Good Tidings of Grief

Comfort and Joy

“Good tidings of grief, to you and your friends, good tidings for Christmas, and a thoughtful new year.” Oh, that’s not how the song goes, you say? 

But I do not wish grief away this holiday season. I have learned I cannot fully experience tidings of comfort and joy without lived grief.* Whether that is my own grief, or walking alongside someone else and theirs, I am more acutely aware of the things that bring me comfort and joy this season because I house memories of moments and people I miss, the sources of so much joy. I can remember lessons learned “the hard way,” as my dad would say. And I have so much to be grateful for right in front of and around me. This gratitude fuels my sense of hope. 

My students, a colleague, and I were outside journaling in our gratitude notebooks recently, and we paused for a moment to watch the leaves fall from trees around us. We were caught in a little leaf shower, and my goodness, it was lovely. We communally acknowledged that no one ever again will be part of that moment, with these classmates, watching those leaves fall from these trees. 

Our holiday moments may or may not be what we expected them to be at this age and stage. Or, they may be exactly what we didn’t know enough to realize we wanted. Maybe a little bit of all of the above? 

It’s worth our time to notice. To notice what and who is here. And what and who is not. Breathe in the Presence around us and in us. And breathe out acknowledging what bubbles up when we do. No one ever again will be a part of these exact moments and be able tell these stories, however they unfold.

The Beauty of Story

One of the most beautiful things about Advent and Christmas is the stories we hear. Oftentimes we collapse all the individual stories of the Bible into one big Christmas narrative, but when we slow down a bit, we are free to notice the individual nature of each narrative woven together into one big story of hope. Hope that comes out of conditions of grief.

People painted lambs’ blood over their doors and hoped.
People wandered in the wilderness and were hopeful.
People put their trust in leader after leader, king after king, and hoped.
Hopeful people took risks and failed.
Hopeful people took risks and succeeded. 
People listened to voices they heard in the wilderness or from the sky, and they were hopeful. 
A couple of people found themselves in a barn, delivering a child that had already caused a lot of trouble. 
But they listened and they hoped. 

And what came to pass in the coming decades would have sounded like fantasy to those two people if someone had told them then exactly how much hope their child would give the world.

“You gotta be desperate,” a friend told me recently. To have the greatest hope possible, to overcome the impossible, you have to start with desperation.

These two people, on the road, in a stranger’s barn, not sure to which city they can safely return, were desperate. When magi showed up with three gifts for their newborn, at each turn, Mary and Joseph chose the next best path. They couldn’t see the future (and neither can we). They lived with patience and hope for the next right move. They traveled with love for one another, on the wings of benevolent love from God and their neighbors, until they arrived in Nazareth.

Hope and Comfort and Joy

The best part of our Advent new year and the following Christmas and Epiphany celebrations is the reminder that while grief is an undeniable part of our human experience, so are comfort and joy. 

And we get to share this understanding with our children. Rather than shield them from grief, we are able to walk alongside them, sometimes carry them, and sometimes watch them grapple with it on their own, hard as that may be for us. It’s its own kind of grief. 

As Christians in the world, we have the gift to treat the world with grace and bring comfort and joy to others this season and year-round. We can recognize grief because we’ve lived it, the need for hope because we’ve needed it, and lovingly fortify that hope in others with our talents, treasure, and the blessed gift of our time and attention. 

May your Christmas and Epiphany seasons (and beyond) be filled with the hope and love given to us unceasingly by God, lived out for us to see in Jesus, and carried forward by us to one another. 

*Allow me to distinguish, for clarity’s sake, that grief and tragedy are wholly different. I am not wishing for greater tragedy in this world. Solely an appreciation for a God who gives us the entire spectrum of human emotion in balance to propel us ever forward in the immeasurable Love we are gifted and blessed to share.

[Image Credit: Public Domain via Unsplash ]