Grief and Joy
A Paradoxical Season

As is my usual custom, I want to talk today about paradox and about virtue. I talk about paradox a lot because I believe it is central to liberal arts education. Students of the liberal arts recognize that the most important issues in life are usually not as simple as they first seem. They are not simple because as Scripture tells us, in this life we “see through a glass darkly,” and only one day will it be “face to face.” In other words the means we have for knowing truth in this life are always limited. So we must learn to accept ambiguity, while still holding to our convictions. That is very hard to do. It requires both real humility and real passion at the same time. That is paradoxical. I call it critical commitment.

But I also talk a lot about virtue. That’s because at Greenville we educate for character, and character is just exactly the collection of our virtues. It’s not enough to have great skill in nuancing in our mind those important yet paradoxical issues of life. If we fail to act despite their ambiguity, we are, to use C.S. Lewis’ turn of phrase, “chestless men.” Winston Churchill put it this way when he spoke of politicians paralyzed in the face of Hitler’s atrocities: So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent. In more contemporary terms, these are people like those in the current TV advertisements for the Royal Bank of Scotland, who stand trapped in a broken aerial gondola or sit at a table next to a choking colleague theorizing about what ought to be done, but failing to act. When the hero steps forward, the conclusion is simple, “Less talk, more action.”

So when the question of what to talk about today arose in my mind I knew it would be about paradox and virtue. But which paradox and which virtue? Wednesday night at the GCSA Christmas Around the World event... with great food by the way... I asked a couple of student friends what they thought I should say. I had been thinking about speaking on the virtue of joy. Hannah (Hawksbee) said that sounded good but given the events of my year, I was probably in a good position to talk about finding hope in the face of grief. Stephanie (Plant) and Scott (Humpherys) said it didn’t matter what I talked about so long as I just told good stories! So I started searching my frequently defective mental hard disk for paradoxical Christmas stories!

In late December of 1968, almost 40 years ago, I left Boston in a snow storm headed for Christmas to visit my parents who were missionaries in Brasil. I had sweat all summer on a highway construction gang in Lansing, Michigan to earn just enough money for this once a year two-week visit with my family. I was loaded with all kinds of special supplies and gifts... most of them the kind you could not purchase in Brasil in those days. As misfortune would have it, because of a blizzard in Boston, and despite running through the Miami airport with those heavy packages, I arrived at my connecting gate to see the plane for Brasil pulling away. Never mind that it sat for 45 minutes within sight on the runway. I was stranded. And because I had chosen Brand X, a sketchy South American airline, which would not transfer my ticket to anyone else, I was stuck in Miami for three days. The good news was that in that century, the airlines actually cared enough to put me up and feed me for those days. It was Twinkies and hot dogs in the Starlight Motel, but it beat the airport or the street and there was nothing I could do. To pass the time, I bought and read a New York Times bestseller late into the night in that dark creaky room. It was Rosemary’s Baby, the story of the birth of the devil through an immaculate conception! Bad choice! It scared the “beejabbers outta me.” During the day however, I walked the streets and visited a local store to buy some Lime Jell-O for my mom... a holiday essential unavailable in Sao Paulo. As I was returning to the motel through a residential neighborhood, wearing torn blue jeans, scruffy sideburns, and very long hair, a patrol car pulled alongside and the officer got out to question me. He said several residents had called in stating I was too old to be walking in that neighborhood. (Hmmm) The policeman asked where I was staying. I said, “In the Starlight Motel.” When he asked why, I said, “I’m leaving for Brasil tomorrow.” When he asked what I had in the small brown bag, I said “Lime Jell-O for my mother.” In retrospect those weren’t smart answers I guess! He took my student ID card, and while I kissed the hood of his car for a few minutes, he discovered there had been an “all points bulletin” for someone from my school, who was thought to be in Miami and was wanted back in Boston for murder. Ouch! Again not good! I spent the next 3 hours locked in the back of his car while Miami’s finest did his normal patrol waiting for a report back from Washington D.C. on a V. James Mannoia. The ride was of course fine with me, since I had nothing else to do anyway but go back and scare myself to death reading. I learned a lot about police work in sketchy neighborhoods that afternoon. The radio report never came, but he dropped me off at the Starlight, with good wishes for a great holiday with my folks. He said, he knew more about me talking for 3 hours than the report could have told him anyway! Nice guy!

This story reminds me that Christmas is a paradoxical season. It is a time often of very mixed feelings. It embraces the apparently opposing even paradoxical qualities of joy and grief. So that paradox is what I want to talk about today.

