Dear Sacred Friend —

Today it is finished.  With an official stroke of a judge’s pen, her scrawl unreadable but the meaning clear, twenty plus years of marriage is dissolved.  Disintegrated.  Discarded.  “Formally and legally.”  The investment of those decades lost, it feels the years themselves were squandered, the only evidence of them at all are the deep wounds that remain, betraying an anguish so palpable, a wreckage nearly unrepairable, and a healing seemingly so far off. 

I chuckled to myself on the day, years ago, when I inscribed my final gift to you with the words “To My Sacred Friend” and you seemed flattered.  I didn’t have the heart to tell you then what Sacred Friend actually means, but I will tell you now.  His Holiness the Dalai Lama describes a “Sacred Friend” as someone in life who is the hardest to love and the hardest to forgive.  Though you weren’t the hardest to love (you were the easiest), you are the hardest to forgive.  This will be my ongoing work for the remainder of my days.

Someday (they say) I will see all of this as a gift.  Perhaps it is a gift – albeit wrapped in the ugliest gift wrap ever.  Gifts can be messy, I suppose, so messy, in fact, that the gifts themselves are often lost in the wretchedness of their wrappings.

Take a certain birth in Bethlehem – what a scene of misery that night must have been!  An exhausted young couple of outsiders is rejected, offered a smelly stable with its cold hard floor to sleep on (a floor no doubt littered with dung) all the while being left on their own to manage childbirth.  I’m sure much of that night was filled with a bleakness pierced only by screams, cries in the dark, agonizing pain, a lot of blood, intense fear, and feelings of being dismissed and abandoned.  Perhaps they even felt abandoned by God.  This was not the tidy miracle we see in the cleaned-up creche of today, with polished porcelain figures placed oh, so perfectly.  Rather, it must have been a scene of such inelegance, indignity, so raw and so authentically, well, authentic.  We would likely turn away from such a scene today from the comfort of our harried lives.

Yet it is precisely in these wrappings that the Christ child came into our world.  Humble doesn’t even begin to describe it.  Such profound gifts of peace, of hope, of promise, of life, could only come packaged in such profound messiness.  A messiness smoothed by powerful strength and hope.  What a miracle indeed, and what a journey that holy night – from the stable to the sublime!

So my Sacred Friend, someday I will thank you for the gift you’ve given me this Christmas.  For by God’s infinite grace new life will emerge from desolate loss.  I will begin again.  I will find the strength to birth new life.  And as the messiness clears, I will gain perspective.  I believe what awaits me is fresh hope, new promise, a renewed future, deep peace, and, yes, even forgiveness in the end.  And I thank God for the gift of the miracles being wrought continuously in the midst of it all, in me and, I pray, in you too.

Today it is finished.

And today it’s begun.

O Holy Night!

Truly,

Your Once-Beloved      

     

                                    Shared by Karla Hendrick