Like many at this time of year I have been balancing the loss of someone very dear to me (my father) with the seasonal jollity that has been going on around me.  I have found myself reflecting on beginnings and endings, life and death, and journeying through grief.

We have celebrated one joyous beginning: Christmas, the birth of Christ, new life come into the world to be God-with-us. Now we have moved into Epiphany: the revealing of Jesus, human-and-divine, in the world. This Sunday in particular focuses on the beginning of a new phase of his life, teaching and ministry on earth, marked by and set in motion by the Holy Spirit come upon him at his baptism, a moment of the united love of the Trinity.

This was the beginning of a journey of spiritual birth to pain and death, and another new beginning – for the world – in Christ’s resurrection. Because of Jesus, the beloved Son, this is our journey too – birth to death and promised hope of new beginning, new life.  This is the pathway we are gifted and which God in Trinity seals for us at our baptism.

Henri Nouwen, who made the search for deeper relationship with God and others his life’s purpose, wrote movingly about the journey from sorrow to joy and about how to begin to find new life born out of human brokenness and grief. He wrote about “having the courage to let our wounds be known to ourselves and felt by ourselves; embracing the freedom to cry in anguish, or to scream in protest – and so to risk being led into an inner space where the joy can be found.” (1)

Out of his own experiences of bereavement and near-death, Nouwen discovered again the closeness of God’s unconditional love, and he urges us to reach through grief and find the spiritual truth of who we are: God’s beloved.  “You are my beloved Son” were God’s words to Jesus at his baptism. You are my beloved are God’s words offered to us in life, in death, in the private pain of our own grief and in the unity of the journey through life’s griefs in which we all share. (2)

As Jesus has made the way for us, may you too find yourself God’s beloved and comforted (strengthened with his presence) in this new year.

Lucy G

Henri Nouwen, Spiritual Formation: followig the movements of the Spirit, SPCK 2011 
(1) p.43
(2) pp 109-110

image – (c) Lucy G, 2025