Broken On Christmas

I wasn’t planning to write anything for Christmas.

The words, usually vibrating forth from the tips of my fingers, seemed to have dried up and refuse to come ever since Thanksgiving. In many ways, the anticipation of Christmas had reduced itself to a vague feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach, which has been otherwise ignored, sobbed over,  or compared to the seemingly insurmountable pit that overwhelmed Thanksgiving and thus shoved to the side with scorn.

This time of year does not feel the most wonderful. Along with the gushing rush of the holiday season, comes the intense, physical pain of being crushed by a torrent of memories.

I remember sirens and long car drives and sleepless nights; hospital beepings; the slow, heavy sigh of oxygen, breathing when my brother should have been; the heartbeat I could feel pulsing gently when I laid my hands across the wires and paper-thin hospital gown that covered his broken body. I remember the lines on the monitor, holding me fast to cling to the moment because I did not know when they would go flat.

I remember the drive home from the hospital, calling a friend in the winter cold of the ferry docks; hearing her sob out her broken condolences to me and thinking vaguely how strange it was that she was sobbing and I was not, that her voice was frantic and mine was calm and flat, and my heart felt like a large unfeeling stone deep in my chest, heavy without conscious pain.

I remember coming home to an empty house, being touched by the sweet notes and bible verses caring friends had taped to our door to welcome and comfort us, the flowers lining the porch, the flowers on the table, in his room, the large stuffed bear on each bed with a note that said: “When you think of Isaiah, hug me,” …and then sobbing suddenly over an extra bowl of ladled soup.

I remember the approaching funeral, dreading it, being sick over it, hating how wrong it was to speak at the funeral of my little brother, to listen to my dad speak at the funeral of his son, to hear my mom sing the only prayer she could offer in her pain. I remember I almost didn’t cry, and hating myself because it was so hard to feel sadness. To feel anything at all.

The mortuary. The burial. Picking out a marker.

Then came Christmas.

Unopened gifts. The empty chair. The missing voice, laughs, jokes, and smiles. Going up in age as we had every year, and moving too fast around the circle. When had we ever moved from Quincey to Anna? Why was the gap so large?

Christmas seemed empty.

And today, that’s what I remember.

Because I’ve only done this once. I only have one time to which I can look back, one past day in my life so far that I can try to succor into a sort of roadmap, a pilot of experience from which I can gain a dim chart of this emotional storm.

What is grief supposed to look like? How much am I supposed to be able to feel by now? How many tears are too many, and what about when they seem they aren’t enough? Why are there times I feel almost happy, only to be plummetted to the depths in a moment by an unexpected wave? Why are there times I feel happy at all?

________

One of the hardest things in being broken is feeling isolation from those who seem well.

The other day in the car, You Don’t Know by Katelyn Tarver came on the station. She started quiet, flattened, as if she was speaking from a weary, weary soul.

Let me just give up
Let me just let go
If this isn’t good for me
Well, I don’t wanna know

The words broke off suddenly and the music carried where her voice could not, swelling with the pulsing emotion she seemed to have waited so long to feel. Then she entered again, high and loud, yelling out her anger and pain to the invisible faces outside her grief.

Don’t look at me like that
Just like you understand
Don’t try to pull me back. 

Let me just give up
Let me just let go.
If this isn’t good for me
Well I don’t want to know.

Let me just stop trying
Let me just stop fighting
I don’t want your good advice
Or reasons why I’m alright

You don’t know what it’s like.

Everyone is hurting in some way. Every person has a story. And the promise that a mere human could plummet the depths of our sorrow robs us just as much as the lie that no one understands at all. Whatever complicated mixture of sin and emotion it is that erupts from the depths of grief, I don’t believe it’s a lie to say that sometimes the only good doctor for a weary soul is a weary-souled person. There are some cracks that can only be salved with like brokenness.

And that is one of the reasons the Gospel is so beautiful.

Here I am on Christmas day, and I feel like its empty. Trying to navigate the uncharted waters, knowing that there is no chart that exists. But like last year, the silent scream of my soul has reached God’s ear, and the answer which He sent back was Christmas.

Christ was not given to us to offer some sort of neutral sentimentalism, a sanitized version of reality, to sprinkle the “Christmas Spirit” around our homes lest we ever again shed a tear.

This Child — given to the virgin, rejected from the inn, announced to the outcast — this God lying in the hay, the Lord who received burial oils for his birthday, the King who came to His own and His own did not love Him —  this is He who is named Immanuel, God with us, for that is why He came.

“Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed Him stricken,
smitten by God and afflicted.
But He was pierced for our transgressions,
He was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with His wounds we are healed.”

Christmas is when God plummetted the depths no one else in heaven or earth could — He plummetted the depths of your brokenness. Your sin, and your anger, your grief and your pain, your loneliness, your anguish, the night-terrors and the daytime moments of feeling nothing at all — He bore it all, bore it all the way to the Cross, and let it crush Him.

When your brokenness became His, it ran so very deep, that it went to the very foundation of all brokenness and broke death itself. Because God hates it even more than you do.

The sword that pierced Mary’s soul was the sword that brought her salvation. All tears are like Jesus’ – they fall before soon-empty graves.

If you think you’re too broken for Christmas, you don’t understand what it is yet.

For God not only weeps beside us, He will turn that weeping on its head, turn it into rejoicing — not just bringing good that will overwhelm the sorrow, but that will turn the sorrow itself into good.

Both manger and grave lie empty. Christ sits in Heaven between two advents.

That is what a weary world must see.

Soli Deo Gloria,