Chaplain's Corner

Well, here we are with Christmas just about here. I’d like to take a few moments to reflect on the many families that I have had the privilege of interacting with this past year who will approach Christmas very differently this year than they did last year. We often forget that a year can make a world of difference in our lives. For that matter a moment can make a world of difference and many of us can recall with vivid clarity a moment that began a chain of events in our lives that changed the fabric of our lives, our families and our worlds forever. In my work those moments that change everything are all too common.

There is the moment when a person discovers that they have cancer. Recently I have encountered a family that experienced such a moment. They are just beginning to travel a road that will change their lives forever and it all started with the information, “I’m sorry, we have discovered a tumor.” This Christmas will take on a very different feel for everyone connected to this family.

Then I remember another moment that changed lives forever: unexpectedly, a mom died. This death changed the lives of not just her children and grandchildren, but the lives of many friends and associates. Death has a way of changing things forever; this Christmas will be different and will start a chain of different Christmases that will go on for many years.

Or there was the family who came face to face with the fact that their daughter is seriously mentally ill, that what she was experiencing was not just a teenage phase, but a life altering illness of the mind that will impact this young woman’s life leaving her with few who will try to understand and fewer still who will overcome their own discomfort and stay connected to her through the dark valleys of mental illness. It will certainly be a different Christmas for this family.

Then, I think of the family whose father and husband was in a life altering work accident. The accident will leave him with a disability that will make it impossible for him to work again, ever again. The family is only beginning to discover what this moment in time will do to change each of their lives and it will change Christmas forever.

I could go on. The real life dramas that I intersect with briefly in my work as a hospital and personal care home chaplain are many, they are so often life changing and as I approach this coming Christmas, I am so very aware that any one of these or a hundred other such moments could enter my experience and change my life forever, change Christmas forever. And my life is not unique, you can most certainly recount from your life and experience other life changing moments that change the experience of Christmas forever. This reality is that each of us and the stuff that makes up our lives is just a moment from radical changes and we have virtually no control over these events that enter and change our lives.

BUT, as aware as I am of these kind of moments and the changes they can make in the lives of those who experience them and in the Christmas experience of those who experience them I am also confronted with the fact that the first Christmas altered God’s experience eternally. Now we don’t often contemplate this kind of thing, we sometimes forget that God is a personal being, that our capacity for relationship is a small, depraved reflection of God’s capacity and desire for relationship.  The other difference is that noting ever “happens” to God. He is never the victim of circumstances. I personally believe this to be true for the Bible describes this reality, but I don’t have any idea how to wrap my mind around this truth.

So, how did Christmas alter God’s experience? In Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary, God for the first time experienced a kind of separation,  a kind of humiliation, a kind of limitation that had never before been experienced. Nobody forced this on God, he chose it and his choice was motivated by the purest love. But even a chosen change alters things. That first Christmas, the eternal God became flesh, took on humanity, and began a brief but significant sojourn among his creatures.

For the first time in all eternity God would experience first hand what it was like to be a creature – as opposed to being the omnipotent Creator. For the first time that first Christmas God would experience dependency, where up to that point he had eternally been the absolutely self-sufficient One. For the first time that first Christmas, God would experience a kind of separation that he had to that moment never experienced in the perfect unity of the Trinity. That separation would be most severely experienced when Jesus died on the cross and cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.”

The incarnation, Jesus being born of the Virgin Mary, changed things for God, the changes were planned, they were determined by God himself, but they were changes none-the-less. This fact helps me in that it gives me a sense of certainty that God understands how the events of life change us, and how the events, most of which are unchosen, impact our sense of vulnerability and insecurity.

This Christmas that approaches may be for you a very different one, altered by events over which you had no control, events that if you could change, you would change. But the die has been cast, your journey has been altered and your former plans and dreams and aspirations have had to be reconstructed. You may wish that you could just skip Christmas this year, maybe you will, because the pain of the changes that have altered your life and that will alter every Christmas from here on out is just too great.

If there is any comfort I could offer this would be it:  God understands and he’s willing to honor your need to step aside from the Christmas traditions of your family or church or social groups. As much as we have come to see Christmas as “Joy to the World” and in a sense it was and is. The first Christmas was painful to God, it hurt to send the Only Begotten Son into the world, the purpose of the first Christmas was always clear in God’s mind and heart. Jesus would die not just physically, but he would die spiritually and experience Hell itself, separation from God, so that you and I might be forgiven our sins and receive everlasting life.

If this Christmas will be different for you for any reason, if there will be more pain that joy, more sorrow than celebration, more depression that delight – go with it. Pretending will only make things harder. Be real, be honest, give yourself permission to skip the cultural expressions of Christmas in which the expectation is that you will be jolly. Step aside from all that if your must and feel the loss, the pain, the loneliness and remember – God understands.