The Christmas season comes with a strong demand on both body and spirit. For weeks, my days began at 3:00 a.m. for Simbang Gabi. I woke repeatedly before dawn, as if my body had learned this hour by heart. Each day unfolded in repetition, from one Mass to another, from the parish church to the barangay chapels.
I stole sleep in small fragments, carefully saving my energy, and each morning required a fresh act of resolve. This tiredness was subtle, creeping in slowly and deeply. It was an exhaustion I carried quietly and accepted as part of the grace of ministry.
This fatigue was real and built up over time. Sleep came in pieces. At times, the pressure weighed heavily on my nerves. I had a slight fever days before Christmas. Yet I never saw this as an outside burden. I accepted it willingly, even gratefully, because this was the work placed in my hands. After all, ministry does not happen only when you have extra energy. It comes even when you have little left to give.
By the morning of December 25, after the last Mass, something inside me loosened. Relief arrived quietly, without any fuss. I had made it through the season. I acknowledged, not with pride but with gratitude, that I had withstood the grit of the daily routine and the fatigue. I allowed myself a rare moment to pause. The labor was finished.
Then came the silence.
By midday, the convent staff locked the office and headed home. Laughter and conversation faded from the convent halls. The house emptied, leaving behind a quiet stillness. I walked through the church one final time and closed the side doors. Just hours earlier, the space had been filled, people standing close together, some spilling onto the pavement outside, drawn by hope. Now, the emptiness returned.
Closing the doors marked more than the end of a celebration. It signaled a shift, from plenty to scarcity, from noise to quiet, from shared communal celebration to personal reflection. When I closed the convent door, I understood that no one would come knocking.
And I was alone.
This solitude did not scare me. I had lived with it long enough to call it a companion. As an introvert, I have learned to draw strength from silence. I did not crave company. That season of longing had long passed.
Yet something stirred beneath the calm.
It was not loneliness in the usual sense. It was a subtle emptiness, a quiet ache that did not have an easy name. Perhaps it was the leftover feeling from giving myself completely. Perhaps it was the human cost of being at the center of many lives and returning, at day’s end, to a room that asked nothing of me. I had been fully present for others, and now I stood face to face with myself.
As evening came and the sky grew dark, I felt a change within. It was not despair, but a gentle melancholy. It was not regret, but understanding. Ministry is naturally asymmetrical. One gives and gives, often receiving in ways that are hard to grasp and delayed. The silence that follows is not emptiness, but vulnerability.
I did not rush to make this feeling more spiritual. I allowed it to be what it was. Perhaps this, too, is part of Christmas. The God who chose to be born in the quiet of night knows solitude well. The Word made flesh entered the world quietly, resting in borrowed space.
In that light, my own solitude felt less like absence and more like connection.
The bells had stopped ringing. The doors were closed. The season had shifted. In the stillness that followed, I placed even this unnamed pain back into the hands of the God for whom I had risen before dawn, broken bread, and given myself fully.
The day darkened, the doors stayed closed, and the silence remained.
Fr. Edwin “Edu” Gariguez was the former executive secretary of Caritas Philippines. In 2012, he was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize for leading a grassroots movement against an illegal nickel mine to protect Mindoro Island’s biodiversity and its indigenous people. He is currently the social action director of the Apostolic Vicariate of Calapan.
