To the Editor:

Re “Before Christmas, Face the Darkness,” by Tish Harrison Warren (Sunday Review, Dec. 1):

A simple prescription for a day in Advent, with its soft low light and pearly sky, is to step out of the frenzy and into a church sanctuary at an odd time of day when you are likely to be alone, or one of just a few, sitting quietly.

What is it about a holy space that is both settling and sustaining? The word “holy” dates back to the Old English “halig,” the Old Saxon “helag” and the Old High German “heilag,” all words for holy. But it is thought that the word’s original meaning may have been “that must be preserved whole or intact.” A sanctuary, then, settles and sustains because it preserves the whole. It heals.

And so, let the hallowed space and the silence make you whole and hear the true message of Advent: You are loved, you matter, and in the reassuring words of the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Margaret McGirr

Greenwich, Conn.

A Life Story in Wedding Rings

To the Editor:

Re “I Give Thanks for the Matriarchs” (Op-Ed, Nov. 25):

I read Margaret Renkl’s essay with a flash of recognition. I, too, wear several wedding rings that belonged to the women who raised me.

When I married, I asked my aunt to send me my grandmother’s ring to use as my own. I felt that it would have more meaning to me than any new ring could possibly have. But my aunt couldn’t comply; my practical grandmother had pawned the ring to pay for her daughter’s first year of college.

Instead, she sent the ring that my great-grandmother had used a hundred years (to the month) before my own wedding. As the years have passed and as their owners have died, I have added my mother’s and my aunt’s wedding rings, and a signet ring that belonged to my godmother.