Advent Heals the Hurt
Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe
Author Stephanie Duncan Smith writes about her experience of suffering a miscarriage during the Advent season. She recounts how averse she felt to the holiday celebrations in her time of grief:
For the first time in my life, I did not go to the Christmas Eve service. I couldn’t stomach that kind of joy…. I couldn’t participate straight-faced in this remembrance of the ultimate pregnancy narrative, this birth story to end all birth stories, in which God made it from embryo to first howling breath—but my daughter did not.
Cole Arthur Riley writes, “There is no greater exhaustion than a charade of spirituality.” [1] I simply had no energy to keep up the charade.
Duncan Smith describes how Advent honors the darkness present in our lives and world:
When you’re hurting, the only thing worse than the hurt itself is the intimate injury of being told your hurt isn’t that bad, that your pain is somehow unjustified. There is no greater trauma than this invalidation when what you most need is empathetic witness. That’s what Advent felt like to me.
But it wasn’t Advent itself I was bucking against. It was the saccharine, the spin, the half story with the full gloss that rendered this complex coming of God into one-dimensional joy that excludes all other experiences.
The Incarnation always brings good news, but it never minimizes the realness of our pain. Advent declares the hope that a light is coming, but first it declares the truth that the world right now is so very dark. In all the festivities of this season, the threads of Advent and Christmas are commonly confused. The celebration of Christmas only means so much if it bypasses the great waiting, the great groaning, of Advent itself. But this is where the story—and the sacred year itself—begins.
The first language of this expectant season is not bell carols but groaning—the audial ache of a hurting world.
The God of Advent is not a God of indifference, but the God who imagined mirror neurons into existence—the cell network responsible for so much of what makes us human, which is the basic ability to read and respond to the emotional needs of others. Every human encounter of empathy begins with mirror neurons firing in witness to pain.
It is fitting, then, that the sacred year begins with Advent. Human pain is the call—every nerve ending crying out. The Incarnation is the response—every mirror neuron of God firing, volcanic in awakening. God hears the crash and cries of our great fall and, like a mother, comes running. Emmanuel rushes through time and space to be not just near our hurt, but human with us in it.
What I had missed was the very essence of Advent: This is an entire season dedicated to hearing the hurt and naming the night. We are not just allowed to do so, we are openly called to do so.
References:
[1] Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (Convergent Books, 2022),186.
Stephanie Duncan Smith, Even After Everything: The Spiritual Practice of Knowing the Risks and Loving Anyway (Convergent Books, 2024), 48, 50-51.
Image credit and inspiration:Laura Barbato, untitled (detail), 2020, photo, Italy, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Wiping the fog from the window becomes our small gesture of being in the Dark Night—an embodied “I’m here” that reaches for clarity amid unknowing, while the small, steady candle reminds us that the spirit still burns softly even when the season feels bright and our inner world does not.
Story from Our Community:
My husband died unexpectedly at 34 and I found myself struggling to put back together the shattered pieces of my family’s life. A few weeks after his funeral, I realized I was humming and thinking happily about the day to come. I stopped abruptly and thought “What are you doing? Things are looking bad!” But God’s grace broke in and I realized that my happy mood was a gift, an interlude of grace. The tough days would still come, but the moments of joy would also come. I learned to take each day, each moment as it came, and to embrace it as the gift that it is. Thanks be to God!
—Mary S.