For Sunday, December 25, 2016 – Luke 2:(1-7), 8-20
We have a quandary. We want a happy Christmas—a lovely, soft-lights time of giving and receiving love—but in the mix for most of us is a sticky glob of suffering. Our hearts are weighted by people we hear about in the news, our friends and family, ourselves, all of us slogging along with our heavy pails of sadness and fear and loss. Shall we simply set them aside, as warring countries have done in order to have 24 hours of peace on Christmas, or does our suffering have a place in the Christmas story?
Beautiful are the angel chorus and Mary and Joseph’s steadfast courage and the shepherds, least among men, being the first to trust and go, and beautiful today are the signs of joy and courage and rising up in the midst of suffering. Immanuel—not despite the suffering, but in the suffering—God is with us. My friend Patty Wudel, with a poet’s heart, has written a beautiful meditation about the pain and beauty of God-with-us in our suffering. She lives at Joseph’s House, where people who have nowhere else to go find a home in their final weeks and days. When you step through the door, you can feel and see how pain and wonder, sadness and joy are meant to intermingle. I thought Patty’s recent letter might help us to ponder more deeply the meaning of this mystery for our own lives. And maybe some of us will want to give Jesus another little birthday gift to help Joseph’s House.
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Dear Kayla,
Welcome to this gentler space, this place of refuge…this Joseph’s House aglow with holiday lights in every room and the Whispers caroling from our dining room boom box. Warmth and color and old school tunes and hot chocolate to comfort the troubled soul. Here we have “time only to go slowly,” as a poet has written. “No time not to love.” And yet.
It seems to me that here at Joseph’s House our souls are more deeply troubled than at this time last year. Rita is living an anguish felt by us all.
Trapped in her wheelchair, given to outbursts of sudden rage, Rita suffers from lymphoma in her brain, a disease associated with her advanced HIV. “I’m losing my mind!” she screams to no one, to everyone. Inconsolable, her distress manifests as bitterness, as regret and fear. If Joseph’s House were not a community of people who practice working slowly and attuning to the heart as we work, we might not see that Rita’s mind is not exactly broken—it’s her heart that is breaking.
And the pain of our helplessness to comfort her almost compels us to run from Rita’s suffering and our own. Still, when we find ourselves turning away, we are able to help one another stop and turn back to Rita again. Courageously and steadily we take turns being with her and also with our apparent helplessness. In this way we keep our hearts as open as we can in this particular hell.
I can’t help but wonder about this Advent vigil. What difference does it make, this time of waiting with Rita when it seems it will surely end in grief rather than celebration? “How?” as pastor Jan Richardson puts it, “How do we navigate the call at the heart of Advent: to wait, to watch, to wake up…when what awaits us is not what we are praying for?”
For months Rita waited to become strong enough to walk again, hoping to return somehow to her home in pre-war Eritrea. Daily she prayed for her circumstances to change; waited for her prayers to be answered trusting that her health and her former life would be restored. God, she now feels, is not listening; does not hear her prayers. Rita waits no longer.
I think this is where the rest of us come in. What if we, with loving intention, wait for Rita? What if we stand in for her, wait for her because she can no longer wait and trust and pray, for herself? Can we, can those of us not so deeply anguished at this time, keep vigil for her? Can we watch over her, keep close enough for Rita to sense our presence, bless her no matter what as she lives these hard days? Yes, we can. I know that we want to.
Poet Kathryn Lodato writes of an angel …
“who stays by your side,
and holds her sword steady
and holds her gaze fierce
and waits when you falter
and nods when you rise.”
We are counting on you to be such an angel for us. We trust that you want to steady and protect and encourage us, and that you can. And that you will…as we at Joseph’s House keep watch with Rita and so many who are also suffering, and with one another.
May we help each other to know that the One we are waiting for is waiting for us. May we feel His presence. May each of us know ourselves as we really are: beloved, welcome. Already home.
With so much love,
Patty Wudel
Executive Director
