Today is a day I’ve always overlooked, paid little to no account to and sometimes even wondered why it really needs to be marked in the Christmas calendar. After all, this is a season for festive joy, celebration, presents and cheese….definitely cheese.  There are so many other days in the year when we can choose to lament if we wish to, can’t we just have one nice week of celebration?  I mean, come on, it’s Christmas (and here I have a mental image of Bill Nighy in Love Actually shaking his head with a sleazy grin…)

But this year, frankly, my Christmas has been pretty crappy, so I haven’t been in much of a festive mood.  Being on my own with my gorgeous boy is one of the difficult parts of being widowed because all of those family Christmas celebrations fall away overnight, but with the added gift of me having a terrible dose of the flu nearly stopping my breathing and him coming down with D&V on Christmas Eve means any sense of festive cheer disappeared.

So I’m going to be honest, if you’re reading this full of the festive merries, bloated on cheese and looking for a bit more good cheer, you might want to turn away now – you’re not going to find it here today.  But if by chance, your Christmas is a bit more….complex…than the Christmas card images and cheesy Christmas films might depict, then maybe there might be something here for you.

All of this build up to say that today, in the Christian calendar marks the Feast of the Slaughter of the Holy Innocents.  Nice title huh?  Definitely a bit of depth and darkness there, just to even out the festive good cheer.  If you’re not familiar with it, this feast marks the monumental temper tantrum of a tyrant to whom human life had absolutely no value in the face of his greed and ambition.

The story goes that when the Magi (or Wise Men) went looking for the baby Jesus, they assumed they would find him in the capital in the palace of a King.  So they went to Jerusalem, to the Palace of King Herod, looking for him.  You could of course argue that they weren’t following directions very well as the star was apparently pointing at Bethlehem, but that’s a different part of the story, and to my mind, proof that they were male!

Anyway, the Magi show up at King Herod’s Palace, asking for the new king who has been born in and to Israel.  King Herod is not best pleased at this as he believes there’s a coup in the works and someone wanting to supplant him.  He makes the mistake that so many others made in believing that Jesus was destined to be an earthly king, rather than an heavenly one and so he feels threatened.  But he goes along with the Magi and tells them to go find the baby and then return to him so he can also go and worship the new king.  Thankfully, you might at first believe, an angel warns the magi not to return to King Herod so they travel back to their own country by another route.  The Magi are safe, Jesus is safe, the Holy Family is safe.  And that’s where most of the nativity stories end as we put away this complicated but beautiful birth story for another year.

But King Herod, violent tyrant that he is, works out that the Magi tricked him and basically throws a very large and bloody temper tantrum.  He orders every single male child under the age of two years old to be slaughtered, on the basis that this is sure to also kill this new king, even if he doesn’t know precisely where he is, courtesy of the duplicitous Magi.  This is where the bible records the grief of those devastated mothers when it says in Matthew 2:18,

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning.  Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Purists among us may be tempted to point to questions over historic accuracy here, as there is no actual record in Roman documents of such a slaughter (just as there is also no record of a census in which everyone had to travel to their home town) but let’s leave that to one side for a moment; we can park it right alongside the stable and the donkey, which also didn’t happen.  (I know, I’m such a Grinch….)

Before now, I’ve overlooked this part of the story because it’s much nicer to stay in that stable, with the manger, shepherds, angels singing and (eventually) Wise Men.  There’s cheese there, chocolates, presents and turkey and all the things that are lovely about Christmas.  It’s a warm place that speaks of things that have been unexpected and difficult but that are now lovely and cosy, warm and safe.

But since this year has been different for me, I’ve properly noticed this much darker part of the story for the first time and I’m struck by two things: the needless deaths of all those children and the unbearable grief of their mothers weeping and wailing, refusing to be comforted.  This part speaks of a whole generation of utter devastation that doesn’t go away and is not soothed by festive images because grief and loss is not soothed by traditional social celebrations.

Grief by it’s very nature exists alongside images of love and joy because the desperate sense of loss is a reflection of the depth of love that went before.  Grief isolates those who are grieving in very practical ways because life changes on many multiple levels when a loved one dies; some of those changes are immediately visible while others only become clear as time passes.  Traditions change, people often fade away, relationships break and celebrations just aren’t the same – they can’t be because we are changed.  Even when there are moments of joy, there are also always moments of sadness at what has been lost both in the form of the person and also in the many, various ways they touched our lives.

