Overwhelmed and Overjoyed
Driving down Pages Rd, last week, on the way back home from Brighton beach, I was ‘ambushed by grief.” A wave of sadness suddenly swept up from my gut, squeezed my chest, gripped my throat and washed into my eyes. A bunch of precious people from my whanau are buried in the nearby Ruru Lawn Cemetery and one of them had come to visit me. It was my tuakana, my older brother Nick. We buried Nick just two years ago. Laid him to rest on top of my younger brother Ciaran who died in a tragic accident when was nine years old. They both lie alongside my grandad and grandma and my mum and dad. Lately I’ve been thinking of Nick a lot. Seeing his face and hearing his voice on the wind. I’ll miss him this Christmas.
I’m not quite sure how the currents of grief in my life are going to flow together with the deep currents of gratitude, love and joy I also feel at this time of year. Both are very real to me.
In my quest for solace and comfort I have turned to Matthew’s story of Jesus birth. Here, especially in chapter 2, tragedy and hope lie together in the text. Here “weeping… mourning” mothers (2:18) and “overjoyed” wise men (2:10) sit side by side. Here dark threads of grief and loss are mysteriously woven together with vibrant threads of hope, love, and joy.
In this Christmas Story the divine gathers up and gathers in grief, and somehow, without answering all the questions, or making it all better, makes it sacred, make it holy.
For this, I am grateful. 
Sirin and Alkonost, The Birds of Joy and Sorrow. Painting by Russian artist Victor Vasnesov, 1896.
“For Grief” by John O’Donohue
When you lose someone you love,
Your life becomes strange,
The ground beneath you gets fragile,
Your thoughts make your eyes unsure;
And some dead echo drags your voice down
Where words have no confidence.
Your heart has grown heavy with loss;
And though this loss has wounded others too,
No one knows what has been taken from you
When the silence of absence deepens.
Flickers of guilt kindle regret
For all that was left unsaid or undone.
There are days when you wake up happy;
Again inside the fullness of life,
Until the moment breaks
And you are thrown back
Onto the black tide of loss.
Days when you have your heart back,
You are able to function well
Until in the middle of work or encounter,
Suddenly with no warning,
You are ambushed by grief.
It becomes hard to trust yourself.
All you can depend on now is that
Sorrow will remain faithful to itself.
More than you, it knows its way
And will find the right time
To pull and pull the rope of grief
Until that coiled hill of tears
Has reduced to its last drop.
Gradually, you will learn acquaintance
With the invisible form of your departed;
And, when the work of grief is done,
The wound of loss will heal
And you will have learned
To wean your eyes
From that gap in the air
And be able to enter the hearth
In your soul where your loved one
Has awaited your return
All the time.
“For Grief” by John O’Donohue, from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings (Doubleday, 2008).