Living in the Longing (The Ache of Advent)

As grieving parents, we are always longing for our child. No matter when your child died, we are all trying to figure out how to be in the world without him or her. For most of us, this is the most agonizing experience of our lives, a truly extraordinary cross of suffering.

But as the secular world moves into full “merry and bright” mode, we can find ourselves feeling even worse. The dissonance grows between our inner suffering and the external expectation to celebrate, so it makes sense that our hearts hurt even more. In fact, everything about Advent and Christmas, even in our beautifully liturgical Church, is meant to activate our senses and help us to pay attention to what is happening in this season and to feel more.

As painful as this is, I am so grateful for an entire season that appropriately gives voice to our melancholy and longing.

When Advent is observed in the solemn, penitential spirit the Church intended, we can feel right at home in the silent darkness. Even when the Church reaches the great solemnity of Christ’s nativity, Christmas joy is not a forced, cheerful happiness. It is inner joy that comes from knowing that because of Jesus, this suffering is not the end of our story.

Advent reminds us that we live in the “Already-Not Yet.” Christ was born and rose from the dead and yet will still come again. Our child is held by God, and yet we wait here, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. 

Our task as mourning mothers and fathers is to learn to live in the longing. I know this is not easy.  In 2017, I lived an Advent of painful uncertainty, pregnant with our son, John Paul Raphael. Diagnosed with Trisomy 18, he was not expected to live long after birth. I longed to settle into the peaceful expectation of a joyful nativity, but I knew our baby’s arrival included the expectation of death.

Yet it was precisely in my fear and suffering that the Lord met me. He taught me to let him love me in my brokenness. When John Paul Raphael died, He showed me there were lessons to be learned in my grief, lessons that are quite similar to those that the Church offers us through Advent.  

Advent, like grief, reminds us that the world is broken and we long for all to be made right.

Advent invites us not to rush to the Nativity, but to cry out from the darkness.  Advent holds us in the middle -- the time between time – when He has come and we wait for Him to come again.  We feel broken and long to be restored. Part of you died when your child died.  Advent reminds us of the promise, that we will be restored. The Lord is already at work in your grief, even if you don’t feel it yet. Being made new in the depths of your heart can take a very long time.

The death of our child also brings an ardent longing for Heaven.  We are reminded every day that this world is not our home. After my son died, I didn’t know how to be here without him, and I didn’t really want to be. Grief teaches me a healthy detachment from the world and gives me an eternal perspective. Advent invites us to the same.

Advent calls us to audacious hope. Fr. Alfred Delp, a German Jesuit priest who was killed by the Nazis for his resistance, said the following:

 

“Being shattered, being awakened … only with these is life made capable of Advent.”

 

It was not easy to find hope after John Paul Raphael died, but in time the Lord revealed a mystery in my grief. I slowly figured that I knew something more about life than other people because of the death of my child. I had been shattered and was now being awakened. Grief helped me realign my priorities. It helped me slow down. It stripped away the superficial layers of my relationships, and showed me who in my life was willing and able to go deeper with me.

Even when grief was ugly and I struggled with rage, comparison, envy, doubt, and anger, the Lord was right there. He reminded me that He is faithful and all His promises will be fulfilled. As grieving parents, we need the promise of Advent.  We need to know that this wilderness of grief is not the end of your story. We need the promise that our life will not always be this painful.

The promise helps us hold onto hope, not as an ideological concept, but as a person. Maybe hope feels impossible because it was crushed with the death of your child. Maybe it feels like your hope died.

Hope hides in a manger and hides in your grief to restore you and to teach you how to live in the longing.

This too is Advent: the audacious hope that there is something greater than the dark, lonely exile of our grief. There is the promise, that will take time to be revealed, but that will be fulfilled in you.  Hope is coming for you in your grief.

Please know, wherever you are in your grief, you are not alone.

We see you. We know that you hurt to the depth of your love. We know that part of you is so tired. We know that this extraordinary cross of loss is crushing, and yet we know you will never put it down because that would be to leave your child behind. 

Perhaps part of the invitation this Advent is to let the Lord carry us while we hold our cross. To unite it to him and let him love us while we grieve – love us as he makes us new, even in sorrow and even in death. Remember, the cross is a promise – A promise that that this grief, this world, is not the end of our story and we are not alone in the longing.

 (To hear more about topic, check out Episode 28 of It’s Not for Nothing)

Elizabeth Leon

Elizabeth Leon is the Director of Family Support for Red Bird Ministries. She and her husband Ralph are from Ashburn, Virginia and have ten children between them - five of hers, four of his, and their son, John Paul Raphael who died on January 5, 2018. His short and shining life was a sacred experience that transformed her heart and left a message of love for the world: let yourself be loved. She writes about finding the Lord in the darkness of grief in her book Let Yourself Be Loved: Big Lessons from a Little Life, available wherever books are sold. Read more from Elizabeth at www.letyourselfbeloved.com.

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