As we laid Phyllis, my paternal grandmother, to rest Dec. 11, 2019, I looked around and saw my family trying to piece themselves together. It was an intense funeral, the kind that comes after an unexpected loss; the kind where you rack your brain trying to remember what your last words were to your loved one.
In our case, Nana died from a major heart attack after telling my dad, “You just never know what day will be your last.” My dad, of course, affirmed her statement, not knowing this would be their last conversation.
Caleb Cooke
Funerals like that make everyone think of their own final conversations with loved ones. I know this was true for one person in attendance, my maternal grandmother Nancy, whose final conversation with her husband and my grandfather, Hassell, was unexpectedly so too. Three hundred and sixty-six days prior, he told her for the final time, “I really love you.” The next day, on Dec. 11, 2018, we lost my grandfather to suicide.
To say the least, my family has a vexed relationship with the Christmas season. As my father put it, “December just isn’t a good month for us.”
The cold of the winter months bites a little harder when you are grieving. There is only one thing I’ve found to be worse than going through the normal festivities with a gaping hole in your family — the inescapable feeling that whenever you talk about your loss, it dampens the mood of what everyone else is calling “the most wonderful time of the year.”
“Suffering doesn’t end when the holidays start.”
On Dec. 21, my church will celebrate Blue Christmas, a service held to open a space of mourning during the holiday season. This service acts as a reminder that suffering doesn’t end when the holidays start, nor do the holidays stop anyone’s mourning. Much to the contrary, this season can intensify feelings of loss and sadness by leaving no space for mourning.
Blue Christmas goes against the grain of more joyful (and more popular) perceptions of the Advent season. For many, the excitement that accompanies this season is matched with a sense of joy at Christ’s humble entrance on earth. Consider the lyrics to the Christmastime favorite “Joy to the World”:
Joy to the world! The Lord is come. Let earth receive her king! Let every heart prepare him room. Let heaven and nature sing, let heaven and nature sing, let heaven and nature sing!
These lyrics can be summed up in platitudes thrown onto those mourning during the holidays. To use perhaps an overly bright example, “Maybe God needed another angel in God’s choir, and maybe, like in It’s a Wonderful Life, that bell ringing means your loved one got their angel wings!”
For better or worse, the joy of this season cannot help but seep into any discussion, especially those where we feel like the person needs it. It’s human empathy, after all, to want to lift someone’s spirits.
And we are right to want to lift people’s spirits. Jesus’ coming to earth is surely an occasion for joy. However, sometimes we are so excited by Jesus’ arrival that we forget the feeling that preceded it — hopelessness.
In the years leading up to Jesus’ birth, Judea was a small province of the Roman Empire. As an oppressed people, Jews under the thumb of Rome saw themselves as still in exile. Jews knew they weren’t supposed to live under such oppression, and that is why they expected and hoped for a Messiah.
These sentiments are captured in the hymn “O Come, O Come Immanuel.” In a minor key, we sing, “O come, O come, Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel that mourns in lonely exile here until the Son of God appear.”
This hymn rightly describes a weary people longing for God to fulfill God’s promises. The scriptural equivalent for somber hymns is lament psalms. Lament psalms capture feelings of hopelessness and feature brutally honest questions about God and suffering.
Especially fitting for times when God feels further and further away is Psalm 42:1-3 and 9: “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, ‘Where is your God?’”
For those of us who experience sadness during the Advent season, we, too, may ask “Why, God?” and “Where is my God?”
“Why” often is the first word out of people’s mouths after a tragedy. The long form of the question is “Why do I/we suffer?” or “Why did this happen?” Asking this appears to answer the question of “where” God is.
When I asked this question in 2018 and 2019, much like the psalmist, I felt God no longer was present. However, we must realize “Why do we suffer?” and “Where is my God?” are two completely different questions.
“If you look in Scripture for the answer to why humans suffer, you will not find it.”
Asking why we suffer assumes there is a singular and complete answer to human suffering. This assumption is a relatively new one to humans. As scholar John Swinton notes in his book Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil, the assumption that we could answer the “why” of suffering came long after the Bible was written. So, if you look in Scripture for the answer to why humans suffer, you will not find it.
Sure, Scripture informs our answers to this question, but Scripture does not provide a complete answer to this question, much less a comforting or reassuring one. Unfortunately, we never will know why we suffer, and acknowledging this takes a tremendous amount of faith in God.
But the question “Where is God?” is a different matter. Scripture does have an answer to the question of where God is in our times of suffering. The Christmas story reveals that “Immanuel” (“God with us”) is not figurative language. Rather, Jesus’ birth, the incarnation of God, shows us that God is literally with us.
This becomes even more important when we realize what world Jesus was born into — the weary world of an oppressed minority suffering at the hands of the powerful — and the suffering Jesus experienced himself.
However, in the spirit of a lament psalm, I would invite those having a wearier Advent to ask, “Does God’s presence mean anything if I’m suffering anyway?” Indeed, knowing God is with us does not end our suffering in the slightest. We know this as people who suffer 2,000 years after Jesus’ birth.
But our reality doesn’t mean God’s presence means nothing. Instead, what Advent teaches is that rather than distancing Godself from suffering, God chooses to experience it with us. The name “Immanuel” is not dependent on whether you are thriving or suffering because Immanuel rings true in joyful and mournful seasons.
Advent teaches that we do not have a God who flees when God’s children suffer. Believing God leaves during our times of suffering rejects this message of Advent, which is maybe the most powerful message God ever has given to God’s people: “I’ll suffer with you.”
So when we are suffering, Advent reveals that there is an answer to “Where is God?”, and that answer is with us. God’s presence beside us while we are suffering makes more sense than a God who avoids suffering.
When we suffer, God isn’t going anywhere because God has chosen to be with us.
To all those mourning, know this season is for you, too, and you are not alone. Remember what the name Immanuel means: God (suffers) with us.
Caleb Cooke, a native of Mount Airy, N.C., serves as pastoral resident at First Baptist of Columbia, Mo. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degree at Duke University.
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