There are a few things that I wish I wasn’t good at. Like grieving in December. My paternal grandmother died the December of my freshman year at college. Eleven years later my father died in December, just six months before my wedding. Last December my mother died. (I wrote about her death here.) And now this week my 29-year-old nephew Jim died.
The way I look at and experience Advent and Christmas and even death itself has changed in many ways. The colored lights and unnaturally cheery music blaring in nearly every public place is tempered by loss, the loss of those I’ve held dear. Sympathy cards received in the midst of jolly Christmas cards is a challenging reminder that death is very much a part of life. Singing Christmas carols in worship—once a cherished tradition—was almost impossible following each of my parents’ deaths. Having spent so many Christmases sitting between them, singing those same carols, I could almost hear them singing them again, and tears followed for what had been and was no more.
“A stable lamp is lighted,” a poem by American poet Richard Wilbur, has great meaning to me, especially as Christmas 2011 comes just days after my nephew’s death. It reminds me of the great love of God, who sent Jesus to this world to reconcile heaven and earth. Even as God came to us in the helpless, needy baby, God knew that baby would one day die an unloved outcast. I can’t help but cling to the knowledge that God knows a depth of loss like those of us who mourn and meets us in that loss, offering comfort and assurance through the promises of the resurrection.
For those who also mourn this Christmas, may “A stable lamp is lighted” offer some measure of solace to you
A stable-lamp is lighted
Whose glow shall wake the sky;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
And straw like gold shall shine;
A barn shall harbor heaven,
A stall become a shrine.
This child through David’s city
Shall ride in triumph by;
The palm shall strew its branches,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry,
Though heavy, dull, and dumb,
And lie within the roadway
To pave His kingdom come.
Yet He shall be forsaken,
And yielded up to die;
The sky shall groan and darken,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
For stony hearts of men:
God’s blood upon the spearhead,
God’s love refused again.
But now, as at the ending,
The low is lifted high;
The stars shall bend their voices,
And every stone shall cry.
And every stone shall cry
In praises of the child
By whose descent among us
The worlds are reconciled.
Linda Post Bushkofsky is executive director of Women of the ELCA.
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