Not Exactly an Empty Chair but Very Absent for Christmas

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

All of us are so swept into the meaning of Christmas not only for ourselves but for others we know who are suffering losses over the past year and simply cannot adjust that empty chair at the family dinner celebration. These losses represent the angst of having given a loved one up to death this past year and we see the empty chair and we avert our eyes even if the chair is not at the table. We simply know an important person is missing. We don’t talk about it—at least a little—but we mention a name in hushed tones or in revelry of memory like, “Wouldn’t she love this cranberry sauce,” or, “He wanted us to enjoy a good bourbon or a lively Baileys for the toast.” In the kitchen, the scent of baking and cooking wafting all around reminds us that she gave us the recipes and he provided the homemade wine. The family room is full of wrappings and the tree is a sparkling vision of beauty if even in the eye of the beholder. And some of us are wiping away a few tears. Yes, there is an empty chair.

For others, there is a different kind of missing, a different kind of empty chair. It is a chair that chooses to remain empty. It is someone we love who says “No, I don’t want to be with you this Christmas.” 

This is the kind of emptiness that is greater and sometimes more painful than death especially at Christmas for Christians who believe He came to heal all personal wounds so we all can have a seat at the table. These past few weeks I have encountered more people than ever before who have told me things like, “My son hasn’t spoken to us in years; we miss him every Christmas.” “I don’t know where our daughter lives.” “My sister won’t speak to me since our mother died.” On and on it goes. One sad story of alienation after another. This is not at all what God wanted for us when His son came among us. 

Here are a few suggestions I have gleaned from psychologists who have written on the subject.  

• Do not base your happiness of the day on the one who is missing. Concentrate on those who choose to be around you.
• If you have made attempts to contact the person during the year and were rebuffed, move on. You are worth more than his or her feelings of anger.
• Acknowledge your pain privately but be hopeful that reconciliation can and might happen in the future.
• Pray daily for this person and for yourself. As much as you are feeling the pain of separation, he or she is feeling it also even though they invent a veneer of bravado telling others that it doesn’t bother them to be apart from you. They often say: “I’m doing this for my peace,” but in reality, they aren’t. It is never a move toward peace to ignore others who care.
• It simply does not matter whose fault it was in the first place that warrants a complete separation; memories often corrode an event or argument or a history only one of you might remember in detail—and often incorrectly. Put the event to rest.
• If the reconciliation you may have offered is met with half-hearted acceptance, that’s a start. Keep working on it in the coming year.

All of this seems like practical advice from Ann Landers, but it is rooted in the occasion we celebrate today. Jesus came among us to enlighten the minds of all people to the inestimable love of our God. We cannot be enlightened or unburdened if we continue to carry a hurt that gnaws at our heart and soul. Christmas exists because God wanted Someone to come among us whose humanity would suffer as we do, rejoice as we do, feel as we do. God wanted Jesus to be as fully human as He was divine. And you are the same way made in the image of God, you, too, are fully human and Godlike. 

Use the Godlike part of you to reach out—even if you are ignored—and invite Christmas peace into your life. Make amends. Make peace. Do not be vindictive if it is not accepted. 

Reflection

There is a lovely poem by one of my favorite poets, British-American poet, W.H. Auden, titled, “The More Loving One.” It has a line I try to practice daily and seems appropriate to today’s post. 

“If equal affection cannot be,  Let the more loving one be me.”

You might find this poetic thought just right for you today. Pray that you might be the more loving one in a contentious relationship. Christmas is all about love and sometimes that love is buried under a morass of crusted anger and hurt. Only patient love can soften the crust and allow reconciliation to seep through. Your time of waiting and watching may not dissolve tonight but you must have faith that it will come. It will come. So, take time this evening to be quiet and recall the events of the birth of Christ. Read the scriptural passages, especially Luke 2:1-20. And unite yourself with a loving Savior and take along with you the person whose grievance you bear.

I wish each of you, my readers and my Anonymous Angels, a loving, peaceful, joyful Christmas.