Friends, I have been feeling melancholy recently. I’m not entirely sure why: it may be that the stress and uncertainty of the COVID era are finally getting the upper hand in the emotional mix that is my inner life; it could be that I’m still grieving as the anniversary of my father’s passing approaches, or maybe I’m just becoming someone whose eyes leak more easily than they used to. I don’t know.
What I do know is that for me this Advent and Christmas season is turning out to be an emotional mosaic made up of tiles with a wide variety of colors, some of which are happy, some of which are sad, and most which are somewhere in between. If things continue as they have started, this holiday season will be merry but still marked with the odd tear, shed for reasons I won’t always be able to identify or understand.
I also know that my condition is hardly unique. I’ve been a pastor long enough to know that many people don’t experience Christmas as a happy season. Christmas makes a lot of people melancholy and sad, and a lot of those whose winter holiday is one of sadness feel the need to hide their seasonal grief. I get that. When it seems like everyone else is ho-ho-ho-ing it’s hard to be a killjoy, hard to be honest about a lack of joviality in one’s own Christmas empierce.
But I hope that churches in general, and Montclair Presbyterian Church in particular, can be places where emotional honesty is practiced. I hope we can be a community where no one has to pretend they are happier than they actually are (and, conversely, no one should have to pretend to be unhappy either!).
I’m not entirely sure how we make MPC more welcoming of emotional honesty, but here’s an offer: if you want to talk about your holiday blues, please don’t feel shy about reaching out to me or to Talitha or to anyone else in the MPC community (I know that I’ve just offered the sympathetic availability of ears attached to other people’s heads, but I’m confident they won’t mind).
Let’s make space for each other’s holiday emotions–be they jolly or melancholy–and, so doing, let us love one another in ways that are particularly needed, well, always, but especially at Christmas.
God’s Peace,
Ben