OPINION:
Loss is hard enough, but the holidays can make it harder. We feel our grief more keenly when the world around us is ablaze with merriment and good cheer. Expectations of memorable family moments can rub us raw emotionally when there is an empty seat at our table; this combined with the relentless pressures of marketing and social media to experience the “perfect Christmas” can make us feel isolated amid a throng of seemingly untouched souls.
This is supposed to be a joyful time, we tell ourselves, a time when our cultural ideals of celebration and belonging ought to be realized with all the poignant accuracy of a Normal Rockwell illustration. But when you’re carrying sorrow into the season, the most accurate depiction of your inner landscape might look more like a frost-blighted wasteland.
Subscribe to have The Washington Times’ Higher Ground delivered to your inbox every Sunday.
I remember the first Christmas I began to realize that infertility was not just a season for me, but a way of life. The pain of it seared so deeply I could scarcely breathe at times. Envy and wild longing surged in my anguished heart; I felt conspicuous, bereft, forgotten by God. I, who had always loved this time of year above all others, just wanted it to be over.
“I can’t bear the thought that my Christmas rose has such a thorn,” I prayed one morning.
Immediately it occurred to me that the destiny of the Child whose birth we were celebrating was marked by sorrow and that the outstretched arms with which He is often depicted prefigure the Cross. The ubiquitous holly, so inextricably associated with the holidays, was originally prized by early Christians for its kinship with the crown of thorns and its fruit as red as drops of blood.
I was chastened. Perhaps there was more to this season than a round of happy moments and picture-perfect memories. Perhaps God wanted to engage my heart more deeply, not in spite of sorrow, but in the very midst of it.
I began to realize then that sorrow was not the enemy of joy. For pain, rightly considered, can be the very force that exposes our need for a Savior. In God-with-us, we have not a condescending deity or an aloof taskmaster, but an ardent Love who has borne our sorrows and is intimately acquainted with our griefs. He is, moreover, the source of our joy and the ultimate fulfillment of every human longing. It is for this reason that any wound which drives us to him in desperation or desire becomes a precious thing, leading us into a richer relationship with the Lover of our souls.
Historically, the Church has set aside the weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of reflection, penitence, and acknowledged waiting. Advent is not just a recognition of Christ’s first coming; it is the embodied hope that He is coming again. This hope is not wishful thinking or a mere consolation for life’s hardships.
It is, as Tim Keller has written, the hope of restoration. “We get it all back,” he says. “The love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties in this life—but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.”
Advent is the middle ground between the miracle of the Incarnation and the fulfilled hope of our redemption. It is the now-but-not-yet, and, as such, it is a safe space for grief. Advent makes room for our questions, our longings, our losses, and our hopes. It permits the anguished cry of, “How long, Lord?” and the relief of tears which will one day be wiped away forever.
It is worth remembering, however, that the journey of Advent ends with the Feast of the Nativity, a celebration of the astonishing fact of God’s active and present love for us. He has, as Eugene Peterson wrote in The Message translation of the Bible, “moved into the neighborhood,” dignifying the ordinary details of our lives with a new and holy significance. Christmas is a joyful time, not because everything is the way it’s supposed to be, but because we have God’s promise that someday it absolutely will be.
I have found over the years that an honest assessment of emotional pain does not diminish my joy in Christ’s coming but augments it tenfold. Grief has cut through the trappings of the season, exposing the core of what matters, which is relationship, with God and with others. Even the “presence of absences,” as Wendell Berry has written, serves this central value as I rejoice that, in Christ, I will be reunited with those I have loved and lost. We must always be gentle with ourselves in seasons of grief, never striving to enforce a sense of festivity we do not feel. But we can also be open to the ways in which God might want to surprise us with his joy.
The year that my mother died I entered the Christmas season utterly depleted. It had been a long, hard Advent after a long, hard year, and I went through the motions of my holiday preparations, quietly comforted by the fact that sometimes we don’t keep our traditions as much as they keep us. We had invited a number of dear friends for Christmas Dinner, and as I set the table with my mother’s things and rifled through her cookbooks for treasured recipes, I did so under a burden of sadness that felt like a physical weight. I kept things simple by sheer necessity. But I also felt the need to articulate my hope—tired as it was—in tangible, tastable form.
I remember looking around the table on Christmas night, savoring the delight on all of those dear, candlelit faces. Joy seemed palpable in the room, like an unheard melody rippling beyond the stories and jokes and laughter. And, suddenly, there it was in my own heart, swelling to the point of pain. Beyond happiness, this was a sensation that expectations could not prescribe and circumstances could not dictate, a silent assurance that the King whose feast we were keeping was keeping both us and our loved ones in an unbreakable bond of love. We weren’t just observing a holiday; we were celebrating the fact that death itself had been undone. In another moment the scene blurred with tears, but the joy had hit its mark.
There is a moment in C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” in which the animals of Narnia, who have been enduring the “always winter but never Christmas” of the White Witch’s reign are paid a visit by none other than Father Christmas. This was no lighthearted diversion on the part of the author, but an intentional clue, signaling that the unseen King of Narnia—the real king—was on the move. And when the White Witch came upon their little party she was infuriated because she knew what it meant. These animals were not just defying her orders, they were declaring that her reign was a sham.
Every time we sit down together to a meal that’s been prepared in love and seasoned with intention, we’re essentially doing the same thing: defying the so-called evidence of the world around us with evidence of our own. And especially at Christmas, when the happiness of the season tends to foreground our losses. If you are preparing for or participating in the holidays this year with a heavy heart, remember that God’s response to all the brokenness and sorrow that ever was and ever will be was to spread a feast. And it’s a table at which there is a special place for the grieving.
–
Lanier Ivester is the author of “Glad & Golden Hours: A Companion for Advent and Christmastide“(Rabbit Room Press. She is a writer and homemaker who maintains a small farm in Georgia alongside her husband Philip Lanier studied English Literature at the University of Oxford and has lectured across the U.S. on topics such as the integration of faith and reason. www.lanierivester.com
Please read our comment policy before commenting.