When Christmas Breaks Your Heart

This is the reflection I offered at the "Blue Christmas" service held at our church last Sunday.

When Christmas breaks your heart. There are a lot of reasons why our hearts may be breaking this Christmas – this may be your first Christmas without a loved one who has died in the past year, you may have lost a loved one around this time of year and so the season is a reminder of your loss, a relationship important to you may have ended, maybe there has been a divorce, a job has been lost, this is your first year in a new place and you cannot get home for Christmas, a loved one has to be away this holiday season. So we gather, the heartbroken and those seeking to stand with us in heartbreak.
Christmas itself can seem pretty fragile. We often cloak Christmas in sweetness and light – we think of children’s Christmas programs, holiday music that is here for a few weeks then disappears, movies where all the endings are happy ones, trees laden with just the right gifts. Christmas can seem as fragile as a crystal angel hanging from a tree or fragile as a snow flake.
When we think of Christmas like that it doesn’t seem able to handle our grief, our pain, our sorrow. We find no place in it for sadness, no place for the blues amidst the greens and reds of the season. Our heartbreak seems to break Christmas, and we don’t want to do that, so we keep our distance. Because we don’t think Christmas can handle our pain and grief and sadness it makes this time even lonelier, even more difficult.
Yes, Christmas is more about joy than sadness, more about singing than silence, but it is big enough to hold both, strong enough to take our grief and sorrow. When we see Christmas as only sweetness and light, we see it too one-dimensionally. We miss important parts of the story, we miss the strength and resilience that the story offers.
The Christmas story is not just about angels and shepherds. It is also a story about an unplanned pregnancy. It is a story about a people under imperial rule. Mary and Joseph are made to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem by order of the Roman Empire and there seems something just a little bit cruel in making a pregnant woman travel a distance for purposes of taxation and a census. It is a story about a young family with no place to stay. It is about a birth outside.
When we begin to take in these dimensions of the story it seems less fragile. It seems more resilient. It seems like it might hold our pain and grief and heartbreak. I think it is meant to do that. While I think the Christmas story is for everyone, I think it is especially for us when we are hurting, when we are experiencing difficulty, when we feel sorrow and grief and pain. I think it is for us at such times because ultimately it is a story about a God who is with us even in, and especially in, such times. God does not abandon us when times are difficult, instead God walks the road with us. God does not shy away from our grief or pain, God shares them with us. The light of God’s love finds its way even into the darkest corners of our lives and our world. The Christmas story is about a God who is, in the words of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”
If we hear no other word this season amidst the carols and bells and chatter, may this word penetrate our hurt and sorrow – God is with us. God holds our breaking hearts. With God there can be healing, even when that takes time, and it does. With God there is light, even when that light is but a tiny sliver peering into a dark room. With God there can be joy, even if it is on the other side of deep sadness. God be with you. Amen.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David