Reflections on a Joyful Holiday for the Grieving
This December, members of the Juniper Formation Leadership Team are sharing daily reflections through the Daily Ripple app and Substack. Join us as we explore the Advent themes of hope, peace, love, joy, and Christmas. This week’s reflections are written by Theo Isoz (they/them), a lay leader on Juniper Formation’s Leadership Team.
A Different Path for Advent
Psalm 34:6
This poor soul cried and was heard by YHWH and was saved from every trouble.
I am going to follow a different path for the Daily Ripples this week.
I am writing from the bedside of my dying spouse. By the time these have been published, they will have passed, and much of my life will have greatly shifted. The theme for this week of Advent is joy.
The past Theo who signed up, thinking they had things to say about joy, was so sweet and hopeful. Please know that by reading through this week with me, it is as much (maybe more?) of a spiritual practice for me to be writing daily about joy as it is for you to be reflecting. We are in this together. This week, I am writing reflections on a joyful holiday for the grieving.
This passage from the Psalms feels utterly foreign to me at this moment. I am crying out, but I do not feel saved from every trouble. I am more resonant with the How long, O Lord? psalms. My “good Christian” upbringing tells me I should find a way in which I can make a feeling of salvation true in this moment, but my reality stands firm. I am very troubled while witnessing the slow degrading agony of my love. It is important to be spiritually honest that I am not saved from all my troubles.
I have been pondering the 23rd Psalm as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I don’t know that I have walked this valley quite so intimately before, under the shadow of the peaks. I can see where the light is, and we are well below the light line.
What are the places where you feel like you need to be a “good Christian/good person” and find the positive or acceptable spin on things instead of being spiritually honest with where you are?
Reflections on a Joyful Holiday for the Grieving
Matthew 1:18
Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way...
I am writing reflections on a joyful holiday for the grieving while I am sitting in vigil with my spouse, who is in hospice.
A few days ago, Jackson was no longer able to drink from a straw, so I was giving them their favorite ginger ale and apple juice concoction on a sponge. I was suddenly flashed with the images of Jesus on the cross being given sour wine on the sponge. There is a melancholy to Jesus’s birth in the midst of the joy. We know that in a few very short months, we will be thrown into the trauma of his death; it is always present in the background of the birth. By being named the Messiah, the Christ from the beginning, this baby had no choice but to feel weighty.
I want moments of joy to be uncomplicated, pure. But the reality of joy is weighty, complex, and two-sided. Advent is about waiting in darkness for the light; there is an importance here to entering and experiencing the darkness, the angst of waiting. You are getting your eyes accustomed so that you know the light so clearly when you see it.
How might acknowledging the weight of joy change the way you hold it? What parts of your story carry both promise and pain at the same time?
Pain Is a Thief
Psalm 34:5
Look to him, and be radiant, so your faces shall never be ashamed.
Yesterday, I texted a group of my closest friends “Do you think Jackson knows how much they are loved?” My fear wasn’t that I didn’t tell them enough or try to show them enough; my fear was that in the pain, the messages were lost. They felt trapped and separate inside their suffering.
My friends responded with “pain is a thief,” reminding me of how much, in the horrors of caregiving through their agony, I was misremembering the fullness of our history, the clear ways we had known love together.
Where do you need to look, to anchor yourself in your whole story, so that you can be reminded of the love and joy that is also a part of you? Who or what are your reminders? Is there someone you can ask for stories or reassurance of love?
The Risk of Joy
Psalm 34:8
O taste and see that YHWH is good; happy are those who take refuge in YHWH.
If you did not see the introduction to this week on Monday, I am writing reflections on a joyful holiday for the grieving while I am sitting in vigil with my spouse who is in hospice.
Merry Christmas.
If you are having challenges tasting and seeing goodness today, that’s ok. You don’t have to. It’s not a spiritual requirement.
When Jackson and I first started dating, we did the queerest thing - we went on a multi-day camping trip a few weeks into our relationship. The place we chose was a campground in Colorado called Oh Be Joyful. That became a theme of our relationship, trusting joy and good things. Prior to dating Jackson, I didn’t think that romantic joy and pleasure were for me, and I was settled in that. But then, I met Jackson and joy began to open up in me. Together, we learned to trust the experience of good things.
For me, sorrow is easy. I can live in melancholy because it gives the appearance of vulnerability, but only vulnerable to a point. It is so risky to experience joy; it reveals your lifeblood. My sorrow cannot be taken from me, but my joy can.
Jackson taught me to be openly happy.
It is ok if your heart is heavy - if tasting and seeing and feeling goodness is hard. But I am praying that you all can remember it is there someday for you. And I also pray that you are surprised by a glimmer of it today.
Jackson died on December 18, one week ago.
What changes when joy is offered as an invitation rather than an expectation?
Who helped teach you how to trust joy?
Pains of Labor, Rebirth, or Death
Matthew 1:25
...she had given birth to a son and named him Jesus.
Titus 3:4-5
But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, we were saved, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to God’s mercy, through the water of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
If you did not see the introduction to this week on Monday, I am writing reflections on a joyful holiday for the grieving while I am sitting in vigil with my spouse who is in hospice.
Christmas is behind us. The event has happened. The birth, the celebration, the waiting is over.
But before you move on, don’t forget Mary’s experience of the moment of Christmas involves sweat and pushing. Societally, we talk about birth with such simplicity, only acknowledging the cleaned-up post-birth visitor version - the baby is soft and pink, the parents are showered and changed. Nativities are so serene. We cover up the truth of birth and move on so that we can forget that birth is messy and gritty, turmoil and labor. We skip ahead to the wisemen visitation, instead of remembering the labor of Mary.
If birth is so visceral and human, I can’t imagine that the rebirths we experience through Christ are meant to be any less messy.
I have previously talked about death with similar simplicity and niceness. Through the experience of walking alongside my love to their death, I have realized how much “died of cancer” is used almost euphemistically in our language; it covers up the long agony of a body that slowly ceases to function until it finally releases.
What pains of labor, rebirth, or death surround you? How do you metaphorically skip the messy labor of Christ’s birth and jump to the pretty, cleaned-up baby of epiphany?