"My tears have become my bread by night by day
as I hear it said all the day long
'WHERE IS YOUR GOD?'
When we're in profoud shock from profound trauma, there ARE no words that suffice to express what we are experiencing. We can feel numb. Or we can feel pain real as a knive cleaving our heart in two. Or we can feel raging anger drowning us. We can feel overcome by terror. We can feel abandoned by God. We are at the bottom of a lightless abyss, and no one can find us there.
"My soul is cast down within me. Why have you forgotten me?"
I remember the first Christmas without my son. I felt as if a glass wall separated me from the lights, the carols, the people shopping for presents, the merry-makers. I was an alien set down in an alien world. I felt nothing - nothing but grief. Why did I have to go through this? Wasn't there somewhere else I could go? Somewhere they didn't celebrate Christmas? I had a husband, other children and grand-children to get presents for, and Christmas parties to attend. But my husband and I sat at them as silent shadows. Even the sight of the Madonna and child filled me with grief, because I remembered the birth of the son who was no longer with us.
How strange it was that somehow I knew that, even though I couldn't really pray or celebrate his birth, the Infant King was with me. He understood my grief. He understood that I believed that my son was with him, well and whole again. That if I celebrated anything that Christmas, it was the peace I felt in my heart that my son's ordeal was over. As I knelt in front of the manger scene in the profound silence that fills a church after Midnight Mass, and gazed at my little King, my Baby Jesus, I wondered how anyone could endure and survive the death of a loved one if they didn't have hope in the Prince of Peace.
"Hope in God, I will praise Him still,
My Savior and my God."
Today, almost five years later, while there is grief in our hearts and always will be, our family can celebrate again. I can joyfully await the King who is to come on Christmas Day. The King who is to come at the end of time. The King who will come personally to free those he loves from the power of death and bring them to heaven and everlasting life. The King who comes every day into our lives. For He never abandons us: "Eternal His merciful love; He is faithful from age to age."
Our King comes daily into the lives of his people until the end of time. He reaches down into the abyss of our terror and grief and brings us up into the light of lasting hope. He comes hidden in the daily joys of ordinariness, the flights of sparrows, and trees whose boughs are heavy with glistening snow. He comes in the embrace of a child, and the smile of a stranger you pass on the street. He comes in the gentle hands of a nurse, the encouraging words of a counselor. He comes to help us rebuild our shattered lives. He comes to give us courage and strength when we know that soon our lives on earth will end.
"Come, Lord Jesus," we pray this season. What a prayer this is! When we are too exhausted and sad to say anything else, we can say this glorious Name of our King: "Jesus, Lord Jesus." Say it over and over, as if each repetition was a sweet piece of straw laid in his manger in preparation. Repeating his Name deepens our lasting hope, calms us, brings us into his Presence. Saying "Jesus, Lord Jesus," over and over replaces our worried, agonized thoughts with the sacred memory of the Child in the manger, Love Incarnate.
"Write what you will, I shall not relish it unless it tells of Jesus....Jesus to me is honey in the mouth, music in the ear, a song in the heart. Again, it is a remedy. Does one of us feel sad? Let the name of Jesus come into his heart and from there spring into his mouth, so that shining like the dawn, it may dispel all darkness...Does someone fall into sin? Does his despair even urge him to suicide? Let him but invoke this life-saving name and his will to live will at once be renewed." (St. Bernard of Clairvaux)
Wherever you are on your pilgrimage, in sunlight or in shadow, hold on to your hope this season of preparation. Hold on to the One who never deserts us, even if He seems hidden, the King who slips silently into our lives every day to love us. Whisper his precious Name, over and over. That is life-saving prayer enough.