Blessing of Brokenness

The holiday season is loaded for me, like it probably is for many.  My mother loved Christmas, and I adored my mother.  In my childhood home, Christmas was a time of favorite recipes, family, tradition, music, light and celebration.  Often, it was also a time of gathering in strays.  My parents were from a tiny town in West Texas, but moved across the country and around the world for school and work.

Our family celebrated Christmas in several states and just as many countries, usually without extended family.  My shy mother knew what it was to be lonely and away from home, so we always had a motley crew of “extras”.  You didn't have to know my mother long or well to experience her love and be invited to a meal.  I don’t ever recall her saying, “It’s nice to meet you.”  She would look at you with her warm, brown eyes and say, “It’s so good to know you.”  And you would believe her.

I am very much a Polly Anna and, for most of my life I couldn't understand that happiness and suffering could coexist.  I only recently realized that for as long as I can remember there has been an undercurrent of sadness and longing beneath the cookie exchanges, endless decorations and festive cantatas.

Once I was grown, our family had a string of devastating Christmases.  An uncle with a punctured lung 1,000 miles away and all alone, the return of cancer that would claim my sweet little Mommy’s life, my hospitalization leading up to, and the Christmas day birth of our tiny 1 ½ pound son.  Those are the Christmases during which I would expect to suffer depression.  In those times, I would be gentle on myself when the tears came.  Remarkably, though, those were the Christmases that came easy.  It was easy to let go of the perfect meal with the perfect place-settings and the perfectly dressed children behaving with perfect manners. It was easy to decline invitations to parties that, however fun, would tax our energy and drive our sugar-fueled bodies further into exhaustion.  It was easy to know that love isn't the perfect package under the tree.  During the difficult holidays,  it was easy to crumple into God’s arms.  It was easy to accept God’s grace in the form of meals from friends and neighbors.  It was easy to come close to the unfathomable mystery of Christmas.

Those were what the Celtics call ‘thin spaces’, times when we are able to experience a deep sense of God in our everyday world.  We were right in the middle of this messy, noisy, painful world; our emotions were raw, we were too weary to put up a mask to the world, too worn to make ourselves believe that we had the answers or the ability to heal ourselves.  It was natural to focus on the promise of an infant born to a young girl of humble means; a girl that was willing to empty herself of knowing the answers.  In Mary,  there was room for God to send hope.  In our brokenness,  it is so much easier to see God than in times peace.

It has been almost 9 years since the last of our “hospital” holidays.  For most of that time,  I have suffered from a pretty acute depression.  Every year it would show up and knock me off my feet.  I am a happy person!  I have warm memories of a loving mother, that tiny premature boy baby is healthy, rambunctious and up to my shoulder!  How could I be depressed?!  The depression was bad, but my judgment and lack of patience with myself was the really devastating part.

The sadness still comes, but now I use it as I would use a meditation chime.  I no longer down peppermint lattes and crank up Christmas carols in an effort to trump up artificial joy.  Now use the little clench in my heart as a reminder of God’s big love for me.  I bathe myself in that grace.  I open my heart to my own suffering and the suffering of others. Lord knows I’m no Mary, but like her, I allow myself to be an empty vessel.  I can relax in not knowing how God will use me or in which of my many words, glances or actions God will send comfort, hope or inspiration.

“My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.”  Luke 1:46-47