Grief in Advent: A five-minute reflection on Advent eve

Dear friends, one of my Patreon subscribers asked me to share with the public the post I wrote at the Sacramental Life community site last week about allowing Advent this year to help us reckon with our individual and collective grief from 2020. The following was from a series of “Five-Minute Friday” reflections where I just set me stopwatch and wrote for five minutes. Last week, the topic of grief helped me put into a few words what I’m carrying from 2020 into Advent. Whatever you’re carrying into Advent, know that you aren’t alone and your story is important.

Peace, peace, peace, friends.

Tamara

p.s., Would you like to walk with me through Advent? You can either subscribe to my Patreon page to receive the daily devotional guide in your email inbox and/or purchase a pdf with the entire guide in one download.

The gift Kendra gave me the morning of her (postponed) wedding celebration.

GRIEF

Oof. 2020 has been one for the books. I think one of the best gifts we can offer in response to this year is to keep telling our stories.

It's natural for humans to remember the details surrounding global-scale tragedies and to tell the stories over and over for the rest of their lives. It's the stuff of family histories as well as the plotlines for society's retelling of itself archived in books, documentaries, and movies.

Where were you when it happened?

Where were you when the president was shot, the bomb dropped, the towers fell?

So, friends, where were you when coronavirus hit? It's a bit tricky to piece together these details into a shareable story, right? Especially since we're like 9 months in and the tragedy is still unfolding. We're still in the part of the story where we're frantically trying to find out if our friends and family are safe and if they've heard the news yet. 

In March or April, a columnist I follow tweeted the statement: "I wonder if the United States has any idea of the massive grief we were about to experience and whether we'd have the capacity to hold it.

I think it will take years - maybe even generations to answer this question. 

My grandparents both died this year. For all their beautiful character traits, they could've been poster-children for the Silent Generation. My grandfather was on one of the first boats to land in Hiroshima after the bomb dropped and in the last years of his long life we were lucky to get one or two sentences from him describing the devastation of this experience.

There are many qualities about my grandparents I'd like to embody, but expressing grief is not one of them.

I suspect the generational health we'll be able to pass down from this generation-defining crisis is the ability to hold, share, and heal grief. 

So, when coronavirus hit both of my beloved grandparents died, we were midway through caring for one of our loved ones experiencing a severe mental health crisis, and we were weeks away from celebrating our daughter's wedding. We were also hoping and planning for a year of life and growth in our congregation with several strategies in place to enjoy our church family as well as the new neighborhood God had placed us in the fall of 2019.

So much grief. 

I've heard grief described as standing in the ocean. In any given moment, you're managing to hold your ground when a wave can kind of just knock you over. Some forms of grief are like standing in the ocean during a tsunami and others like a regular, old summer day. Either way, you're in the water up to your chest, or your knees, or your ankles - vulnerable to getting knocked flat by an onrush of saltwater.

I don't think any of us should expect to get through this story comfy and dry.

We're going to have to reckon with our grief, friends.

May I suggest welcoming the coming weeks of Advent as a time to listen to our grief? Listen to each other's grief. Begin to piece together the outline of our stories. We can try to muster enough strength to face the ocean of grief covering our world - lock our knees, dig in our heels, and stare down the waves. We can try, but I wouldn't suggest it. 

So, friends, where were you when it happened? 

I'm listening.

Peace, peace, peace,

Tamara

p.s. If your friends or family would like a devotional guide for Advent but subscribing to the Patreon community isn't a good fit right now, the Advent Daybook 2020 pdf download is the next best thing. The details for making a donation and requesting the download are all on this page at my website: Advent Daybook 2020 pdf.