O holy night! The stars are brightly shining; it is the night of our dear Savior's birth. Long lay the world in sin and error pining, till He appeared and the soul felt its worth. A thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices, for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.

One of my favorite Christmas hymns is O Holy Night. Originally a French poem, O Holy Night was first set to music by Adolphe Adam in 1843; in 1855, Unitarian minister John Sullivan Dwight translated it into the English version we sing today to celebrate that most sacred  of nights when Heaven and earth became one in the flesh of a tiny little baby. The first few verses capture the spirit of Advent: a time of weariness and waiting, a time of reflecting on who we are by looking back at our origins and forward to ongoing conversion, and a time that reminds us that our world is redeemed and yet still not whole this side of Heaven.

As a child of divorce, this time of year tempts me to lose heart, especially when I focus on the warm feelings of home promised to me by the world and all the glorious consumables available. However, when I embrace Advent as it is meant to be – a time of sober preparation for the coming Messiah – any privations or wounds I experience only serve to assist me into entering more deeply into the mysteries and graces of the season. And when it’s time to light the pink or “rose” candle on Gaudete Sunday, I might even enter into the joy that God promises to our weary souls.

A Weary World

So here we are on the third Sunday of Advent. Can you believe it? We are just days away from the end of what for many has been a very long and arduous year. Covid-19 descended upon us during the season of Lent, and now, in the new liturgical year, we are still navigating what feels like an ever-changing world. If ever there was a year that wearied the soul, this is certainly it. J.R.R. Tolkien was a man who knew weariness all too well, having suffered much in his own life. He was orphaned at a young age and lost some of his closest friends on the battlefields of World War I. Tolkien summed up the despair many of us have experienced this year in the memorable dialogue between Frodo and Sam in his novel, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Sam and Frodo, burdened by doom and fatigue on what felt like a never-ending quest, remarked (emphasis added):

       Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.

On Gaudete Sunday, after spending the first two weeks of Advent looking toward the end times and being reminded of the need to repent, we pause to rejoice in the good still present in the world, the good that makes it all worth it. What good can our weary world rejoice in this year? What joy can break into our weary hearts, particularly as children of divorce, who perhaps have felt the brokenness of humanity and the effects of the pandemic all the more because of the wounds we were already nursing and the privation of a good, stable home that has been missing for some time?

A Supernatural Joy

This year has been a reminder, perhaps a harsh one, that the world is not our home and that the joy that we long for cannot be found in our material surroundings. The joy we seek is a supernatural joy, one that belongs to all of us as children of God, awaiting with great hope the coming of Jesus at Christmas and the coming of our Lord at the end of time. When I was a young adult, I had a breakthrough during a Confession that took place in the midst of the Advent season. Christmas was particularly hard for me, not having the full and loving home from memories past to return to for the holidays. I’m sure most of us children of divorce can relate. In confessing my self-pity, the priest responded with a very simple observation: that Christ came at Christmas for just that reason: to give me a home and a hope at Christmas. The incarnate God left His Heavenly home to dwell in and become my home, my place of belonging, precisely at Christmas. This truth about our origins and our destiny is so important for the adult child of divorce, who often feels homeless or at the very least divided between two homes. I can both grieve the loss of the natural joy found in a thriving, holy family and choose to cultivate in my being a supernatural joy by embracing my place in THE holy family.

Advent: Living in the Waiting

Like so many of the truths of the faith, while we know this to be true in our minds, it is much harder to convince our hearts. And even if we do get to that place of joy, many of us may hesitate to embrace it for fear of losing it again all too quickly. In an Advent homily, Cardinal Ratzinger reflected on how the world, though redeemed by Christ, remains full of sin nonetheless. He remarked: 

…it is precisely to him [God] that we can and must bring, in complete honesty, the whole burden of our life. We are rather too inclined to forget that in the Book of Job, handed down to us in Holy Scripture, at the end of the drama God declares Job to be righteous –Job, who has hurled the most outrageous accusations at God – while he rejects Job’s friends as speakers of falsehood, those friends who had defended God and had found some kind of good sense and answer for everything. Observing Advent simply means talking with God the way Job did. It means just seeing the whole reality and burden of our Christian life without fear and bringing it before the face of God, as judge and savior, even if, like Job, we have no answer to give about it all, and the only thing left is to leave it to God himself to answer and to tell him how we are standing here in our darkness with no answers. (What It Means to be Christian, pages 19-20)

This is why we must understand the joy to which we are called as a virtue, one necessary for the healing we seek. In a homily I heard a few years ago, the priest observed, "The life of faith is reckless. It believes and trusts in the power of God. It believes even when it seems there is no reason to hope. The life of faith is reckless because it trusts that God is faithful to his promises. It trusts that God cannot be outdone in generosity.” That said, it’s okay too if we don’t have all of the answers. It’s okay to feel the brokenness and it’s okay if choosing joy is purely an act of the will and not something we “feel.”

Let’s return to the words of Sam when he asks, “How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?” This question is something we all experience personally as children of divorce. So much bad has happened, for many so much bad is still happening. We must make the decision, like Sam and Frodo, to see the good and fight for it. The darkness that haunts us, whether it be from our wounds as children of divorce or weariness from a year that has robbed too many of us of authentic community, has already been overcome by a tiny babe born in a world much changed and much the same as our own.

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Shaina Pia lives in Connecticut with her husband and children. Prior to receiving her Masters in Theology of Marriage and Family at the John Paul II Institute, she worked as a medical journalist having obtained a Bachelor degree in Journalism from Boston University. After briefly working for a diocese in New England, she taught high school theology for eight years and now works as a stay at home wife and mother.