“Grief, for me, has held so many unexpected emotions. We most often think of sadness, and there is much sadness in grief. But there is also relief, there is anger, there is defeat, there even is joy. I thought it was humorous as I was making the reminder flyer for this service that at the top, I wrote a description of this service and how though it is a season of joy, many of us are mourning and I invited you to come together as we mourn.. And then at the bottom, on the same paper, in the same strokes of my typing, I invited you later this week to spread the joy of the Christmas season.  

And the reality of those -grief and joy- coexisting is the reality that we live in. Remembering the people that we have lost is often painful, but even in the hardest of it, at funeral services and even bedsides of hospitals immediately after a death, I have experienced laughter with friends and families, sharing stories of our departed loved ones.
In this season though, it can feel unnatural to be experiencing sadness at a time when so many around us are experiencing joy, but our world is full of these seemingly opposites coinciding, this great juxtaposition.  
 
We must not succumb to the darkness, to the sadness of it all.  And yet we must at the same time make space in this season of joy for the sadness of our grief. Because yes, this is a season of joy, and yes, there will be joy and laughter in remembering stories of our lost loved ones or remembering holidays gone by, but there is also sadness.  

Sadness that they are no longer celebrating with us. Sadness that things are not as they once were. Sadness in our inability to do the things that we once could. Sadness that our holidays look different than they once were. Sadness that our world is changing in a way that we are uncomfortable with. So much sadness can exist in the remembering.  

The memories continue to live.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Tibetan monk and peace advocate, once said: “Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
 
This is the hope that we cling to. We hope that we experience God’s comfort. We hope that we experience some rest from the often overwhelmingness of grief. We hope we experience God’s life and light in the midst of death and darkness. We hope that tomorrow will be better than today.  

And in the meantime, we endure.  We grieve. We honor our loved ones.

We allow for tears in a season of joy. And we allow for joy in a season of grief.”

(written by Alexis Johnson, Chaplain of Alexian Village of Milwaukee)