The Pain is Real, so Hopefully also the Hope: Remembering Doug

I am still thinking about hope.  I am also thinking about my classmate from high school who died last week.   Death happens any day and any time.   As we get older we tend to know more and more people who die.  Depending on your view of Eschatology we are all going to die unless raptured directly by God (we may get to that).

Nevertheless, I had not seen Doug since 1984. We had our conversation in the middle of a country road.  I was running on a hot summer day and he was driving by.  He stopped and backed up in his Chevrolet Chevette, and we briefly talked about what we were doing and where we were going in life.

From what I remember of Doug as a high school student I was pleasantly and thankfully surprised learn from the Facebook posts about him contained information that he was a man of faith before he had died.  When he thanked all of us for our birthday wishes a few weeks back on Facebook he also had thanked God. 

Despite my poor witness as an adolescent, God can still work.

While I had not seen Doug since 1984 and had never met any of his kids, I can only imagine the pain and numbness they might be feeling this week.   Their father is gone.    I can only imagine the intensity of nothingness or numbness that the shock of a loved one’s sudden death brings.  It is very real but also very unreal.  Hope is typically the last thought on the mind.

When it comes to grief and loss I think that we do not think about hope until after some of the shock has gone and we are feeling the anger and depression.  For the people in these stages of grief, hope in Christmas can be a spiritual under-current that flows against the empty bright lights and the trite and platitudinous Christmas music playing in the background.  The hope we find in Advent and Christmas allows us to cry and express our feelings.  It hopefully allows us to reach out to God despite our lack of understanding of why things happened, and that we will move on and we will see less painful days. 

Christmas can be a very spiritual, heady time for the thoughtful one.  Underneath the Christmas tree and Santa Claus façade is the message of what the babe in the manger came to bring—hope in that there is the forgiveness of our sins and the hope of life of life after death. 

Christmas points to the biggest miracle ever accomplished and our need for hope and faith.  The baby whose birth we celebrate only lived 33 years.   He did not perpetually stay in that manger.   He died and rose again and according to the Bible sits at the right hand of God the Father. 

People doubted it then and they doubt it now, but Christmas also asks the rhetorical question that St. Paul/The Apostle Paul asked King Agrippa in Acts 26: 8 Why does it seem incredible to you that God should raise the dead?  (New Jerusalem Bible).

When we talk about God and death and hope, it does not sit well with many people who are empiricists or skeptics.  There is a cliff where factual analysis takes us.  At the end of the cliff there is the emotional and spiritual void that no rationalization is going to fill.   We cannot know it all and we cannot figure it all out and so we have to have some kind of non-empirical answer for what is happening.   We are in an emotional wilderness without direction or bearing and where we are just surviving and that is where hope and faith comes in even in the midst of tough emotions.   

No easy way to conclude this, but even with my intellectual discussion, I recognize that from the physician to the scholar to the factory worker we are all simple people.  Real pain does not exactly let you do fancy things. We all must do simple things to get through the pain.   We have to admit our humanity.  We pray and we cry.  If we do the best we can and make it through then we did okay.