Sick Pilgrim
Christmas is complicated.
On one hand, the music is familiar, the smells are sweet, the ornaments are sentimental, the snow sparkles, the air is crisp and easier to breathe, the presents are piled high under the tree.
On the other hand, we can’t turn back time as much as we wish to, we can’t make gifts from nothing, we can’t wish people different, we can’t strong-arm good into triumphing over evil. The holidays are lonely. Even in rooms filled with family. People aren’t who we wish they would be. There are empty seats at the table. The expectations are so high they’re childish. The realities are so inferior they make us feel foolish.
Side by side with goodwill and nostalgia is an ache I can’t seem to ignore.
Christmas is complicated.
This morning, about half way into the second reading, a mom arrived to church, without a dad, but with a slew of children. Her teenager, first in line leading the way into the sanctuary, stopped and stood still, paralyzed by the scrutiny she felt when the congregation turned to see who was late. The mother, with a baby on her hip, ran right into the back of the motionless teenager. The collision turned the mom’s get-everyone-dressed-and-in-
While most people were polite and turned away once they got a good look at who couldn’t get their shit together on time, I watched the scene unfold. The mom looked around to see who had witnessed her anger and caught eyes with me. I tried to smile and hoped that my smile didn’t feel like condescension. What I really wanted was to ask her if she could get a margarita after church. What I really wanted was to tell her that I feel it too even though technically I was on time.
*
It seems like everyone I know is losing it in one way or another right now. I feel it, too.
But, we hope.
We hope for everything to get easier. It usually does.
We hope for everything to hurt less. It eventually will.
We hope. It’s what we do.
Hope is beautiful, but it carries a certain amount of sadness, doesn’t it? There’s a yearning inherent to hope requiring patience while we are expectant for something that is eluding us, that is still out in front, unreachable… but… foreseeable.
This is Advent. Precisely, actually. To hope is to journey through the season of Advent.
As Christians, our hope points us to the One who is coming. We wait with expectation, sweeping the surfaces of our hearts that we might prepare Him room to operate and move until one fine day He returns in splendor.
Together, we wait. Together, we hope.
This morning when the priest said, “We live in a time of ‘already’ but ‘not yet,’” I saw the tardy mom reach over and straighten her teenager’s hair, removing it from the neck of her sweater, smoothing it down her back, perhaps getting a jump start on the sweeping of her heart. My heart leapt for them both.
This Christmas I am challenged to look at the ways that I wait and long for God. In these times of restlessness and despair where peace is not yet mine, I am challenged to arise and renew my hope as I look forward with passion, longing, and desperation while realizing that one of the ways that the Lord brings hope just might be through me.
I found that mom after church. I put my fist out. Reflexively, she bumped it without knowing why. She smiled up at me, questioning but hopeful. I looked down at my four little ones around the hem of my skirt and said, “Solidarity. That’s all.”
*
Jesus, wrapped in our injured flesh, born to poor parents on the run, with nowhere to even lay, tells us where He dwells. It is with the sick and the hurting and the confused and the oppressed and the hungry and the broken hearted. He is in those we love. He is in those we wish we loved. He is in every trial, every rejection, every longing.
So I think it’s ok that Christmas is complicated, because it just means Jesus is near.
Allison Sullivan is the author of Rock, Paper, Scissors. Read more of her work for Sick Pilgrim here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sickpilgrim/2016/04/the-dark-devotional-christians-drive-me-crazy/
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