A Soulful Christmas

Photo Credit: Addy Mae on Unsplash

"It's the most wonderful time of the year." Yes, but it's also the most sad, which may not be a bad thing.

Every year, at some point during the Christmas season, I give in to a brooding melancholy that seems to have become part of my annual observance. Sometimes, it will materialize as we decorate the tree, each sparkling ball or dangling bauble a telling relic of Christmases past. Sometimes, it will haunt me as I light the candelabra for Christmas dinner, illuminating the ghostly faces of absent loved ones gathered round the table. Sometimes, it'll be waiting for me on Boxing Day, after the family has gone home and the house has been put back in order, asking, "Is that all there is?" I no longer resist it; but neither do I allow it to colour the entire season. It's like my sad-eyed holiday guest I welcome each year, to share in the festivities.

If there's a source to this sorrow, it's not just one thing. It's the painful recollection of all those family moves when I was growing up, moves that placed us in yet another new community at Christmastime, far from our roots and our relatives. It's the scattered wreckage of my two broken marriages, which can haunt me pretty much any time of the year, in season or out. It's a wistfulness for the childhood that has receded with time, becoming the long-ago memories of a bygone age.

Such nostalgia occupies a soulful place in our lives. From the Greek language, where nostos means 'homecoming' and algos means 'pain,' nostalgia means the pain of returning home. Christmas reconnects us, sometimes against our will, with every other Christmas we've ever known, with the people we have loved and lost, with memories that bless or bruise, and with the deep desires that still burn within our hearts, like a guiding light we'd almost forgotten about. Our seasonal sadness takes us home by way of a dark road that is, nonetheless, rich with meaning and significance. Each Christmas, when this happens to us, we get a small portion of our lives back, to carry with us into the New Year.

This nostalgia, which is intrinsic to our experience of the season, is not to be dismissed or neglected. For it contains a hidden bidding, to go back and retrieve those parts of our lives we've left behind, those living seeds of our own continued growth. It may be that the pain of returning home is the greatest Christmas gift of all. If we're open to it, a soulful Christmas will lead us back to ourselves and to the beautiful, life-long work in which we are engaged, the work of becoming the people we were created to be.

Here, in case you missed it three years ago, is a true story of a friend struggling to be found by Christmas the year his wife died. It's called, "A Wreath on the Door." And with this, my podcast, The Mystic Cave, is back, with brand new episodes scheduled for the New Year. Stay tuned.