of them. I have spent many years and a lot of therapy struggling with the feeling of being robbed of those years of my life by him–my youth, my college years, the promise of finding out all I could be. We were toxic as a couple; whatever the chemistry, the result was that he became more and more controlling, while I became more and more codependent. I was miserable, and no doubt he was, too. We got to that point that is the death knell of relationships. We didn’t fight because we were exhausted and didn’t care any more enough to fight. So we were done, and I remember the day in 2014 when I had been without him longer than we had been together. Today, I have been processing the complex feelings of sadness and–yes–loss I am feeling. I am sad for my children, of course, but was unprepared for how I felt for myself.

I doubt he will have a funeral, or a viewing, as we still have in the South. I don’t think he would want one. Truthfully, I don’t know who would go. My kids, his siblings, my parents, maybe someone from their church, and some Russellville people who remembered him from school. I don’t see his obituary in the local paper. And, since I got the news, I have had “Close to You” playing in a loop in my head.

“Close to You,” by the Carpenters brings back one of my earliest and fondest memories of Bob. It would have been around 1978, and we were both in the high school choir, the RHS Singers. I picture him with the other guys doing the dance routine, wearing those striped rayon shirts and white boater hats. I never hear the song without that memory, and it is nice. I think I loved him first and most because he was a good boy–not a good old boy, but a good boy, as we say in the South. One who loved his mama and grandmama and wasn’t always up to meanness. He wanted to be Band Captain, and he loved the RHS Marching 100. That’s the way I want to remember Bob–young, handsome, with a boyish face and easy smile. It’s funny the things I remember, like the shape of his feet and the way he looked when he played the trumpet.

Close To You, The Carpenters https://youtu.be/iFx-5PGLgb4

Bob was a husband and father, son and brother, grandson, descendent of the first governor of Tennessee–and a Bama fan. I am glad that he lived, and for me, the world is emptier tonight. We shared children and nearly 50 years of history together. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer people you can say that about. I feel like the part of me that shared those years is gone, too. And that is why I am writing this. I wanted to remember, wanted, needed, to give myself the time and place to summon memories–snapshots of Bob, happy and endearing. Not only that, it is also important to me that he is remembered. I want him to be mourned. He will be by his family, but that is not what I mean. This night, it is important to me that in this vast universe, a man is remembered–that he lived–and marched and sang and played and laughed–that he was. Rest in peace, Bob.

Season of Lilacs: Memoir For My Mother

home, memoir, mother, family, south, grandmother, lilacs, autobiography

Down home, where they know you by name and treat you like family,
Down home, where a man’s good word and a handshake are all you need.
Folks know when you’re fallin’ on hard times you can fall back on
Those of us raised up—down home. (Alabama, 1985)

Prologue
When my grandmother died, it was April, and the lilacs were in full bloom. I think back on those lilacs now, realizing that they, like the women in whose lives they played such a part, define homeplace for me. I realize that I cling to them, the flowering, decadently-scented lilac that stands at the doorway like the angel at the Garden of Eden, and the women of Big Mama’s. But the angel armed with flaming sword was placed at the Garden’s entrance by God to keep people out, so homeplace, even as it beckons, has its own fiery barriers. I can no more cross the threshold of home guarded by the lilac than Adam and Eve could get past God’s messenger. And yet, just as the searchers have sought the now mythic Eden, Southerners, like me, spend an endless quest yearning for homeplace, trying to go home.

It was around my grandmother’s table that I first learned about homeplace, as she and her 5 remaining daughters, the sisters, recollected the old hard days and made plans to go back. In the same way that bell hooks (1990) contends, “houses belonged to women” (p. 41), for me, home is made by them. On Sundays, over coffee and caramel cake, they lovingly described the house and place where six babies were born. I learned that the old homeplace was a location of enshrined desire. And it is within nostalgia, a yearning for home, that desire and homeplace ideology intersect.

Daddy’s people did not like Mother’s people. My father’s father had finally left the farm, got factory work, and moved inside the town limits. When his son, my father, fell in love with a girl from “the mountain,” it appeared to them like a step backward. My mother’s home was a place of noise and music and laughter and hard liquor—everything that Daddy’s fundamentalist Christian mores denounced as sinful. The pact was made: when they married, she would disavow that lifestyle, stay away from home. I knew very little of my maternal family until I was 12 years old and my mother could not stay away any longer. She took me with her to Sunday coffee at Big Mama’s.

By the time I met them, Big Mama had left her job at the local truck stop, and the sisters had divorced the wild young men who drank and played music on Saturday nights. I returned to a Sunday afternoon matriarchy that had resigned itself to calm. Now the sisters and their daughters returned to sit around the same table, now cluttered with chipped coffee cups rather than bottles of Jack Daniels. Big Mama’s house was not quiet or orderly. The old house creaked and heaved with determination as it enveloped the lives it cradled, including, again, Mother’s, and now, mine.

