For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven ... a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance (Ecclesiastes 3:1,4)
The holiday season is a time (we hear from the endless advertising) to laugh, to sing, to entertain, to dance, to revel in the wonderfulness of it all. It's the hap-hap-happiest time of the year. It's a season that's supposed to overflow with one side of the Ecclesiastes equation — to be a time when all of the good things are rolled into one.
But the author of Ecclesiastes offers a different vision: that the seasons of our lives are most often a mixture of both. That it's not always possible to have the joyous neatly separated from the sorrowful, that in this life, the beautiful and the painful often go hand-in-hand.
I think there's wisdom in Ecclesiastes for us no matter what time of year it is. But especially at this celebratory time of year, the message in these verses seems particularly important.
So I'm interested in thinking about what happens when we acknowledge the holiday season as a time where both joy and sorrow are present. I'm interested in considering the holiday season as a time for lament and a time for hope.
I have to admit that before 2008 I wasn't nearly as aware of or interested in the practice of lament. By lament, I mean the expression of sadness, grief, mourning that comes from experiencing the shadow sides of life.
But right in the middle of the most wonderful time of that year, right when silver bells were ringing, I was diagnosed with incurable stage IV cancer, days after my 42nd birthday.
Rather than decorating a tree at home, I was living at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, spending my days being wheeled through the halls from one scan to another, one radiation treatment to another.