Something about this time of year contrasts so deeply our hopes and fears. Joy and sorrow make for odd bedfellows around the Christmas tree.
For many, holidays are complicated. Loved ones have been lost. Family toxicity mars memories. All seem hard to bear in the midst of endless “Jingle Bells” playing everywhere.
In these reflections from Christmases Past, I start with the Sandy Hook tragedy 12 years ago today. This past June, surviving classmates graduated from high school without 20 of their starting number. Whatever trauma marks the lives of these graduates, nothing compares with the ache that remains in the hearts of bereaved parents.
It is 2012. I want to know who took the “merry” out of “Merry Christmas”? It isn’t the first time – and I doubt it will be the last.
I found myself avoiding Facebook earlier this week, growing weary of my religious friends ranting about “CHRISTmas” being lost amid all the holiday bustle, on the one hand, and cranky non-religious friends of mine going anti-Jesus’-birthday ballistic, on the other. Then Tuesday and Friday happened.
Tuesday, a lone gunman terrorized thousands of holiday shoppers in a suburban mall near my home, killing two and seriously injuring a third, before taking his own life. Friday, the most unbearable pain was inflicted on a quiet, obscure place called Newtown.
And now people are stomping on the grief of those left behind with their rages about what sins or perversions caused all the deaths of so many innocent kids and their teachers in Connecticut.
Enough, already!
I could add my fuel to the fire – I am fully capable. But I stop myself and ponder that this is not the first year that “merry” has been taken out of “Merry Christmas” and it is not likely to be the last.
Long before there were Puritans banning Christmas parties, and gun-crazy protagonists and antagonists, and righteous and unrighteous scrooges, and people fussing about the meaning of Christmas or its links to pagan holidays…long before Christmas was even celebrated, unspeakable tragedy was part of the first Christmas story.
As the news from Connecticut unfolded Friday, the words that sprang to my mind were of the writer Matthew quoting the prophet Jeremiah: “Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” (Matthew 2:18; Jeremiah 31:15)
It’s not the favorite or most frequently retold story from the gospels’ scant Christmas narratives. In fact, it is a passage we prefer to avoid.
According to Matthew, King Herod was out to get baby Jesus, supposed usurper to his throne. All the despotic ruler knew was that sages from the East had passed through looking for a baby destined to rule over the nation. Said baby was to be born in Bethlehem, a hamlet not far from the capital, Jerusalem. Shortly thereafter, Herod had all the boys in Bethlehem who were two years of age and under slaughtered. They are remembered on December 28 in the Feast of the Holy Innocents.
I look down the list of the tiny victims from the Sandy Hook school and I am struck by their ages, all fives and sixes. Twenty children, boys and girls, who will be missing from the ranks of the school district’s graduating class twelve years from now. Twenty children and their heroic teachers. And who can speak of the trauma faced by those left behind?
We like our Christmases merry. That is as it should be. Singing and feasting and giving and all things delightful. The first Christmas was an occasion of heavenly joy. Joy and peace are as Christmas as can be. But the pain our present Christmas season brings is unfortunately not as foreign to the traditions of this holy day as we would like to think.
If you are looking for “why” answers in this blog post, forget it. I have cried out all my whys before the God I put my trust in and am left with gaunt clues as to any meaning to be found in this week’s tragedies. There are no easy answers, and any attempts will sound forced in the face of such a sobering weekend.
So I offer you only what Matthew offered. When confronted with the story of Herod’s massacre of helpless baby boys, he drew on the words of the ancient weeping prophet and cried, “A voice is heard in the land, it is the voice of weeping and great mourning.” And such is as it should be.
I pray this Christmas is merry and bright for those of us more distant from these tragedies. For those who are not, I humbly ask the God of all comfort to bring you rest. Jesus said to mourn with those who mourn. And so, I mourn.
I also pray we do not forget that tragedy and pain are as much a part of the meaning of Christmas as is Jesus himself. For the message of his birth is that he came to bring us peace, and that, in so doing, it would cost him everything.
One year later, I wrote:
At age 29, William Chatterton Dix was struck with a near-fatal illness. Bedridden for months, he succumbed to depression. In his depressed state he wrote several hymns, including the Christmas Carole, “What Child is This?”
The song, set in the minor key of the traditional Greensleeves ballad, has an unnerving sound to it. Even as the first verse fades from the heights of “This, this is Christ the King,” the second verse responds in contrast with the haunting “Nails, spear shall pierce him through.”
