Advent Reflection: grief and the Christmas story

Last Sunday was the third Sunday in Advent, known within the church as Gaudete Sunday (rejoice Sunday).

In the chosen reading from Philippians chapter 4 (4-7), Paul writes, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”

But all this talk of rejoicing, and especially of rejoicing always, may very well seem deeply insensitive to those for whom this season’s joyful character jars so utterly with their own deep and searing pain. There are countless families just like mine, for whom this Christmas is to be the first without someone we have so deeply loved, which certainly adds a rather sobering, quieting note to all this rejoicing lark!

 

IF you want to read a gripping exploration of grief, look no further than C.S. Lewis’s ‘A Grief Observed,’ the publication of his notes following the death of his beloved wife, the American writer Joy Davidman. Lewis, in fact, published the work under a pseudonym and many of his friends unknowingly recommended it to him as reading matter to help with his grief for Joy.

In the book, Lewis is forced to confront in the real world what he had theoretically worked out decades earlier in ‘The Problem of Pain.’ In that work, he had sought to reconcile the notion of a good god with a world full of suffering. As usual, he had not settled easily upon any trivial, comforting or immediately reassuring answers, but had noted how pain, being so hard to ignore, may be the means by which we come to rely more fully and completely on God. In pain and suffering, we are corrected, challenged, forced to confront the reality of our limitations. Pain imposes upon us the necessity of surrender. It is through pain that we are most changed and transformed.

Yet, in ‘A Grief Observed,’ he bridges the gap between a philosophy and its application to life in the depths of his own misery. And one thing is strikingly clear: it is not easy!

It is often suggested by religion’s detractors that it’s a comfort blanket for the grim realities of life, and more pertinently, of death. Yet Lewis experiences the opposite. If God is love, he is easier to buy into when things are good. In his happy times with Joy, Lewis explains that he “feasted on love,” and that the good times didn’t lessen his desire for God any more than they lessened his desire for food or literature. He notes that one can profess belief in anything until it has consequences and implications in the real world.

It is in the separation from Joy that Lewis is spiritually stripped to the bones. Where is God? Is he a “cosmic sadist?” If a good god has done all this, is that not actually worse?

Lewis writes: “The terrible thing is that a perfectly good god is in this matter hardly less formidable than a cosmic sadist. The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed, might grow tired of his vile sport, might have a temporary fit of mercy as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But suppose that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good: the kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting.”

What is more, Lewis is appalled by common platitudes and attempts to give easy answers, a mentality bitterly summed up as “There are cigars in heaven.” In a famous passage, he writes, “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.”

 

What, then, is Lewis’s path out of this despair? How does he make his peace with God? The answer, ultimately, is the recognition that his love for Joy has changed him. Bereavement, he concludes, is not “love cut short” but is, in fact, another phase of a journey together, just as marriage follows courtship. It is a continuation of the path they had set out upon together. His mind is focussed not on the unimaginable nature of the eternal or the transformation of his wife into a holy icon that is the product of his projections, but appreciation for what has been and what it has meant.

For Lewis, then, gratitude is his redemption. It is that which ultimately reconciles him to his Christian faith. He realises, in the course of his reflections, that if we are to genuinely be comforted by the Christian hope of eternal life, we must ultimately order our affections such as to love God above all things. The dead cannot be returned to us. We cannot see, touch or hear them as we used to, yet that is what we long for. Lewis concludes that only by loving God and the dead above ourselves, can we break from that desire and make our peace with their return to God, with their soul’s journey to its eternal home.

 

And, finally, here’s where we get to the significance of the Christmas story. How can we love that which we do not know? How can we love God, if God is a set of intellectual abstractions and philosophical propositions? How can we love God if God is so utterly beyond the realm of human comprehension?

Yet Christianity, uniquely, claims that God took on human form, to become a part of human suffering. Far from watching on with pitiless indifference, the Christian god is one who will weep at the graveside of his beloved friend Lazarus. When we weep, we must remember that God has wept real, sincere and heartfelt tears too. What an awesome revelation of God’s love that is!

The events of Christmas are celebrated each year with rituals, music and traditions so utterly familiar to us, which carry on no matter what, seemingly unconcerned by the dance of hope and tragedy that has marked the passing year, and well they should, since the events of Christmas turn the world on its head. They answer the question of whether we are here today and gone tomorrow in a chaotic and purposeless universe, or whether there is an eternal into which we can place our hope.

So back to rejoicing! The reading doesn’t invite us to rejoice in a shallow way, to pretend to leave our troubles aside and fake it until we make it. Instead, rejoicing is about living a life centred on hope in God, who through the profound mystery of the Christmas story has made himself known to us,, that he may occupy his rightful place in our hearts.

We may still feel deep sadness that those we love will not have their seats at our festive tables, and share the delights of Christmas with us as they did before. We must allow ourselves the right to acknowledge that pain, to go through it and to comfort one another. But God lights our way towards hope; God is our rudder as we sail into the storms of life. The Christian story anchors our pain in hope. It absorbs our little stories into one big story, in which love and hope reign triumphant.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice.”