On main streets and storefronts, on lampposts and stair rails, trimming doorways and front yards, holiday lights are beginning to appear.
The season is upon us – too early for some, just in time for others. We’ll soon put up Christmas trees, and more lights will come out to circle its branches with hues and bulbs generations old. Yet in the nostalgic hymns and carols that surround the new light, in the prospects of familial warmth that beckon the Advent season, we feel keenly the absence of those we miss, presences we yearn for still. And our hearts keep on breaking.
As good as the season is for some, it is the very essence of grief for others. Advent is the joyful and penitent expectation of the Christ Child’s entering this life with us. But it is the dear ones lost to us this year and in years past who return to our minds and hearts and fill us with a yearning we can only take to prayer. We see their faces and gestures on the faces and in the gestures of children and grandchildren. All we can do is sigh and glance up to a star.
Some who haven’t yet experienced it might wonder why there could be gloom in such a joyous season. They don’t know that it is the irony itself that accosts us: great joy in Christ’s coming and great sorrow in the clinging to the imprint of a loved one. So where in all the wash of light – white and blue and green and red – do we go with the melancholy that encloses so many during Advent?
The only place I know to go is to the Story itself. A grown man is willing to set his reputation aside in a time and place when all one has is one’s reputation, and a young woman barely out of childhood, who said “yes” to an angel’s call, is with child herself. They journey into the starlight with no accommodations. Lambs are inexplicably rambunctious in their fields and their shepherds are drawn to a light from a cave. Kings from a distance are readying themselves to be humbled as never before. And, finally, in the cave’s stable among the animals of the land, their snorts and swooshes of tails the only sound in the still, still night, the Child is born … and God, miraculously and graciously, becomes one of us.
From the moment He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Christ took on every part of us except sin. Growing to manhood, He took on our joy, the exuberance of friendship and celebration and rejuvenation, miraculous or not. And He took on our sorrow, too, every ounce of loneliness we have ever felt, our dejection, our pain, our desperate grief in the longing for one who has returned to Him. He turned to us in the flesh and embraced us as we had never been embraced before.
In our faith we celebrate the joys of being human and the sorrows of human loss. We get in there and grapple with the real things of life, marriages and births and passing life lessons to children and, ultimately, with the onset of time, receding into the background of the generations as the years wear on. And, of course, we also walk with the sorrowful in their tears and good-byes.
Somehow, in some mysterious way, the embrace of that Child becomes our hope. That embrace gives us the fortitude to live on through the highs and lows of a season, through the highs and lows of our lives. It is the Story itself to which our lights foreshadow and our grief calls out. It is the story itself that returns our joy, our laughter, our hope right there before us in that loveliest of faces, that intimate, hallowed face of the Christ Child, the face we now so anxiously await.
As the lights begin to swirl round us and as those who have passed before us come back to life in our mind’s eye, as we listen ever more attentively to the enlightening story of the Christ Child’s imminent arrival, hope may just find room in our hearts. And when it finds our hearts at Advent and Christmas, it will surely reign there.
Fred Gallagher is an author, book editor and former addictions counselor. He and his wife Kim are members of St. Patrick Cathedral in Charlotte.