Enmeshed in the Christmas story is the pain of present and future estrangement. On the liturgical calendar, December 28 commemorates King Herod’s massacre of boy babies in Bethlehem with the Feast of the Holy Innocents. Meanwhile, the Cross overshadows the manger as Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Over nearly six decades I’ve come to experience Christmas in many settings. What has always made the season for me has been human connectedness. I suppose I could celebrate the birth of my Lord in solitude – after all it is his birthday and not mine – but I cannot imagine it being the same. For at the heart of “Our dear Savior’s birth” is that we who were estranged are brought together through that very Savior.
At first when in a new place, I’ve depended on the relationships I’ve brought with me or on staying in touch with family and friends wherever I’ve come from to make the holiday meaningful. Gradually, new connections are made – and with them new or revised traditions – and some of the empty feelings are subtly filled in.
Christmas Eve caroling of my younger years in South Jersey was replaced by a Christmas Eve party with local friends in China. A few traditions remained – the retelling of the story of the first Christmas, for example. Others were substituted – the drinking of hot tea instead of hot chocolate.
But the heart of each Christmas whenever and wherever it has been celebrated is our relationship with Jesus and our relationship with one another. So it is this year that my wife, our children, and I gather around a freshly cut Oregon-grown noble fir, share the Story, sing a carol, pray, and exchange gifts in honor of the Christ child.
At this time of year, we celebrate human connectedness most fervently in holidays spanning from the North American Thanksgiving to the East Asian Lunar New Year. Community is certainly central to the meaning of Christmas. And well it should be that our most important holidays reflect the belief that relationships are what make us most human. In contrast, severed relationships and being cast out of human connectedness are the most tragic of all pains and punishments.
As we revel in our relatedness, a part of me leaves our secure circle and goes out to those who are disconnected this season. A child is in the hospital. A daughter has just been laid in her grave. A brother is at war. A father is in prison. A mother has disappeared out there somewhere. Family members are estranged. Friends are friends no more. Each example has real names.
Other names have other pains. No heat in the house. No house to heat. No job. Poor health. And yet, it is the loss of relational connectedness that strikes me as the most painful. Perhaps because human relationships are the gift that most reflects Christmas and the hope of a new year.
I prefer my Christmases pain free, sanitized if you please. Even so, I am reminded that pain is as much a part of Christmas as is the joy. For the meeting place of “the hopes and fears of all the years” is the babe in the manger. We have to take Christmas as this mixed bag remembering that it is not the end, only the beginning. In the end, death will lose its sting, the grave its victory. Now is but a promise – yet a promise like no other.
Two days before Christmas 2017, my mother died. Her funeral was on the 28th – Feast of the Holy Innocents. The following summer, my wife’s parents died. If Christmas 2017 had been a strange cross-country transit for Mom, Christmas 2018 had its own poignancy with empty chairs around the tree.
That Christmas season I was invited to light an advent candle and share a reading at my church. I was asked to speak on sorrow in the face of joy. Here is what I shared:
I get that the holiday season is not always merry. Two days before Christmas last year my mother passed away and we spent the entire Christmas Day in snowbound PDX [Portland, Oregon, airport] trying to get to her funeral. This Christmas will be the first one without my wife’s parents who passed away this summer within 9 days of each other.
The most joyful season can fill us with the most pain. Ask the families of Bethlehem who endured the loss of their own babies because King Herod was jealous of the Christ-child who had fled to Egypt, a refugee.
One of my mother’s favorite Christmas carols sums up this joy-sorrow mix. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, writing during the Civil War, despaired that “hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.”
Mom lived through much pain in her life – her home in China, where she grew up a missionary kid, was bombed during World War II. She faced unspeakable heartache as an adult. Then in her later years, she lost her ability to preach and minister way too early.
But nothing could erase her trademark joy-filled smile. When news came that her home had been bombed (she was away at the time), that 10-year-old girl had entrusted her life to Jesus, her one true security. And he held her tightly till her final breath 76 years later.
Even in her fading days, her joy continued to shine through. Planted there by her Lord, it was far deeper than anything this earth could erase. As Longfellow concluded, “God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;/ The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail,/ With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
I’ve discovered that joy is not the absence of sorrow. Rather joy is the beacon shining through the darkest days of our lives. Christmas will be different in our house this year, maybe not so merry at times, but certainly filled with joy.
I share these posts from Christmases Past for those of my friends for whom Christmas is not so merry this year. I pray that, though the merry be muted, the presence of Christ will be made manifest.
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