I know this may make me sound like the Grinch. That’s because most of us think of Christmas as the one occasion each year that represents unqualified, unpolluted goodness. Isn’t it all about love, joy, peace, and hope? But even my brief December arrest in Miami makes it clear Christmas is not simple. I was full of joy at the prospect of reunion with my family for the first time in a year, having no communication except letters for all that time. I was full of joy knowing I’d be spending the holiday with those I loved, in warm weather, on the beaches of Guaruja. But even before I could arrive, I was already filled with fear; and I don’t mean just about Rosemary’s Baby! I feared I’d end up in jail with no one even knowing where I was. Keep in mind this is pre-cell phones, pre-text messages, and even pre-phones of any kind in our home in Brasil. And even before arriving home I was already full of fear of saying goodbye to my family for another whole year after Christmas and fear of the awful first semester examinations I would have to take back in frigid Boston in January, only hours after leaving those warm beaches. So I could hardly feel the joy, for all the anticipated grief. It was a time of hugely mixed feelings. You may be facing a Christmas of paradox, a Christmas of hugely mixed feelings too. And of course this Christmas is certainly one of mixed feelings for me. It is full of grief for Ellen yet full of joy about the prospects for a new future ahead.

Joy and Grief. That was the title of the story on CNN last Thursday morning as I exercised. The picture showed Andrue Smith, a 28-year old construction worker in Tucson, holding his brand-new triplets... all boys! He calls them “Daddy’s little army.” His joy was obvious, as he said, “All I wanted was a son.” He got three for Christmas. But his joy was matched by grief. After delivery, his wife Debbie’s heart failed, her brain was damaged, and Andrue had to make the agonizing decision to end her life support. She will never see those boys. “I can’t imagine a life without her,” he said. Amazing joy mixed with amazing grief... all in the same Christmas season.

Grief – Last week I read C.S. Lewis’ book “A Grief Observed.” In it Lewis recounts the agony of his grief from the loss of his wife Joy Davidman. So ironically his too is a story of grief and Joy. Married only four years after a lifetime of bachelorhood, Lewis lost Joy to cancer. His grief took the form of deep doubts about God Himself. In early weeks, he railed at God, calling him the Cosmic Sadist, and even a divine Vivisector... killer of those who are still alive! (p44) He felt heaven’s doors were bolted shut, and its windows dark. He felt abandoned. Prayer, he concluded, was nothing but “self-hypnosis.” And in the end, the world turned “shabby” characterized by a “permanent provisional feeling” like just so many “cul-de-sacs” going nowhere and eventually slipping into “boredom tinged by nausea.” Those feelings are not lost on me, and perhaps they are not lost on you even in this place and in this season.

Apparently, 19 year old Robert Hawkins felt some of this grief in Omaha last week too. In the face of the joy of Christmas, he grieved his life, his years of therapy, his depression, and even his loss of work at McDonald’s. He killed 8 people, then himself. In the re-opened mall on Saturday, one shopper, John Andrews, said, “It doesn’t feel like a Christmas feeling.” Then yesterday as I drove to Christmas carols at the Botanical Garden in St. Louis I heard on the radio of another young man, this one 20, shooting two others to death at a YWAM missionary training center in Arvada Colorado. He’s still on the loose. Literally the next story was how police at Loyola University in LA arrested a young college student for threatening to kill as many people as he could and hoping the police would then shoot and kill him. Two hours later, as I drove back to Greenville from the carols, there came yet another report of another young man shooting after the service at the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. A church security guard shot and killed him. This CNN story was entitled, “Faith and Fury.” Talk about Christmas paradox.

What is this tragic grief? Grief it seems is the overwhelming pain born out of a terrible and irreversible loss of someone or something that was central to our very self-identity. As with Robert Hawkins, it can even be loss of our self. We are shattered. Existentialist Jean Paul Sartre echoes Lewis’ allusion to “nausea” in his play of that same title. Sartre also echoes Lewis’ “cul-de-sacs” in his play describing life as having “No Exit.”

Maybe today you feel that loss of identity. Maybe you are feeling you are not the scholar or athlete or friend or person you thought you were. The skill or relationship on which you have based your self-concept may be shattering. You may feel alone, discouraged, unloved, and even worthless. Maybe you even feel that terrible and seemingly irreversible emptiness. For you it may be a season of deep grief.

Joy – In the face of such grief, what is joy, and where on earth is it? There’s an old Sunday school song that says it’s “down in my heart, up in my head, down in my feet.” But it seems in short supply, even at Christmas. I remember days of terrible loneliness in college. Days when it seemed I didn’t know who I was. Days when my identity as a member of a family so far away seemed lost. I remember that having a girlfriend seemed to drive those haunting feelings away for a while. But when they would break up with me, as seemed to happen over and over, I’d be devastated again, falling into grief. Each time I’d promise myself to remember that my identity was not in those relationships but in the one I had with my Father in heaven. As time would pass I’d find my balance and restore the joy of living, promising myself not to forget that deeper confidence. But it seemed only weeks before yet another relationship would take my eyes off that deep confidence, and would then be shattered again leaving me to grieve. I remember thinking how easily and foolishly I could change my focus from the solid substance of my relationship to Christ back to the mere “frosting” of relationships with others. It seemed I would never learn.