But grief also isolates in metaphorical ways because the person who is grieving cannot connect with those who are celebrating in the way they did before.  No longer is an annual celebration a straightforward time of festivity and happiness, so when others around us are wholeheartedly celebrating, there can be a sense of distance and separation because our experience is somehow tainted by the loss we experience.  Of course while the sharpest pangs of grief are usually reserved for “firsts” – first Christmas, first birthday, first anniversary etc – the grief never actually diminishes, our life just grows around it and learns to adapt to it’s presence.  And for those whose loved one died during the Christmas season or even on Christmas Day itself, that celebration will never ever be the same again because it will be even more tied up in love and loss and pain.

For me, I still grieve the events of my son’s birth over a decade ago and all that was taken from him through his avoidable life threatening illness and the disabilities that resulted from it.  He is and always will be my precious boy, perfect in every way just as he is, but the very love I have for him is still mixed up in the pain of the life he could and should have had if his birth story had been different.  I still grieve the death of my husband nearly three years ago from the cruelty of such an aggressive cancer that his life was destroyed in a mere ten months from his diagnosis.  I grieve his absence not only in my own life, but in the lives of both of his sons and his sister who not only had to say goodbye, but did so during the covid restrictions via video call – something that no one should ever have to endure.  I grieve for the future that has been lost, the sons who will not be able to watch their father growing old and who cannot spend another Christmas with him (even amidst all the arguments over tangled Christmas lights and who was going to open which present when….even in good times, Christmas remains complicated because people are involved) I grieve for the traditions our family has lost by virtue of his absence and I grieve for the ways in which Christmas for me will never be the Dickensian Christmas card with someone shouting, “God bless us everyone!”

That is not to say that joy is wholly absent because joy is a far more complex experience than happiness, and there are of course still moments of joy, for example when Adam charged up to a Santa on his sleigh travelling around our neighbourhood and was overjoyed that, “Santa is here!  Santa is here!” The fact that he’s nearly 12 years old is irrelevant, in his innocence, he’s experiencing it now and that’s all that matters.  There is still a Christmas tree and lights and presents and beautiful carols listened to, if not sung (singing when struggling to breathe and with semi paralysed vocal chords courtesy of Long Covid is not an option)

But there is also now, in our Christmas, grief.  Perhaps not audible weeping and wailing and refusing to be comforted because we are past the first pangs of the sharpest pain, but that’s simply because our lives have grown around this grief and learned to accommodate it within our hearts.  But the grief is still there and it always will be, just as I imagine, the grief of those long ago mothers may have moved on from weeping and wailing in the first desperation of loss, but would never have disappeared and certainly would not have been comforted by a simple manger scene.

So, maybe this year, if your Christmas has also been touched by grief in one form of another, whether recently or long ago, through the death of a parent, a beloved or a child, maybe like me, you can find something in this most unlikely part of the nativity story that seems like it should be so set apart from the festivities of peace, love and joy.  Because as is always the case in the human experience, grief sits right alongside joy because grief is nothing more than the shadow side of love.  And even if, right now, the cuddly image of a small baby in a manger does little for you, maybe the story of those women whose lives were torn apart because of that baby might offer something you can connect to in experiencing their agony of loss.  Evil, hate and grief will always coexist in this world, right alongside peace, love and joy, but maybe we do a disservice to the season of Christmas if we only focus on the one, while ignoring the other.

After all, isn’t the whole point that God heard our cries for help and our pleas saying, “God where ARE you?!” And replied with, “Emmanuel, God with us” by sending Godself right into the middle of our lives.  Birth is messy, it’s chaotic and dangerous and things can go wrong, whether through human action, inaction or violence, but at Christmas, God refused to look away from the reality of human existence, and instead came right down into the middle of it.

So even if you aren’t able to experience joy this year, may you at least find peace and if you are grieving, know that you are not alone in it.  Emmanuel doesn’t ignore the darkness, Emmanuel comes right down into it.