The Return of the Light - HONEST!

Jim Reilly’s funeral Mass was celebrated yesterday, the day before Christmas.  How perfect.  How perfectly awful, you might think.  Sartre spoke of a God-shaped hole left in man with the death of God.  How awful that Ann and the family discover in themselves a Jim-shaped hole, and at Christmas.

Jesus was likely not born on December 25^th.  The calendar itself didn’t exist until centuries later.  But the story of the brightness of the star in the Scriptural story suggested that he would have been born during a long and thus dark night, and so placing Christmas near the longest, darkest night made sense.  Placing Christmas near the Roman celebration of Winter Solstice gave Christians something to celebrate while the Romans of the area were celebrating the “stopping of the sun” in its moving lower and lower in the sky, and coming back toward them, bringing back the light.

Have you ever missed a bus or a train or a ride and stood there watching it speed away from you?  Don’t you feel abandoned?  Imagine the sun doing that, taking with it light and warmth.  And so we can understand that the “pagans” would make the Solstice a huge celebration. 

And it is no accident that so much of today’s celebration of Christmas is about light, and about it shining in the darkness. 

When my daughter Margie called a couple of days ago and with voice quivering  told me that Jim had died, I stopped and dropped what I was doing and we both cried on the phone.  Even though we knew Jim and his family were going through a long ordeal with his cancer, we were stunned by the reality of his death.  Everything stopped.  She in Cleveland could not travel 250 miles north for the funeral, we in Traverse City could not travel 250 miles south.  And so we are stuck with our Jim-shaped holes as we awaken this Christmas morning.

But the sun will rise one minute sooner this morning than it did yesterday.  Since the day Jim died, the night is already five minutes shorter, the day five minutes longer.  Do we notice?  Do we believe it?  Do we trust that the snow will melt and the grass will grow and the leaves and flowers emerge?  It seems like a miracle, doesn’t it?  It is. 

All of us believers join Jim Reilly’s family in daring to watch for signs of the return of the light, here at the darkest times.  Jim made it easier by leaving us looking up, in our darkest night of mourning, at the heavens when the stars are brightest, when we might come as Magi to follow the little glimmers of hope that we see and discover the miracle of hope-in-the-flesh. 

Sartre’s “God-shaped hole” calls us who have lost God to find him, like the Magi did.  And I smile to think that I need to fill this Jim-shaped hole by finding good things to do as he did, little things mostly, but also a companioning love, a love  that is something other than making it all better, fixing it all; a love that is present, fearless and certain.

Last Tuesday night (as Jim had died) I ended my group session with the dozen or so homeless people I appreciate so much at the Goodwill Inn here, wanting to leave them with Christmas greetings.  As the word “Merry” formed in my head, I looked around at each of their faces and let my own face fall under the weight of that word.  I said “I can’t wish you a merry Christmas; I suspect that word is way too superficial for you.  But I can wish you a blessed Christmas, because I know that is true.”

A blessed Christmas to all who feel loss.