That’s when I first began to understand that joy and happiness are quite different things altogether. Happiness, it seems, is something that depends on “happenings.” Depending on what “happens” from day to day, or week to week, I might be happy or unhappy. These happenings included how well I did on an exam, how much pressure I felt in studies, whether I had a girlfriend, how well she treated me, and maybe even whether our crew team won its last race. Happiness was apparently like the waves on the top of the water, whipped up by every variable wind of the day. But joy on the other hand was the deep depth of relationship with Christ that stood underneath those happenings at all times. If the ocean is deep, the waves on the surface can rock and roll all they want but the depths remain calm. If however, as seemed too often the case in my life back then, I did not have that depth of relationship with Christ, then whenever the waves grew large, the troughs of those ups and downs would scrap the bottom. And that was when I sometimes just wished life would end. It was a terrible grief. Maybe like me you feel some of that today.

From Grief to Joy – So how does one make a journey from grief to joy? Early last summer, shortly after Ellen died, I found myself without any appetite for many of the things I have always enjoyed most. I didn’t want to eat good food. I didn’t want to be with friends. I didn’t want to drive fast. I didn’t even want to take photographs... something I have done almost daily for over forty years. As I drove west in Ellen’s Mini Cooper, passing gorgeous scenes, I wondered whether I would ever want to stop and take pictures again. But I remembered how so many friends had urged me not to act too soon. “Don’t make any decisions.” “Let time pass.” “Just put one foot ahead of the other.” It was all good advice. In Hebrews we are told, “On the right path the limping foot recovers strength and does not collapse.” (Heb 12:13 Phillips) On the right path! In other words, keep on keeping on.

So I visited California and headed back east. By the time I got to Washington D.C. I found myself taking pictures again... even from a speeding convertible in traffic! Continuing long-standing disciplines over enough time, choosing to remember the reality of my identity in Christ beneath the heavy seas of emotional happenings, is eventually bringing joy back to my life. As Lewis put it, in grieving his loss, he continued to take outside walks as much as he could. Then one day he realized “the face of nature was not emptied of its beauty and the world didn’t look like a mean street.” (p69). Soon amidst the tears there are twinkles (p88) because we have chosen by will, not emotion, to remember the joy that exists deep beneath the unhappiness of happenings.

You may ask what does this have to do with Christmas? It seems to me that Christmas also celebrates a paradoxical moment when grief and joy were mixed in large measure to form a turning point, a watershed moment in history. So it can and should also be such a moment in our individual lives each year.

It was paradoxically a moment in history when God Himself experienced His deepest grief. His children had fallen away. His heart was broken. The part of His creation that was not just good but “very good,” was now fallen. We cannot even imagine His grief. Our pain pales by comparison. Christmas represents the moment when God chose by an active will to reach down in painful sacrifice, full of grief, to act. To squeeze His infinite Self into the form of a mere human was more painful than any of us could possibly imagine. To sacrifice His son; what greater grief can a Father endure? We think of Christmas as all about a birth. But we must never forget that in reality it was also all about death. It is paradoxically about both.

Friday night at our annual alumni Christmas party at the home of Ken and Marjie Smith in St. Louis, we sang the familiar carol, “The First Noel.” I had never noticed the line in one verse that says “By his blood mankind has bought.” The First Noel, the Good News, is about a bloody painful grief-filled sacrifice. In our reflection on the joy of this season let us never forget the paradox that such joy emerges out of grief by the divine act of will. The third advent candle, like the third candle of lent, is pink, reminding us of the joy that emerges out of suffering.

That Joy is the confidence that lies below the surface of the happenings of this day, of this week, of this exam period, of this year, of this relationship, of this career, and even of this life. It is joy born of our confidence in Him alone, not our circumstances. It is joy that points us to a future that depends on Him not upon ourselves.

In Tucson this week, Andrue Smith received a gift of joy in the form of three new sons. But it arose out of his own grief-stricken act of will to end the life support for his wife.

In closing hear these words of Scripture capturing the paradoxical nature of Christmas, one that embraces both grief and joy:

Isaiah 53:4-6: But he took our suffering [grief] on him and felt our pain for us. We saw his suffering [grief] and thought God was punishing him. But he was wounded for the wrong we did; he was crushed for the evil we did. The punishment, which made us well, was given to him, and we are healed because of his wounds. (New Century)

Philippians 2:5-11: Let Christ himself be your example as to what your attitude [choice] should be. For he, who had always been God by nature, did not cling to his prerogatives as God's equal, but stripped himself of all privilege by consenting to be a slave by nature and being born as mortal man. And, having become man, he humbled himself by living a life of utter obedience, even to the extent of dying, and the death he died was the death of a common criminal. That is why God has now lifted him so high, and has given him the name beyond all names, so that at the name of Jesus "every knee shall bow", whether in Heaven or earth or under the earth. And that is why, in the end, "every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ" is the Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Have a blessed paradoxical Christmas full of joy arising out of grief.