The unexpected lesson Christina Rosetti’s Christmas carol “In the Bleak Midwinter” taught me this year.

 By Lenora Rand

On the morning of December 23rd, I got hit with it. Someone close to me suggested something I might do to improve ever so slightly. Not a big deal, really. Except I heard it as VERY critical. Like: “you totally suck” kind of critical. And further confirmation that I could never do enough. Or be enough. 

 That I wasn’t good enough.

 And that was all it took. Those words went right to the knot inside me that holds all the wounds, all the “I can’t ever do anything right, I am not good enough, I am not enough” messages I’ve been dealing with all my life…and gave it a little cattle-prod. Just like that, the volume on those messages got turned up to 11. 

I walked around most of that day and the next in a going-through-the-motions, feels-like-I’m-walking-through-mud daze. I fell into a very familiar depression-lined hole. Of course, in that hole was also anger – can’t you see how much I do, can’t anybody see how hard I try to do everything right, to do enough?   And a whole smorgasbord of tasty resentments. 

So, this “not-good-enoughness” stuff? I’ve got it on good authority that I’m not the only one who battles this to one degree or another. In fact, there’s been all kinds of studies done and tons of articles written over the last several years about how not-good-enoughness is running rampant, how it’s reached epidemic proportions these days. Many of us, like me, are all too familiar with lugging around messages about how we don’t do things as well as we should, especially as well as others. How we’re not smart enough or pretty enough or funny enough or talented enough or happy enough or kind enough or spiritual enough, that we aren’t working hard enough or DOing enough. 

 Of course, there are theories about why this is happening.  The kind of parenting most of us get is often blamed. Or the kind of messages we get from many of our religious traditions. Or from, as one Time magazine author puts it, “our culture of ‘self improvement,’ the belief that I can always be getting better, stronger or faster.” 

Or from consumerism, which feeds off us not feeling good enough so we’ll buy this shirt, that car, this gadget, that drink, use this hair product, go on that diet…because doing so will make us finally feel good enough. 

Many people believe social media has made it worse. As one writer recently confessed in a piece on The Conversationalist,“Growing up a digital native, I have felt the pressure of only showing the best parts of my life on social media, then checking the number of likes as a measure of self-worth. Diagnosed with clinical depression in my sophomore year of college… I began to figure out what the triggers for my depressive episodes were. One was the internal comparison I made between myself and other people on social media. Those comparisons made me believe that I was not good enough.”

Quite honestly, I often find that the holiday season is like dousing gasoline on the fire of our not-good-enoughness. That was certainly a part of what led to my total debilitating relapse into the disease the other day. 

In The Many, the band I have the privilege of working with and writing lyrics for, we recently led an online Longest Night gathering. Hannah, one of the band members (who, as it happens, is also my daughter) for this event created an arrangement and recorded the beautiful carol written by poet Christina Rosetti, “In the Bleak Midwinter.” I have always loved that song, but this year, as I took a moment to listen to it again on December 24, it was like I really heard that last verse…really heard it…for the first time.

“What can I give him?” the author asks. Basically saying: “I have nothing. I am nothing. I’m nobody.”

But the answer she comes to is life-changing: “You don’t have to be anyone or anything than what you are. Whatever you have to give is enough. YOU are enough.”

And it hit me: the radical good news of Christmas, the deepest meaning of this birth, which in the middle of all our theological ramblings, we often seem to miss.

This is the simple message from God to us: YOU ARE ENOUGH.

 Yep. 

The baby Jesus was born to a poor unwed mother. Not to a rich ruler. Christ’s birth was announced first to the shepherds, not influencers. Christ was born in a stable, born in a place that was dirty and smelled like shit. Not in some lavender-scented palace or penthouse or highly rated birthing center. 

This is the good news I need to hear. Deep in my bones. When I finally listened and heard it clearly on the day before Christmas, something broke in me. I was able to stop isolating in my sad swirl of not-good-enoughness long enough to talk to someone, tell them what was going on, let the tears flow, let it go. Breathe in love again. 

And the difference it made was huge.

So, I just want to put it out there: if you’re anything like me and this is the good news that you need to hear as well during this season…or any season of the year, I hope and pray that you can. That you do. 

Just in case, I’m gonna say it again: 

YOU are enough.
You ARE enough.
You are ENOUGH.

That’s the gift of Christmas I hope you and I and all of us can receive this year. 

By the way, in case you’d like to hear Hannah’s rendition of “In The Bleak Midwinter,” here you go. Listen closely to that last verse.

Thanks for reading. Want to read more?

You will find more of Lenora’s writing on the Chicago Tribune’s blogging platform, Chicago Now in a blog called Spiritual Suckitude.

Lenora also writes frequently for The Plural Guild, the music, art & liturgy collective she co-founded, to create resources for people of faith and doubt committed to seeking justice, who love kindness and who are trying to walk humbly on this earth. And she is the lyricist for the band, The Many.

Along with that, Lenora, who basically never sleeps, helps run a branding and marketing consultancy called SmallGood, helping nonprofits, social enterprises and for-profit positive impact companies grow their good.