Good morning…
“I’ll have a Blue Christmas without you,” Elvis Presley sang into our hearts with his 1964 single, the year after I was born. As I have aged into deeper awareness, I wonder, “When people lose loved ones during the holiday season, is Christmas always tainted with the blue of grief?” Something within me feels an answer forming from Paula D’Arcy’s transformative words.
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Excerpt from Paula D’Arcy’s Seeking With All My Heart
No, life was not what I had expected (hoped) it would be. And that was not the only surprise. Having been raised in a tradition of faith, I’d assumed the beliefs I’d learned would help me weather any adversity. Then great adversity came, and there was a profound gap between belief and the realities of loss. The small story of my life collapsed around me, and no tenets of faith were able to hold me up.
Relentless grief shattered all my borders, and it seemed as if the pain had won. Only in time was I able to unmask the pain and recognize it as a powerful tool (vehicle) in the hands of Love. With painstaking care, heartache began to open something entirely different in my being.
I started to look at life differently, no longer experiencing myself as the center of my own little world. Instead, I watched a force that apparently had always existed, but I had never seen it play its hand before. This force was clearly the center of everything, and there was an intention and purpose to its movement. It was pushing through the events that surrounded me. It was speaking to me.
This force was the power behind pain. It pushed until my pain had served a purpose – to break things open in me. It drove through systems of thought I could never have penetrated on my own. The force ushered me past thought into the presence of Love.
This is why faith is an encounter. And why it necessarily turns things upside down.
When Love moves, it sometimes destroys. But for our sake. Anything in its path, anything that is not Love, anything that is not awakened, will fall away. There are no alternatives. In the face of Love, our lives must change. (68-69)
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With Paula’s wisdom wrapped around my question, what answer begins forming from within: “When people lose loved ones during the holiday season, is Christmas always tainted with the blue of grief?” I sense that only in time is pain unmasked to reveal the enduring gifts of Love. We are moved out of the center of our own little world and we begin to watch an eternal force pushing through everything with intention and purpose. Speaking quite personally, this powerful presence serves to shed all that is not Love, ushering us into all that God is. In the face of Love, our lives must change and, over the years, grief’s differing shades of blue cast new light on the path before us.
“He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food” (Job 36:16, NIV).
…Sue…