Some images never leave us. When Big Mama got sick in 1983, the sisters rallied. Nobody was taking care of their mother except them, and they stayed with her around the clock for a year. On a Sunday very different from those spent around the table, I saw death still in the claiming. Big Mama had no appetite and was drinking only a little milk. Mother was at her bedside trying to get her to eat yogurt. I could not bear to go into the dark bedroom, witnessing the scene instead from the next room, as close as I could get but not nearly as far away as I longed to be. My mother coaxed her mother to eat, tiny spoonful by tiny spoonful, cooing to her as she had to my own baby, to me as an infant. She tenderly spoke words of love to her mother, words devoid of joy, words sickeningly rich with heartache. I had never felt so low and empty and sick, and I never have since.

After she died, I was wracked with remorse because I missed so many years. I loved her, and I treasure the time I spent with her. But regret and guilt are old friends who call often; there would be no moving forward. Then I dreamt my dream. She and I were alone in the darkness, and I, grown and helpless, was sitting in her lap. She enveloped me in an old string quilt, soft and comfortable with age. Her words and her body soothed me; I knew that I had known her. And my heart and mind rested easy.

When the sisters finally made the pilgrimage back home, some 50 years after leaving it, they carried with them buckets and tools. They came for artifacts, tangible memories. Each collected cuttings from foliage that remained, now overgrown with scrub bushes and weeds. My mother and her four sisters cut through the wild vines and tall weeds to re-claim their mama’s garden and take it home with them—old plants: mock orange, iris, forsythia (yellow bells), and lilac. Since then, wherever Mother has lived, wherever I have lived, we have dug up a piece of those plants, with good roots so they will live. “They won’t ever even know they’ve been moved,” she tells me. I do this because wherever I live, it comforts me to know there is a lilac by my door.

This piece was adapted from an academic paper published as Whitlock, R.U. (2006). Season of lilacs: Nostalgia of place and homeplace(s) of
difference. Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education. Fall-Winter 2005.

On the Couch With Bill O’Reilly

Last night after our traditional family Christmas drama, daddy referred to something I had mentioned in passing–that I see a therapist. The second he asked about it, I regretted it. Actually, I thought he knew; my mom has known for months, so I assumed they had talked. No. So, he asked me about it. He asked me why I’m going to a therapist. “What are you going for?” he asked. Two things here: If I knew why I was going to therapy, I wouldn’t need to go. And also, it’s none of his business why. I thought everybody in the world knew to have enough tact not to aske this question. It is right up there with age and weight. But my daddy does not mind asking questions.

So, despite spending the previous hour processing Xmas drama by using tools from the past year’s work, I knew I might as well give him some sort of reasonable sounding answer. He asked me specifically if it was for anger, which gives me pause because I don’t put that reason high on the list despite being asked about it by 3 other people including the therapist. Maybe I’ll bump it up. Anyway, I talked about needing confidence and tools to trust my decision making ability. I said I wanted to be more productive and explore why I avoided writing, when it is something I really want to do. And, I said–which is the highest actual reason on the list–that I wanted to explore what it was about me that had made me succeptible to losing myself as a young woman in a marriage that I just barely escaped. I still have dreams that I haven’t yet, and it terrifies me. Whatever I said, daddy nodded, but I could see the situation was just beginning to gel in his mind. This was not going to be the end of the matter. He asked me whether it was loneliness. “Would living closer to family help?” I had to restrain myself not to say “GOD no!” He kept looking for the “Big Issue.” There isn’t always a “big issue.” When my voice started to quiver because I was breaking up in spite of myself, we turned our attention to anything else.

Tonight, while reading Bill O’Reilly’s book on Lincoln, he said, “Hey, talkin’ about your therapy, is your therapist, a Christian or a athiest, or do you know? I’m just reading here, you know Lincoln got down during the war and he said the Bible was his best solace and counsel. Of course, I don’t understand.” I know what it is. Daddy is afraid I’m searching for something. Happiness. The Meaning of the Universe. What’s It All About, Alfie. So I told him; I’m not. And, I don’t exactly need a moral compass or spiritual strength. I am really truly a Bible believer. Already. So I told him my therapist suggested prayer and the Psalms, which seemed to be enough for tonight.

A year ago when I told Mother I was seeing my therapist, she thought about it and then over coffee one day said, “If you’d just get back in church you wouldn’t need a therapist.” I didn’t have a good reply to that either. But then, 6 months ago, she had reconsidered. We were talking, like we do, about nothing in particular and everything all at once. I said that I always felt like they didn’t know quite what to do with me. And she said something I will never forget; it cut right to it. “No, we never did know what to do for you.” That kind of changed everything. Then she ended with, “I want you to keep on going to that therapy.” I’m thinking back on this, now that I am coming out to my daddy as a therapy patient.

I know Lincoln fought his demons, which is how I consider depression and meloncholy. Lincoln was a quipper, and he had a public persona and a private self and he was expert at keeping them separate, most likely even from Mary. Or maybe especially from her. Yet, he spoke–and I think really believed in–the better angels of our nature. I like this very much. Faith and hope that came from somewhere very deep. When Bill Clinton was physically moving into the White House, he said he was going to set about doing what every new president must: “get in touch with his Lincoln.” I’ve been doing that a little too. But all of this I cannot express to Daddy.
More on this later.

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