Merry Christmas.
I guess.
I enter this season heavy hearted. As I write the weather is cooling, the leaves turning, falling. This year I feel sadness and anger. A dear friend died over Thanksgiving weekend and I can’t think of a good reason for it. I’m angry over her death; I’m not sure whom I’m angry at. Many blame God—why did God let this happen—but I don’t know what hand God played. It happened. And I don’t like it.
She was a lovely lady, energetic, young. Our children have been friends since they met in the toddler room eight or nine years ago. The families grew close and a few years ago we met in Greece for a day, our holidays intersecting not – at – all by coincidence.
When my own mother, and two decades earlier my father, passed away, I was sad, but not angry. Uncles and aunts have gone. They all had good long lives and had moved on to the final glory. Over the years some friends, my own contemporaries, have died, too soon, their lives cut early. I have mourned for them but this one death, this one has crossed my emotional line. I’m angry.
Offering me condolences, or heaven help me, blessings, spikes that anger. I don’t want blessings because a dear friend died at 50. There was no good reason for it.
I suppose I don’t really understand God. I want God to be this omniscient puppet – master; and I want there to be a reason, a purpose, for everything and everybody. If I give God thanks for all the good in my life, then is God not to blame for all the bad?
These are raw emotional thoughts and no amount of theology softens them. I can’t put my intellectual knowledge to work here because I miss my friend and see the pain on the faces of her mother, husband and son. I feel that pain as well.
Jesus helps some. His humanness touches me. He seems too extraordinary at times, too driven to purpose, but at other times he is all too human, emotional, irrational even. Pragmatic often.
Jesus’ birth matters, and helps. There is darkness hovering over the manger: the extreme poverty into which he’s born, the babies who will die because he is alive, the political and social upheavals his life triggers.
And of course, the noise of this season is the light that shines from the birth of the Christ child. We live in both, in the dark corporeal shadows, in the bright saving light. It makes my head spin at times; squeezes my heart. Why, I ask often, why?
I have no answer—oh, I have a thousand answers, I read, I listen, I’ve heard many sermons, I’ve been to many funerals, I know the promises, I know the theology. I know many things. But, I have no answer.
I have loss and anger. Raw emotions. And someplace, also raw, also emotional, is a feeling, faint right now, that a child born in a manger centuries ago, somehow connects me to a profound mystery filled with unfathomable beauty and sometimes sadness.
Faith doesn’t make life easier; part of me wants to indulge in anger, if it wasn’t for this other feeling connected to Christ.
