Chapter 1.
There was a time… distant, but not too very long ago, when life was … different. The world was still broken, vexed by the same spectres that have always plagued humankind, and yet, there was a flame that burned at the core of our blooming civilization. Imagine with me, for a moment, standing in the arch of a run-down doorway. Around you are pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages and rats, all trudging through the fallen snow; and before you, a warehouse with battered walls and broken, boarded windows. But the Place didn’t matter. You look through the inviting door and recognize friends and family, dressed in their finest and dancing to a band of merry musicians playing their hearts out. Children run to and fro, terrorizing a dog with the billows of their laughter, and their parents echoing joyously in chorus from a distance. Here, there is no worry about a child disrupting the evening. This is their village, and they are free to be children. In the corner there is a long table, wrapped in whatever burlap cloth the community could scrape together (because even the most humble decoration showed a proud defiance against the poverty of their time), framing an assortment of rich, fragrant dishes. You smell pine, currant, and holly, all mixing with the salt-licked air blown in from the nearby docks. Moments before stepping through the threshold, you see a guy or girl walking up the steps beside you, clearly intent on entering as well. They find your eyes and smile warmly, and you smile back, knowing that if they are here in attendance, they are a Friend. As a guy, you’d offer your arm out of politeness, and as a girl desiring to show gratitude, you’d take it. There was no pressure, no hidden agenda, no guessing the other person’s intentions—it was normal and expected to experience deep human connection on a regular basis. As the evening goes on, a stranger asks you to dance, and simply, expectantly, you say yes. There is a closeness in the sway, and an intimacy shared between two total strangers that would terrify us today. And yet, it was the way of life. In many ways, it was the life we were created for.
Back then, you didn’t take advantage of the time you spent with the ones you loved, because in a moment a disease could wipe out everyone you knew. Back then, Presence mattered more than pomp and praise and the projections we sell of ourselves to others, because in that world, connection was a rare gift, not a luxury. Back then, in spite of the crushing labor and endless hours and incessant obligations, we chose togetherness, because in the end we understood it was all we really had.
. Here we are now
or rather, here we find ourselves, 150 Christmases later.
He watched as she guided the old lady through the process of paying with a phone. The elderly lady was clearly getting frustrated, but the girl at the register showed grace. He looked at her and smiled. She smiled back, and looked away. He picked up his box and placed it on the conveyor belt. She grabbed it, scanned, and told him the total. She was pretty, and she was kind. He liked how her hair was—it wasn’t fancy, but it was done in a way he had never seen a girl’s hair done up before. He was about to hand her his payment when a small child ran up asking for a sticker. The girl at the register smiled a big smile and gave the child what she had come for. The little one ran off with her mother, and they left. He looked at her, and She looked at him, and for a moment, there was a pause. Then, she handed him his change, said, “Merry Christmas,” and smiled. He took the bag, smiled back, and walked away. His legs moved unbothered, but his heart wrestled to stay. What was that moment he had just experienced? Was it just him? His imagination? Or was there something there? Romantic… perhaps not. But undeniably a spark of connection. Yet, like countless times before, he just kept walking. He was tired of misreading, and tired of being misunderstood. He was tired of taking the step to reach out just to be shot down every time. So he walked, walked, and was out the door.
She watched as he walked. She had seen his patience when she was helping the lady, and his smile when she was entertaining the girl. She had watched his eyes look at her hair with an inquisitive look, and she felt, for the first time in a long time, seen. She understood rather quickly that people like him are rare. Kind, Attentive, Patient… and even after only a few moments of interaction, she felt a soft kindness that she was happy to reciprocate. She wished this interaction wouldn’t end. What else was he like? How did he get to be this way? Perhaps they could be friends? She threw as much warmth into her “Merry Christmas” as she could, hoping he would perceive it as anything other than a farewell. But he turned and walked away. She wanted to say more, but didn’t know how. He longed to say more, but didn’t have the permission.
He left. She watched. And they were both sad.
This is the life we live. This is the world we live in. We long so deeply to connect, but are often so terrified of breaking the social script that we would rather suffer in silence than risk being left vulnerable. We misread, misunderstand, judge intentions, and then pray our intentions won’t be judged by others. Perhaps not with the girl at the grocery store, but often where it matters even more. We hide our struggles from those closest to us. We don’t voice our appreciation or love as often as we wish we did. We leave things unsaid because if they were spoken, who knows what might happen. We let our dearest relationships drift… often not by choice, but life has its way and we get busy, and we struggle to find the time.
The truth is that many of us are lonely. Making friends is hard, and maintaining friendships is exhausting. We wish it were different. But anxiety always wins. The fear of rejection always wins. The overthinking always wins. And so we always lose.
Many of us are tired. The grind simply never stops, because the bills don’t stop, or the assignments don’t end. You wake, rise, work, eat, sleep, repeat. You don’t remember what it’s like to take time for yourself, and if we’re being honest, we’ve become numb to the notion of being truly alive. We look forward to the distant wedding or birthday—any event that has enough gravity to pull close the ones we love - though those are often few and far between. Instead, we treat our social life as a game of chance: rolling the dice and hoping that eventually schedules line up or that someone we know will be there or that we’ll have enough energy.
Many of us are hiding. We’re falling apart, but we suffer alone. Because letting people in means vulnerability and displays weakness. So we break, and drag along the broken pieces, always wearing a smile below eyes that have long forgotten how to cry, and long given up asking for help.
Many of us are isolated. We spent so much time building our life around a specific group or season or institution or job, and when time pulls us away, all the friends, rituals and belonging suddenly disappear - leaving us disoriented and forced to rebuild from scratch.
