So I Am Going to Add Tears
Dear All Souls,
Two Sundays ago, Christy Yates stood before us and did what artists sometimes do when they love something enough to tell the truth about it.
She spoke about Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, and about her Advent painting that hangs in our sanctuary year round, now brought forward during this season and set on the platform like a companion to our waiting. She named what many of us have felt when we look at it, that there is a lot of joy in that painting.
And then, near the end, she paused. “I am going to do something weird,” she told us. “I had a weird thought this morning about this painting. And again, I want to make sure we are getting this tension right of joy and sorrow. Of grief and beauty.” Then she held up a pencil and said, simply, “so I am going to add tears.”
It was such a small gesture, but it was important because it named what Advent keeps insisting on, even when we would prefer cleaner lines. Christian joy is not a coating we paint over sorrow. It is not denial. It is not the demand to be okay. Joy, in the company of Jesus, is honest enough to weep. And grief, held in God’s presence, is allowed to be beautiful without being made cute.
Christy’s pencil did not ruin the painting. It completed the truth of it. Tears do not cancel joy. Sometimes they are how joy refuses to become shallow.
That is why we are gathering this Sunday night for the Liturgy of the Longest Night, at 6pm.
This service is for anyone who finds the season heavy. For those carrying loss, anxiety, disappointment, estrangement, exhaustion. For those who feel out of step with the world’s insistence on sparkle. It is also for those who are steady and well, but want to learn how to sit beside a friend in the dark without trying to fix them. It is a service where we make room for lament and prayer, where we tell the truth, where we let God meet us as we actually are.
If you need a place where tears are not awkward, come.
If you have been holding it together and you are tired of holding it together, come.
If you are not sure what you feel, come anyway. There is space for that too.
Advent’s promise is not that the night will pretend it isn’t night. Advent’s promise is that God comes to us there. And sometimes the holiest thing we can do is what Christy did: take the joy seriously enough to add tears, and take the sorrow seriously enough to bring it into the light.
Peace and all joy to you this Wednesday,
Bliss +