It is soon to be Christmas. Merry Christmas! If we were in the British Isles, I’d wish you a happy Christmas. I’ve always been partial to wishing a blessed Christmas. Regardless, may you have a day with warmth and some time with those close to you.
“Merry” is not a word we use often. “Eat, drink, and be merry” seems to encourage excess. I like the origin of words. Merry comes from the Old English “myrige,” meaning pleasing or delightful. It is related to “mirth.” Mirth is another word we don’t toss around much.
With all this wishing of merriness, it’s as if the very purpose of Christmas was to be happy. No other day of the year is so focused on joy. That is certainly true for us Christians. The birth of our savior in a stable under a star? What’s not to like about that? Even for those less religious, Christmas is a day of good feelings and cheer. Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch came around after all.
Unfortunately, things like sadness and loss and suffering don’t follow the calendar. It is part of being human that we will have days that are hard. If the roll of the dice says one of those falls on Christmas, we won’t feel merry, no matter how many gifts we open or cookies we eat.
If you or someone close to you is struggling with pain in this season, it could even be more difficult if you are surrounded by festivity and bright lights. No one is trying to make you feel worse. But the contrast between your heaviness and others’ lightness might pull you deeper.
I have discussed a phenomenon with others my age. It seems that as we move into our sixties, more and more people close to us have burdens. Part of that is a matter of advancing age for our peer group. Health problems of all sorts appear on our radar. Conditions we didn’t even know existed when we were young become part of our vocabulary.
Age is a factor, but it’s also that our circle has grown. As you go through life, you acquaint yourself with more others. Job, neighbors, organizations each add to your list to care about. If you have children, they and people in their lives get attention. Then, there’s grandchildren if you are so blessed. And on and on.
The bad things that can and will happen in life have more opportunities to touch you. I said to Pam that it is getting hard to keep track of all the ailments among our friends: hips, knees, heart, carpal tunnel, eyes, hearing. Bodies wear out. We know that; we just haven’t ever lived through it before.
Physical suffering is only one type. That might be the easier pain to deal with. There’s a giant range of emotional and relational anguishes one can experience: divorce, family splits, children rebelling. Again, none of these care that it is the Christmas season. Christmas carols won’t heal those wounds.
I wrote about the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of my brother’s death. Dean died of a brain tumor the week I graduated from high school. He was sixteen. I was eighteen, a terrible age to deal with such a thing. I’m using this space to do some delayed processing.
I thought about the Christmases around his death. Christmas 1973, it was becoming clear that efforts to heal Dean were failing. No one talked about that. The holiday came as if under a cloud. Dinner, gift opening, Christmas Mass all went on with pall over things.
The next year Dean was gone. We had shared Christmases as children with all the wishing and giggling and playing with new toys. Those were past. Now Dean was too. The metaphorical empty chair was in his place.
Later, I became a parent. Like all of you with children, none of us can imagine losing a child. It’s incomprehensible. But it happens. For such a mother and father, I suspect Christmases become a vessel of memories of that child that are opened each year with sadness no matter how many years have passed.
Whenever there is a death of someone close to us, we talk about how in the year following we experience our first of everything without our loved one. Not only Christmas, but the first Easter, the first Thanksgiving, the first summer picnic with that empty chair. Time heals, yes, but not quickly.
Two families in our farming community will be celebrating Christmas with the slow work of healing present. “Celebrating” doesn’t feel like the right word, but Christmas will come regardless.
Frank Ziegler was a farmer near Fairfax. Frank’s capacity for friendship covered a large geographic area, with many friends from Sleepy Eye. His was a face that so easily held a warm smile that it’s hard to picture him without. In his final days, as he was fighting his own physical battle, he reached out to me after an accident I was in. It was like him to be concerned about another with his own diminishing energy.
Mary Jane Hoffman was a farmwife and mother who lived nearby. Those simple descriptors, “farmwife and mother,” are filled with so many duties and responsibilities that volumes could not tell their story. As with most successful farms, the wife is exactly one half of the equation. Mary Jane was partner with Marty on the farm and mother of six wonderful young men.
For a long time, Mary Jane and Marty and their family sat in front of me at Sunday Mass. In the way one can watch a family grow in a small town like ours, I saw over the years children added and growing up. Things always looked under control as the boys sat mostly behaving in their pew. But you knew there had to be chaos finishing chores, getting everyone dressed and into the car.
I referred to our farming community. Losing people like Frank and Mary Jane is like pulling a thread from the fabric. We are of the same generation, and this will be common in the years ahead. Young people will take our place. But there will be less of them on farms if the hundred-year trend continues.
Back to the beginning, I wished a merry Christmas. “Merry” is nice; we all want to little merriment. But it’s not realistic to be merry every day. As joyous as the son of God coming to Earth is, it was also a step on the way to Calvary. Joy and sorrow are always blended in this thing we call life.
No matter our circumstances this Christmas, we take time to reflect. It is a season of love, and each of us can commit to bringing a little more love into an Earth that so desperately needs it. That is joy to the world.