Season’s Grievings

This blog post was adapted from a message delivered by the author at Boulevard UMC in Richmond on December 13, 2020.

Among the most surprising practices I’ve picked up during Coronatide is hospital chaplaincy. Heading to a hospital to complete a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) mid-pandemic might be a head-scratching decision to you. It has certainly been anxiety-inducing as the pandemic has escalated recently, but I have cherished the opportunity to journey with people and remind them of their worth and God’s love for them in some of their most significant moments.

Chaplains (for whom I have tremendous respect after getting a taste of their ministry this fall) join patients and families in what the Celtic tradition calls “thin spaces,” or, as Eric Weiner writes, “locales where the distance between heaven and earth collapses and we’re able to catch glimpses of the divine….” Whether we’re experiencing the joy of a newborn child or the tragedy of losing a loved one, there’s something mystical going on where we feel closer to something, or Someone, beyond what we can see, touch, hear, smell, or feel.

These thin spaces can be devastating, like the one where I knelt on the floor with a grandmother who just lost her teenaged grandchild and asked me, teary-eyed, “Why would God do this to us?”

In that moment, I felt so powerless, so helpless. All my theology classes melted away as we wept over a life taken far too soon. And honestly, that question still sticks with me, a perfectly legitimate query about the One who we claim has all the power, knowledge, and authority to intervene when tragedy strikes.

Honestly, 2020 has really challenged my understanding of God. Natural disasters, pandemic, the exposure of white supremacy, political division and hatred, misinformation – it’s all driving us further and further apart in a time where the deep, meaningful connection we need and crave is so hard to come by. It’s grief like we’ve never known before. Grief over lost loved ones, lost opportunities, lost jobs, lost relationships. Grief over a Church still divided by LGBTQ+ inclusion, by racism and classism, by political affiliations.

In a year like this, doesn’t the Advent journey towards Christmas, a celebration centered around joy, hope, and peace, feel out of place? What place do we have, a brokenhearted people, in Advent and Christmas? When we can’t sing the alleluias of heavenly hosts and the praises of Mary, Simeon, and Anna, what can we do?

Grief does not exclude us from Advent, the celebration and anticipation of God’s coming to earth. To the contrary, it is our grief, our loss, our heartbreak that continually beckons God to earth to know us and our pain. Emmanuel’s incarnation, God taking on and transitioning to human flesh, perfectly expresses God’s love and empathy.

I don’t know what’s coming to mind for you as you think about the loss and grief that you have experienced this year, or things that come to mind when the holidays come around each December. I cannot begin to understand what that pain is like for you. But, I believe we worship a God that has worked and labored to understand and feel our pain for generations. A God who falls to their knees with us in our despair.

Needless to say, that day changed me as I bore witness to unthinkable grief in the thin space of a hospital room. In the midst of my continued questions about suffering and God’s presence, I do know, then and always, God takes immeasurable steps to see us, hear us, and hurt with us. In the thin space of Advent and Christmas, I pray that we can take steps to see, hear, and hurt with God too.

Rev. Jonathan D. Fuller is a provisional deacon in the Virginia Annual Conference. He is in ministry at Randolph-Macon College as Assistant Director of Residence Life and Housing and at Boulevard United Methodist Church. He's passionate about equitable education, inclusive church, being married to his partner, Abby, and being dog-dad to his rescued pit bull, Winnie.