When Christmas Joy is Tinged with Sadness
We reprint this piece annually, as requested. Our lives change quickly, and everything, including Christmas, changes when we are touched by the loss of those we love. As a faith community, we pray with those who have lost someone you love this year during this Christmas season.
Christmas can be the most joyous time of the year. Children’s excitement is infectious; the decorations and lights are a sight to behold, and traditional Christmas songs fill the air with notes of wonder and excitement. Yet, for many, Christmas brings a pervasive and often overwhelming sadness. This sadness is usually born from losing loved ones and the loneliness that now shrouds the joy around us.
I wish I could tell you there is a magic cure for the feelings of loss and loneliness that embrace many at this time of year. There is no quick fix; if there were, someone would have found it long before now. One thing is for sure, though: it’s okay to feel sad during the holidays. It does not help to push back the feelings of sadness, pretending they are not there. Trying to mask the emotions that weigh us down with a happy face only deepens the feelings of isolation and sorrow.
A piece of the answer lies in seeing Christmas in a new and broader way. Christmas is about the birth of a child and all the wonder that birth brings. As we remember the birth of this child, Jesus, we commemorate the birth of love unsurpassed and irrepressible in our world. His birth was a moment when time stopped, and God touched the world with the very depth of his outrageously extravagant love. God’s love was born in the child Jesus, not just for a moment but for all time and eternity. His love echoes throughout the centuries and touches the very depth of our beings. In a very tangible way, we know God’s loving touch through those we are blessed to love.
When we experience the Christmas holiday with all its joy, perhaps the answer is not in pushing away the sadness but instead in remembering and embracing the love that graced our lives and knowing with unwavering certainty that love is not gone but transformed. The child born in a simple manger to a peasant family grew to be the man who embodied the fullness of the love of God. We should not allow ourselves to see the birth of the child Jesus at Christmas without also understanding the life, death, and resurrection of the man. In our celebration of the remembrance of his birth, we do not celebrate a moment; we embrace a lifetime, and we espouse eternity. When we see the baby and hear the melodies of “O Holy Night,” we must strain to hear beyond the notes that capture a moment so that we can hear the symphony of a life lived in love and the final promise, “I am with you always even until the end of time.”
Those we have loved and have gone before us have been swept up into the arms of our outrageously loving God. The commemoration of the birth of the child Jesus at Christmas is the birth of that love remembered. It is a joy-filled reminder of how God has touched our lives with the depth of his amazing love through the lives of those we have loved and who have loved us. The recollection of the birth of the child Jesus is a call from all eternity to our heavy hearts that love lives on and that those we have loved are now born again with this child. They are born again from all eternity to remind us of God’s great love and to echo in our hearts, in their own voice, the final words of Jesus, “I am with you always, even to the end of time.”
I pray this Christmas, when sadness seems on the verge of overwhelming, that in every Christmas melody you hear, you will hear the echo of the love of God proclaimed. In the laughter and the merriment, you will know and believe the promise of God that those you have loved and who have gone before you into his loving embrace are singing out their eternal love for you. May God bless us this Christmas with peace of heart and a sure knowledge of His infinite and outrageous love for us and those we love.
In God’s Unending Love,
Gwen