Almost all of us are drowning. In obligations and in stress and anxiety… so we scroll and tap to like and pose for selfies as time slips through our hands—all while suppressing this nagging sensation in our souls that we were made for so much more. In our world, we have infinite breadth of connection, but near exiguous depth. We curate our lives for everyone to see, leaving the worst and posting the best- and in doing so, create an impossible pace to keep. And so we run, and run, and search for our tribe, but finding friends feels harder and harder every year so we give up hope. Or maybe we cling onto it merely as a fantasy because false hope is better than succumbing to the void.
We need help, but we won’t ask. We long for connection but don’t know how to get it. We wish those around us shared our desires… but because we’re alone, we all suffer alone. All of us, alone, together.
…
I mourn what we’ve lost. I think we all do, in our own ways. Some of us knowingly with sharp grief, and others in the blind striving and stumbling towards an echo we’ve never heard but long to know, pained by soreness we can’t quite place. Ironic, how the machines that first built cities - those thriving cathedrals of connection and promise - are the very things that have caused us to lose sight of why we created them in the first place. Our cathedrals of connection are hollow. And though we try to build new ones, and try to repair the old ones, and design apps for connection and plan trips with the friends, they are often lacking in their effectiveness, not because they are broken, but because we are. If we removed every screen and cut every cable and gathered in a room together, we would not know how to ask for a dance. We wouldn’t know how to set the table. And even if we did, there’s no guarantee anyone else would come. In this regard, we have truly, terribly, been cut off from our human heritage. And all that’s left is to wither.
Oh, but it still gets worse.
Specifically for my Christian audience, the Church of Jesus is supposed to be the one institution defined solely by community. And yet, we’re not much better off. Not if we’re being honest. We’re often just as lonely, just as tired, and just as hurting. We’re still fighting that sin, and we’re still losing. We mourn deeply over it all - the lust, the lies, the gossip, the anger, the gluttony and every other vice we entertain - but we fall again and again and again. We pray, and we read, and we worship, and yet… we fail. Accountability is so difficult when it’s merely a text on a screen. So we join a small group, and meet once a week, but quickly find that putting on our Christian hat one night out of seven doesn’t really solve the problem and it all begins to feel pointless. So we go back to white-knuckling alone - forcing our way through our faith, exhausted.
This is the world we live in.
But once a year, something shifts. It starts with music playing earlier than it should, and gives way to little colored lights freckling the city. Silence gives way to bells, and smiles find their way even into the most mundane of interactions. During this time, it’s not so scary to be human. We can talk to strangers and expect a response. We can host a party and expect people to come. We can extend an arm, and it will likely be taken. There’s something about Christmas time that feels like heaven is literally touching earth. It did, 2,000 years ago. And I believe it still is. For during Christmas, we see a collision of two spheres that have long been separated, but that were designed as one: The collision of The Social and The Spiritual.
We were made with a twofold purpose: Love God, and Love others. One is not higher than the other, but rather, they fuel one another as an engine for growth. Our relationship with God empowers us to love others well, and the strength of our community keeps us from wandering away from our source of life. This is how we were made: Community as Worship, and Worship as Purpose. It is why God gave us the Sabbath: A time to rest and enjoy community and focus on Him. Yet somewhere, somehow, we bought into the lie that they are separate. We divorced the Shield from the Sword, and in doing so created a social realm that feels increasingly hollow, and a spiritual realm that feels painfully lonely. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we then try to Frankenstein them back together by treating the social as a stepping stone to the spiritual. Often, in our Christian circles, the vertical (Man to God) is treated as the main event while the horizontal (Man to Man) is treated as an optional afterthought. And yet every year, once a year, the traditions of Christmas subvert this expectation. We go in public and sing carols and hymns. We give to the poor not just as a religious act, but also as a social one. We put up a nativity as a symbol of our gratitude and newborn salvation. We open our homes and fill our tables. And the result is magic you can touch. Nothing changes about us necessarily, but because the traditions passed onto us were steeped in a time when that fusion was natural and normal, all we need do is perform them, and we’re teleported back in time.
This begs a vital question: How do we make new traditions?
By Rhythms and Reasons
Chapter 3.
Christmas seems to go by faster every year. Perhaps I’m just growing older… Or maybe, it too is finally getting sucked into the relentless pace of our culture. But in any case, soon the lights will go down and the trees will die and the bells will cease, and we’ll return to the dreaded place we just barely escaped from. The magic will fade, the families will drift... But they don’t have to.
There is something every ancestral human society knew well: That just like a heart, a steady rhythm keeps a community alive. And yet, a community without purpose is merely a mob, waiting to be broken up. True transformative traditions require a rhythm, and a reason that is larger than ourselves. And this is hard. It requires commitment and consistency. It requires sacrifice and service. It requires intention, and inertia. When we devote ourselves to the when and why, the who and what will naturally follow.
We can’t continue to borrow on the spirit and rituals of a bygone time. We need to learn to make new traditions, to imbue them with meaning and to defend them in a world that so desperately needs them.
Covid-19
Interestingly, 2026 marks the 7th year. A year that, biblically, means healing, restoration, peace, and completion. It is the year of the Sabbath. And I believe this year can be the year of our healing as well.
My hope in writing this is to not merely inspire likes, but to impact change. I personally refuse to live another year floating in a digital void hoping that my calendar gives me permission to do life with the ones I love.
I’ve taken the steps to build the structure to support a community. Now it’s time for the traditions and the people. Starting in 2026, it’s going to be new and bold and big. This is open to everyone. And I hope everyone gets to experience it. If you’re interested at all by any of this, want to join this movement, or want to help it grow, please reach out. And let’s discover together what it truly means to be the Church of Jesus Christ.
It will cost us everything.
But that is vapor in light of our eternal reward.
In Him & for Him,
Ethan S. Martinez
join@californiamaine.org
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