Christmas isn’t just for the joyful. It’s for the sad, the anxious, the fearful, grieving and harried too. Whether we’re preoccupied with memories, struggling with changes life has brought our way or filled with sadness and grief for the empty places at our tables and around our trees; Whether we’re weighted by worries or afraid for our world and fearful for the state of our planet, lament the terror of war and the struggles born of abuses of power and powerlessness; Whether our hearts are broken open by the losses of health, identity, relationship or meaning; Whether we are seeking refuge from the frenzied demands of this season, Christmas is a season for for us too.
The Christmas story contains more than one tragedy: a forced census, a murderous political leader grasping to power, an occupied land with characters who are scared and isolated. Don’t our griefs also run the spectrum from global crisis and poor political leadership to personal losses, fears and griefs of all kinds?
The cure for all these losses in our lives isn’t to “get over them”. The cure isn’t the beauty of a newborn baby or a perfect Christmas (as if that’s even possible!) The cure isn’t even time – which they say heals all wounds. Check out this poem by Albert Huffstickler, called “The Cure”
The pain of our grief, our challenges, the terrible losses that define life, they don’t cease being painful…they find their shape in the form of our living. Just as we don’t “bounce back” from the times that dent and ding us, we don’t go “back to normal”, but instead find ways to move through and incorporate them into our living, so too do we seek not to find “an end” to our grief and challenge, but to find “the shape of it”. When we can see life’s shape, with our joy AND our sadness, our losses and gains all together, can we see that we find our new shape – we find it in our life and our living.
The tragedies we witness, the losses we suffer, the difficulties of our relationships, our mistakes, our failures, the sadness of our isolation and separation – our anxieties, our history and our grief…we don’t have to “GET OVER” any of them…but to find the wisdom and the shape of them. This isn’t an easy task, it’s a daily re-learning and a practice of discipline.
The Christmas story places a couple expecting their first child on a demanding journey by foot to a strange town where they don’t appear to have any family. They are not well off, they lack security and support. And they are about to bring a child into the world in a dangerous time. Despite what our carols and lullabies imply about this story, it’s a story populated by those who are afraid: a paranoid king who sees threats to his power everywhere, shepherds afraid of the night sky, a young woman who is startled and fearful to discover she is pregnant, a man who is afraid to marry this woman.
Like those characters in this story, there is inner strength and a pervasive and persistent call from deep within us to survival – but more than that – a call to thrive, to help, to seek out the seeds of compassion and joy, even in the darkest challenges – and not despite our grieving, our emotion, our depression, our sadness, our anxiety, but along side it.
Can we embrace our complicated emotions about this season – as the fearful, put-upon, poor and marginalized central characters of the Christmas story would have had to? Let’s give ourselves permission to feel blue, to grieve, to be anxious…it’s then that we are truest to the depth of meaning of this season. My wish for us all – that we find the shape of all of it. In the darkness is a quiet strength that comes from the wisdom and gift of every one of our experiences. What a gift that Christmas comes in every shade – red and green, silver and gold, and…deep, dark blue.
