The song “Sleigh Ride” is lost on me this year.  It has turned into the aural equivalent of eating sawdust. Originally an instrumental, lyrics were added by someone else two years after the composer finished the score in 1948, just three years after the end of World War II. At this time, the world desperately needed light orchestral pieces and lyrics about things that go “jing-a-ling, ring-ting-ting-a-ling” and about “a happy feeling nothing in this world can buy…”  They are bouncy, full of cheery holiday warmth, with a very real time and place.  

But this year they sound hollow to me.

My family lost a very dear member in early December–just three weeks ago– when my cousin’s husband died of a rare form of cancer. This wasn’t just some guy I know from the annual Christmas card, he’s been in our lives since he and my cousin started dating in high school. I met him when I was 9. My cousin is a few years older than me and I look up to her. I watched their relationship closely and it, their eventual marriage, and then their parenting of three kids, set my gold standard in those areas.

Hearing “Sleigh Ride” over the past few weeks, with its saccharine sound grating on my ears, reminds me how troubling this death has been for so many, and then more broadly, how troubling the holiday season can be for anyone whose life is anything but “nice and rosy and comfy cozy”.  We all have things we carry with us, things that the bible aptly refers to as “groanings”. For those things, we don’t need holidays, we need Christmas. We need Christ.  

The song that has been ringing more true than ever this year is “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”. The darker melody and plaintive lyrical cry of a world in need of a savior cuts deep into the heart of Advent. Think about a song that leads you to repeat the word “Rejoice!” twice, once in a major chord, sounding like hope, and the second time in the minor chord, an almost ominous tone, yet still “rejoice!”.  That’s where I got caught up in the song – a call to joy laid over a sad minor chord.  That’s exactly where we rest in this life, in that tension between the fallen world where there is cancer and death, and at the same time the hope of eternal life in Christ Jesus.

If I could cut and paste all of my cousin’s CaringBridge updates about her husband here, I would because they are a beautiful study of faith in suffering, but here is a good summary:

The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness,
on them has light shone. (Isaiah 9:2)

With each scary diagnosis, each ineffective treatment, she somehow held on to that light, and never lost sight of it even while many of us reading those updates did. The angel said to the shepherds “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy”.  My cousin was saying the same thing, even when facing death, in fact, most of all when facing death.  It’s those words that gave Paul such conviction when he quoted Hosea, saying “O death, where is thy victory? Where, O death, is thy sting?”.   

The default emotion for this season is supposed to be happiness. It’s in all the ads and on every channel.  But not everyone can default to that, and some would say there is no reason to feel happy at any time, and especially not during Christmas. But the Bible calls us to something deeper than that – joy.  Happiness is just a slice of what makes up joy, just as peace is merely a slice of Shalom. Joy involves profound gratitude among other things, and implies a loss of innocence, an experience of pain that it takes to truly know the goodness of the Lord’s redemption. Joy is the outgrowth of that very specific knowledge. As I’ve looked for where God is in this time with my cousin and our families, I have seen that the depth of grief in loss brings out the depth of love that was there.  The more painful the grief, the more powerful the revelation of the love that was there.  The space that grief creates then is an invitation for God to pour his love in the wound created by the loss.  And the revelation of God’s love in a new way, despite the bitterness of what brought it about, is a sweet comfort.  As Andrew Peterson sings, “maybe it’s a better thing… to be more than merely innocent, but to be broken and redeemed by Love.”

Maybe I won’t be able to listen to “Sleigh Ride” the same way again, but I know that because of Jesus, there is hope, and if there is hope, then I can find joy in its wake.  Thank God Emmanuel answered our cry, that He has come and is coming again, freeing us to live as we were created to live. Thank God we can remember His birth, which He knew also meant His human death, but which also meant a new life for any who want it.  Whatever you carry with you this time of year, or always, know that the Lord wants to carry it with you, and that Jesus came to help do just that.