Sunday Thoughts: Christmas Edition

Of all of the touching articles and blog posts I've read over the last week about the Sandy Hook tragedy, the following devotional address given by Elder Jeffrey R. Holland (found on A Most Uncivilized Adventure via Segullah) spoke to me the most, so I thought I'd share it here today. It's worth the read...

Excerpted from "Christmas Comfort" by Jeffrey R. Holland

Ricks College Devotional, December 1, 1998

I do not want this to be an unhappy message; indeed I intend it to be a supremely joyful message; a message of special comfort. But to make it that, I must speak of Christmases and other days in our individual and collective lives that for whatever reason may not be very happy or seem to be the “season to be jolly.” For many people in many places, this year, this Christmas, this December, may not be an entirely happy Christmas. One not filled with complete joy because of the circumstances facing a spouse or a friend, a child or a grandchild. Or perhaps that was the case another Christmas in another year, but one which brings a painful annual memory every time the put the tree up. Or, and may Heaven bless us that this is not be so, perhaps this may be the case in some future Christmas, when unexpectedly, and undeservedly, something goes terribly wrong. When there is some public or very personal tragedy, in which it may seem, at least for a time that, “hate is strong and mocks the song of peace on earth, good will to men.”

 

On the evening of December 23rd, 1976, my father underwent back surgery. The surgery was successful, but near the conclusion of it, he suffered a major heart attack. Eight hours later, he suffered another one. From those two attacks, he sustained massive damage to a heart that was already defective from an illness suffered in his youth. By the time we finally got to see him, wired and tubed and gray and unconscious, it was midmorning on December 24th, Christmas Eve.

 

“Magnificent timing,” I muttered to the universe.

 

Pat and I stayed at his side all day, as much for my mother’s sake as for my father’s. He was not going to live, and age 60, she had never had to confront that possibility in their entire married life. As evening came along, we took her to our home. She needed calming and our three little children deserved some kind of Christmas Eve. Pat has created a wonderful world of holiday traditions in our family and we tried to do the Christmas Eve portion of those, but it was a pretty joyless exercise, I’ll be quick to admit...After hanging just a few of their mother’s annual Christmas Eve gingerbread men, the children  uncharacteristically suggested that perhaps they should just go to bed a little early this year, reassuring everyone that this was their choice and something that they really wanted to do. You can imagine how convincing they sounded. I stayed for a while, putting out a Christmas gift or two, and then I told my wife...that I was going back to the hospital. There was obviously nothing I could do there. She knew it and I knew it. But she also knew it was my Santa Claus who was lying there alone, with all those tubes and IVs and monitors. And she said not a word to try to get me to stay.

 

So at the hospital, I sat and walked and read and walked and looked in on my dad and walked. He would not, in fact, recover from all of this. I suppose everyone knew that. But the nursing staff were kind to me and gave me free access to them and to the entire hospital. A couple of the nurses wore Santa Claus hats and all the nursing stations were decorated for the season. During the course of the evening I think I checked them all out, every one, in every wing of the hospital, and sure enough on every floor and in every wing, it was Christmas. You’ll forgive me if I admit that somewhere in the early hours of the morning I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.

“Why does it have to be like this?” I thought. “Why does it have to be on Christmas? Of all the times to lose your dad, did it have to be the night when dads are the greatest guys in the world? Lying under that oxygen tent was the most generous man I had ever known; a Kris Kringle to end all Kris Kringles. And by some seemingly cruel turn of cardiac fate, he was in the process of starting to die on Christmas morning.” In my self pity, it did not seem right to me and I confess I was muttering something of that aloud as I walked what surely must have been every square inch of public and a fair portion of private space in the hospital.

Then and there, 2 or 3 am, I guess, in a quiet hospital immersed as I was in some sorrow and too much selfishness, heaven sent me a small, personal, prepackaged revelation; a tiny Christmas declaration that was as powerful as any I have ever received. In the midst of mumbling about the very poor calendaring I thought the Lord had arranged in all of this, I heard the clear unbroken cry of a baby.

It truly startled me. I had long since ceased paying attention to where I was wandering that night and only then did I realize I was in the maternity ward. To this day, I do not know just where that baby was or exactly how I heard it. I like to think it was a brand new baby, taking that first breath and announcing that he or she had arrived in the world, the fact of which everyone was supposed to take note. It may have been just a baby saying it was time to eat and wondering where that comforting cuddle from a mother was.

But wherever and whoever it was, God could not have sent me a more penetrating wake up call...It was as if the Lord were saying, “Listen, this is the happiest night in the whole wide world for some young couple, Jeff...they love him and he already loves them, and think of the calendaring, think of it; born on Christmas day. What a reminder that they have each other now and forever. Whatever happens; good times or bad, they have each other. Whatever pain may lie ahead, whatever sword may pierce their souls from time to time, they will be triumphant because the Prince of Peace was also born this same day once in Royal David’s city. 

“Jeff, my boy,” he seemed to be saying with that baby’s cry, “I expected more from you. If you can’t remember why all of this matters, then your pitiful approach to Christmas is no more virtuous than the over-commercialization everyone laments these days. You need to shape up just a little. You need to put your theology where your Christmas carols are. You can’t separate Bethlehem from Gethsemane, or the hasty flight into Egypt from the slow journey to the summit of Calvary. It is of one piece. It is a single plan. Christmas is joyful not because it is a season or decade or lifetime without pain or privation, but precisely because life does hold those moments for us. And that baby, my son, my own beloved and only begotten son in the flesh, born “away in a manger with no crib for his bed”, makes all the difference in the world, all the difference in time and eternity, all the difference everywhere, worlds without number, a lot farther than your feeble eye is apparently able to see.”

Well, I felt reprimanded. I can’t fully describe to you what happened to me that morning, but it was one of the most revelatory Christmas experiences I have ever had or assume I ever will have. And it dawned on me that that could have been my young parents who were so happy that morning. I was a December baby and my mother never wearies of telling me that that was her happiest Christmas ever. Perhaps the joy they felt that day at my birth was to be inextricably, inseparably, eternally linked with my sorrow at their passing; that we could never expect to have the one without the other.

 

It came to me in a profound way that in this life no one can have real love without eventually dealing with real loss. And we certainly can’t rejoice over one’s birth and the joy of living, unless we are prepared to understand and accommodate and accept with some grace, the inevitability including the untimeliness, on occasion, of difficulty and trouble and death. These are God’s gifts to us; birth and life, death and salvation, the whole divine experience in all its richness and complexity.

 

I was...reminded that life will not always be as cozy as chestnuts roasting on an open fire or an unending splendor while we stroll, walking in a winter wonderland. No, life will have its valleys and its peaks, its moments for the fall and moments for the rising in the lives of all of God’s children. I’ve repented since that night. In fact, I did some repenting there in the maternity ward. If you have to lose your dad, what more comforting time in all the world than Christmas? None of us would want the thousand painful experiences some people have at Christmas, but even so, in the end, it is all right. It is ok. These are sad experiences, terribly wrenching experiences, with difficult moments for years and years to come. But because of the birth in Bethlehem and what it led to...There is a rising after the falling. There is life always; new births and rebirths and resurrection to eternal life. It is the joy of the stable, the joy of the maternity ward, forever.

“Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Let earth receive her King. No more will sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He will come and make the blessings flow, far as the curse was found.” Of this Christmas witness, I am a witness, in the sacred and holy name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen.