Take heart. This story is going somewhere.
With Thanksgiving now officially relegated to the abundant supply of leftovers crowding refrigerators across the land; with Advent and Christmas(!) firmly upon the doorstep, and beyond them both a new year, we have entered a season which is in many ways a window, a portal through which we cannot help but recall years past.
The holidays, packed as they are with activity and gatherings, family, songs, myriad seasonal sights, tastes and smells, are a uniquely powerful space for REMEMBERING. It is sweet, and bittersweet, beautiful and haunting, the way in which a meal, a film, a crackling record draw us to another place and time in our minds, resurrecting feelings from our youth, and bringing to mind those we have known and lost; those who have gone before us and the years we were given to share with them.
There's a longing woven through our memory. It is that longing which supplies the sweet sadness to the feeling we know as nostalgia. It is the longing that presses back in defiance against the absurdity inherent in the passing of our years. We are creatures born for eternity, you see. And as such, the feeling that we cannot help but lose years and loved ones, even as we enjoy and are richly blessed by them, never seems fitting to the human heart. However many eons pass upon the earth, there is something within humanity that can never quite resign itself to the inevitability of loss, try as we may to be sensible about things. And now it strikes me that, perhaps, it is simply because loss and separation and sadness are not what we have been created for. In the overflow of the Creator's eternal Love and Joy, we have been born upon the earth for a life of UNENDING enjoyment, BOUNDLESS intimacy and fellowship, with one another and with the Lord himself. And so, with every ending and passing comes to us an alien, ever ill-fitting grief. Grief, bittersweetness and longing.
Whether we can find the words for it or not, what we are longing for is a time, and for a world, where our joy and love and fellowship might NOT be passing, but endure forever. Our sensibility presses back against the thought, because in even imagining such a world we shrink back for fear that our hearts might burst. And indeed, should we be forced to experience that manner of eternal joy and boundlessness in our current state, it would very well be our undoing. But make no mistake, it is in precisely this manner of - nearly inconceivable - Love and Joy that we have been born to partake. And it is the promise of scripture that we WILL one day partake in it, in fullness, by the grace, victory, and renewing work of Jesus. We are living in the midst of the UNFOLDING story of Grace; we each now have a part to play within it, and one day we shall know it in full.