Christmas, Divorce, and The God who Caresses Me With Tenderness

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 

Isaiah 40:1

[I wrote this in January 2015. I decided to post it this year while reflecting again on the holidays.]

This morning I attended church in  Alabama, not my home state. The church has grown to 34,000 members since its founding in 2001.  The music and technology were so flawless that bands from three different locations lead our singing simultaneously, streamed live on twenty foot screens behind the stage. The pastor’s invocation called on the congregation to "go with gusto after God today, grab for and seek God enthusiastically in worship."  It was a blessing being with my people, God's people, while visiting a "foreign" land.

Sadness continues for me - perhaps it has deepened. The marriage dissolution is not yet final, as we work towards finishing the court paperwork by the end of the month. And there are so many papers to be filed; it is hard to navigate through a complex court procedure in the midst of grieving and upheaval. For example, at some point we had to complete a very long “Child Support Order.”  This meant taking two paragraphs of our own simple language and cramming it into a 15-page court mandated form which included, among other things, a check in the box “neither spouse is pregnant.” Welcome to the post-Christian era.

Christmas and New Year’s was a sad time of many firsts for me and my teens.  We walked in the dark, with no play book for a broken family living in separate households. We struggled with when to engage and when to extract ourselves from dad, when to speak and when to be silent. We also recently lost our home church due to schism, so on Christmas Eve we attended a service in a small Episcopal Chapel in an old neighborhood settled by Scottish immigrants. The homily was sadly lacking [1], so in the late evening hours before Christmas morning I read Pope Francis’ Christmas Eve sermon:

• “The people who have walked in darkness have seen a great light. God who looks upon us with eyes of love . . . God who is in love with our smallness . . . . Do I allow myself to be taken up by God? to be embraced by Him? or do I prevent Him drawing close? What is most important is not seeking the Lord, but rather allowing Him to find me and caress me with tenderness.  Do I allow God to love me?   . . . He is a God who made Himself small in order to better encounter us . . . “ [2] 

I don’t know which man of God was more theologically correct - Pope Francis or the Alabama mega-church preacher.  For a bleeding soul still in pain, chasing after God with gusto seems overwhelming, even impossible.  But a God who will find and caress me in my smallness says “comfort ye, comfort ye, my people.” [3]

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[1] See prior post about this Episcopal service: Christmas Eve and Cleaning Toilets (12/25/14)
[2] Pope Francis' Christmas Eve homily, 2014.
[3] Isaiah 40: 1-5 (KJV) (and the text from Handle's Messiah.)

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.