A Christmas Prayer for the Lonely and the Heartbroken

There’s probably someone like this in your neighbourhood. A man who lives up the road from me, lost his wife to cancer in September and faces this Christmas feeling lost, lonely and heartbroken at the prospect of having to spend his first Christmas without his loving wife of more than 30 years. To him, the strains of every Christmas carol, every lighted tree he sees through neighbourhood windows on his long lonely walks on the country road where we live brings heartbreaking memories of other Christmases rushing back.

“I’m finding it hard to keep back the tears,” he told me when we met up on the road the day before yesterday. There’s a cocktail party planned at my house the week between Christmas and New Year and the widower, who was invited, will be there. There will be lots of munchies, a crackling fire in the fireplace, and the company of a few other neighbours, that he has known longer than me. But I know down at heart that what the lonely widower needs more than anything else, far more than goodies, albeit so lovingly made, is a feeding of the soul, something only the Babe of Bethlehem can do for him. Even with the Good Lord’s special blessings showered on all those who mourn, it is difficult when Christmas still comes to pass after the recent loss of a loved one.

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I was there once myself many Christmases ago, and because I overlooked the only Source that could heal my grief, remained obliviously inconsolable. The aching cavern of heartache and loneliness left in the human heart by the loss of a loved one can only be filled by the Savior. Yet so many who feel hopelessly lost in the depths of grief, forget that God, with us in good times, is even closer in bad times. It seems hardwired in human nature that we go right past what is there in front of us when searching for an elusive solace, never knowing that the kind of solace that stays for a lifetime is all ours simply for the asking. Not feeling qualified to address the widower about these things, I ardently believe that Christmas is a time of miracles. The first Christmas was a miracle, and this Christmas some 2000 years later is also one. Few words explain the miracle as well as St. Andrew’s Advent Novena:

“Hail and blessed be the hour and the moment in which the Son of God was born of the most pure Virgin, at midnight, in Bethlehem in piercing cold. In that hour. vouchsafe O my God, to hear my prayers, and grant my desires, through the merits of our Savior Jesus christ, and of his Blessed Mother. Amen.”

It is not only this widower for whom I’m seeking a miracle this Christmas, it is for so many others whose tragedies befell them so close to Christmas, the loved ones of those who lost their lives in Paris and San Bernardino, Christians massacred by Islamist terrorists everywhere, and including all of those whose loved ones fell asleep. Words of comfort will never ease the pain of all of those who mourn loved ones, but prayers will. This Christmas, please pray to the Christ Child for the lonely and the heartbroken. Pray that they turn to the Savior for the enduring kind of consolation that He, and only He, can give them.