The Holy Season of Advent has always been one of mixed feelings for me. In my spiritual life, I try to keep it to the front of my mind, preparing myself for the miracle of Christmas, when God sent His only begotten Son to die for my sins.
In my emotional self-survival tense, I usually try to shove to the back of my mind the fact that my heart shall soon have to endure the bitterness of another Christmas.
Normal people from happy families will not understand me because for them Christmas is the most wonderful time of the year. They are another part of the problem.
"Maria, are you going to see your family this Christmas?" they ask, all good will and pleasantness.
"Yes," I reply.
"How long has it been since you have last been with them?"
"Several years" I answer all coolness and detachment.
"Well then you must be so excited to see them again!"
"Well...I am looking forward to seeing a handful of my siblings. A few of my siblings I always have to mentally prepare to be around. I suppose you could say that I am anxious to see them." Dark pun intended.
This is the part where the sweet happily married middle-aged mother of my friend starts to look at me as if I were the rich man in Scripture, who refused to let a beggar eat the scraps.
"But," she protests, "What about your parents! Your parents must miss you so much! You must be looking forward to seeing THEM!"
I chuckle darkly, and answer, "Yes, they miss me and they love me but I do not have much of a relationship with them. It is painful to be around them, so you can say fairly accurately that I am preparing to see them again."
The well-intentioned lady then starts to look at me as if I were the woman caught in adultery in the Gospels.
The reason why she does it understandable. You see, I am too honest to just pretend to be normal and answer that I can't WAIT to see my parents and they are so wonderful and I am so happy to be with them. No. I can never do that. But I also hold myself to a certain level of propriety and a party and conversation with the mother of one of my BFFs is just not the place to clarify and say,
"You don't understand, you are projecting your own good nature onto my parents and asking yourself how you would feel if your daughter talked this cooly about not seeing her parents for years. My parents do not love me that way. My mother loves me the way a two year old loves a teddy bear. She squeezes it until the stuffing falls off and cries over it, and gurgles terms of endearment to it, then throws it against the wall in a fit at a minute's notice. My father loves me with the obsessive, grasping, controlling desire to possess and own that a rapist feels toward the one woman he has hunted down who has escaped him. Except that he wants to grasp and pummel, disease and impregnate my mind and heart, not my body."
No, I am not telling her that over cocktails, thank you.
So this is the part that the lady says,
"Well, you should talk to your parents. All families have problems. But your parents love you."
"Please do not tell me what I should do. I know what I must do. You do not know my parents. I love them, but I don't trust them."
"How do you possibly love somebody when you don't trust them?!"
"Very painfully."
At this point the nice lady starts to look at me as though I were a leper.
She does not know that I was a leper before, but the Christ touched, as He did in the Gospels and now I am clean.
At this point I tell her that I am planning to see them but to please not discuss this topic any further. I should have said that a long time ago. But I know that if I had she would have stared at me as if I were the walking, decaying body of Lazarus in the Gospels.
That would be fairly accurate though, I was a corpse. I still have to heal. But Christ ordered the stone to be removed, so that I would not be trapped. Then, when I still felt too weak to escape the living death, He called out to me in a loud voice to come out. Then I got up and walked out.
Now I know that He is the resurrection and the life, and if I believe in Him, I shall never die.
This is where I recieve my joy from Christmas. From the Christ child. From the God who saved me and is still strengthening me through the path He has paved for me. His great love for me is what gives me joy at Christmas. He deigned to take on my human nature and be born in a stable, to take my sins and the sins of the world on His shoulders. He came to free the captives, to give sight to the blind, to raise the dead. I was a captive, now I am free. I was born blind into a blind world, parented by blind men, and he gave me my vision. My heart was dead and he revived it.
Now, with the vision of the manger and the cross before me, I can go toward this Christmas with all the loneliness and cruelty and pain that will accompany it, and hear not the ache of my heart, nor the silence of my father, nor the screeching of my mother, but the laughter of the baby at Bethlehem saying to me. "I am with you. You still have me. Family may forsake you, you may have no money to buy your friends gifts, but I have come into the world and I will come again. You are mine and I love you. Do not be afraid, Maria. I am with you every day, until the end of time."
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