by Jenny Kwan
The materials from A Sanctified Art* for the 1st week of Advent 2025 invite us to confront our fears—both the big, societal-scale "Herod" fears and the deep, personal "Zechariah/Elizabeth" fears (Luke 1:5-13).
I firmly believe that true solidarity is not charity, but mutual aid rooted in shared vulnerability.
In that spirit, I would like to share my personal "Herod" and "Zechariah/Elizabeth" to see if it might resonate with your own experience.
My "Time of Herod"
Yes, I'm afraid. But more than that, I'm terrified. I distinguish between "fear" and "terror" because sometimes "terror" doesn't feel like "fear". A big part of the inner work of social justice is understanding our feelings, and often, that requires understanding how feelings work in the first place.
Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is characterized by excessive, uncontrollable, and (often) irrational worry about events or activities. There's a long list of possible symptoms—GAD takes shape differently in different people. And it may surprise you to learn that the emotional feeling of fear need not be one of them. It's possible to be anxious in many different ways, from dry mouth to nausea to feeling light-headed to numbness to feeling like objects are unreal (derealization) to muscle tension to difficulty in concentrating and mind going black to persistent irritability.
I personally don't meet the diagnostic criteria for GAD, but I do feel these:
I feel numb and hollowed out.
In my meditations and somatic work, I feel persistently clenched and ready to flinch at all times.
I compulsively reach for social media and online news sources (Reddit), scanning the virtual horizon for threat, often breaking promises I make to myself not to do this.
I get flashes of violent rage. 80% of the time, the rage is self-directed. I usually have no idea what I'm angry about or at.
And I don't feel the emotion of fear. Not really. Occasionally I'll get flashes of dread, but not often. But I know that logically, based on what I do feel, is that I'm stuck in a fight/flight loop that is most likely grinding my adrenal system down. This is terror.
The Political and Religious Face of Terror
And there's a lot to be terrified of. I'm a trans woman. The validity of my legal documentation is under threat, during a time when legal documentation in the USA matters more than ever. Critical health care that I need to stay physically and emotionally safe may not only be defunded, but outright outlawed. Even outside of outright bans, pressure from the Trump administration has already led key clinics to stop providing these needed services. The judiciary below the Supreme Court has been fighting a valiant fight, but the Supreme Court itself has been gutting civil rights protections for all sorts of people, against American traditions of jurisprudence and abusing the shadow docket.
Not only am I a trans woman, I'm also a first-generation immigrant who is a naturalized citizen. Given the pattern of disappearances by ICE into vacuums of due process, I have no faith that I am truly safe. I'm sure I'm already on a list somewhere, based on my legal and medical history and political activities and online speech. It's really a question of how far this country continues to slide into authoritarianism.
My personal "Herod" is the creeping, unapologetic slide into a theocratic authoritarianism.
And finally, and perhaps most tragically, I am filled with rage and loathing against my fellow Christians. I logically understand the impulses to authoritarianism and cultural conservatism. And I'm disappointed. How can anyone defend these impulses as love? But fiscal conservatism under the guise of preserving individual liberty as a Christian value? Or even Prosperity Gospel? These boggle my mind.
The Isolation of the Terrified
And I am well and truly stuck. At the age of 45 with an elderly mother, emigration is not an option for me. Barring emigration, all I can do is watch. I feel sad to say that up until last year, I felt enough of an attachment to this country as a veteran of the armed services that I would not have considered emigrating. That has since changed, and is one of the most crushing disappointments of my life.
I support leftist movements from a distance, but I do not participate directly. The last thing I need is to be arrested to be placed in a men's prison.
Speaking of organizing, I am isolated. The terror is compounded by the failure of community. I have been deeply wounded by interactions with people in the context of activism. I don't trust other trans women, or trans people generally. Alliance with queer cis people is fraught. Cis het folks generally are a crapshoot. I’m too trans for civil rights organizing on the basis of race, ethnicity, or immigration status.
And I'm a software engineer in Silicon Valley. The little I have learned about the "Time of Herod" gives me pause. If I were someone in Roman-occupied Judea at the time, would I have been seen as some sellout merchant? A collaborator? When I look at my life, I see a deep disconnection: from safety, from community, and from purpose.
This is my Herod: the systemic and religious terror that isolates me, demanding I hide in a perpetual state of flinch.
My "Zechariah/Elizabeth Disappointment"
I have tried so much in the pursuit of sustained intimacy with a lasting chosen family. Like Zechariah and Elizabeth, my life has been spent pushing and waiting, resulting in a kind of profound, internal barrenness.
The Search for Kinship
When I first transitioned gender 15 years ago, I threw myself into support groups, and quickly found myself facilitating one. Unfortunately, trans support groups are way-stations for people during a tumultuous time—people get the support they need, literally transition through that difficult time, and then quickly leave it behind. Most trans people don't transition to be trans; we take the steps of gender transition so we can disappear into "normal" society. So the community doesn't gel. I stayed for years, thinking I would find a long lasting community. I did not.
I thought I would find kinship in activism and organizing. But these are goal-directed spaces, and in my experience, people connecting with each other on the basis of strategizing for achieving political outcomes don't become friends. There's too much space for disagreement, on goals, on means, on tactics. Egos get bruised. People burn out and walk away. I pushed on this front for years, nursing larger Herod-scale disappointments, but also personal disappointments as a chosen family never coalesced. I thought I would find the kind of kinship that famous activists write about in their memoirs. I did not.
The one place where activist spaces can get more intimate is in grief circles. And there is a lot to grieve: murder, sexual violence, poverty, abandonment. But even in mourning, I found myself isolated. As someone who is largely cis-passing, I was viewed with suspicion: "you don't go through what I go through," or "you're one of the lucky ones, not like me." I was cast out by more radical queers for how I look, while simultaneously being a magnet for others who just wanted to blend in and be left alone. This complexity was always too much. I thought I would at least have friends and allies in the mourning. But I did not.
There are too few trans people to have consistent physical spaces. So we have to rely on the Internet. And ironically, the easiest way to find other trans women is with online dating. Of course, this is a terrible strategy. Reducing human interactions to snap judgments based on 2-D pictures or little video clips with a swipe is perhaps the most dehumanizing act of our age. And then the uncomfortable dynamic of "we're just friends, right?" is so frighteningly difficult to navigate. So I tried briefly and I stopped. I simply do not.
Trying and Giving Up
I wonder, if Zechariah and Elizabeth were alive today, would they have gone to all of the fertility clinics? Would they have gone through the extensive protocols? All of these add up to years of pushing, years of waiting, years of disappointment.
What did they try back then? Prayer, yes. Offerings, yes. Were there folk remedies? Were there rituals, perhaps led by other priests, perhaps not? Was there the equivalent of herbal medicine?
Did they talk to other childless couples? Did they form the equivalent of modern support groups for fertility? And what happened as, one by one, lucky others conceived and bore children, falling away from the group? Was each one devastating, or could they be genuinely happy for others?
And at what point did they give up, concluding that they were too old, and that not having a nuclear family of their own was simply their lot in life? Did they ever give up?
And did they fight about it? Was there blame? "Bad seed." "Bad soil." What was their relationship with each other like?
At the age of 45, I have given up. I transitioned gender 15 years ago. I've done the equivalent of years of fertility treatments—not to conceive a child, but to conceive a sustainable, chosen life. I'm done.
The Hesitation to Believe
Zechariah and Elizabeth were silent, unable to speak, until the promise was fulfilled. My silence isn't physical, but it is spiritual: I am paralyzed by the inability to trust that any good news can stick.
If Gabriel were to appear to me, what would I say? Would I have my wits about me enough to test the spirit? And even if I truly believed it were an angel of God, would I object? Would I simply say that I'm not worthy to receive the blessing of family or deep intimacy?
Or would I, like Zechariah, come up with reasons why God's power cannot overcome my burdens? I can hear myself saying: "I have too much trauma. I cannot trust. The community is too broken. I am too old for a new beginning."
My deepest, most personal terror is the disappointment of perpetual isolation, and the chilling reality that I no longer believe the good news is for me.
Making Space for the Good News
Friends, my terror is compounded by my isolation. My experience of the external "Herod"—the systemic, theocratic, and political violence—has fed my deepest personal disappointment, my "Zechariah/Elizabeth" barrenness: the failure to find and trust in lasting belonging.
When the world is screaming threat, and our bodies are stuck in a fight-or-flight loop of numbness and clenching, it is nearly impossible to hear the angel Gabriel’s simple command: "Do not be afraid."
The story of Advent doesn't start with joy; it starts with an old couple’s profound grief and a priest’s disbelief. It starts with us, here, today, having to name the reasons we cannot believe the good news is meant for us.
As I shared at the retreat this year (2025), our goal is solidarity—a mutual aid rooted in vulnerability. We cannot stand with one another in the face of Herod until we can name the personal disappointments that leave us too broken, too numb, or too clenched to step forward.
I invite us to begin this Advent series by doing that inner work, making space for our own truth, so that when the message of hope finally arrives, we might not dismiss it in our fear, disappointment, or rage.
Discussion Prompt
I offer these prompts for your reflection as you move into the discussion or activity portion of this evening. Take time to sit with these questions, allowing them to move past your intellectual mind and into your body.
Locating Your Herod (External Fear): Think of the political or religious threat that leaves you feeling most unsafe or enraged. Where do you feel your "Time of Herod" terror in your physical body? (Is it a lump in your throat, tension in your jaw, a clench in your gut, or the feeling of numbness, as it is for me?)
Naming Your Disappointment (Internal Fear): What is the deepest, most private disappointment or grief in your life—your "Zechariah/Elizabeth" disappointment—that makes you hesitate to believe that good things will happen for you?
The Call to Solidarity: Based on your answers to (1) and (2), what is the one thing you would need from this community—not as charity, but as mutual aid—to help you unclench or believe, even just a little?
Jenny Kwan is a member of Haven Berkeley. She is a queer, first-generation Chinese-American trans woman who is passionate about building true solidarity through mutual aid. Her work focuses on the intersection of ancient Christian spiritual disciplines (like contemplative prayer and virtue ethics) with contemporary somatic and psychological healing practices. She believes that the inner work of trauma recovery is the essential foundation for effective social justice and genuine community.
*In Advent 2025 Haven is sharing a devotional called “What do you fear?” by the folks at A Sanctified Art.You can receive access to these materials by contacting Leah, or by attending a Haven service in Advent 2025.