Savannah Guthrie returned to co-hosting duties on Today on Monday for the first time since the disappearance of her mother, Nancy.
After running through headlines of the day, Guthrie, with a smile, told viewers, “We are so glad you started your week with us, and it is good to be home.”
“Yes, it is good to have you back at home,” said her co-host, Craig Melvin.
Guthrie then went into the news. “Well, here we go, ready or not. Let’s do the news.”
She interviewed Steve Warren, a retired colonel and NBC News military analyst, about the rescue of an American airman in Iran.
Guthrie’s last appearance as co-host was in Late January. Her mother was last seen on Jan. 31, when a friend dropped her off at her Tucson area home. She was reported missing the next day. Authorities later released security camera video of a masked person at Nancy Guthrie‘s front door, but they have not identified any suspects in her abduction. The FBI also investigated multiple ransom notes, including two they believe may be legitimate.
In an interview with Hoda Kotb, her former co-host, last month, Guthrie said, “It’s hard to imagine doing it because it’s such a place of joy and lightness, and I can’t come back and try to be something that I’m not. But I can’t not come back, because it’s my family. I think it’s part of my purpose right now.”
“I want to smile. And when I do, it will be real. And my joy will be my protest. My joy will be my answer, and being there is joyful. And when it’s not, I will say so.”
On Sunday, Guthrie’s parish, Good Shepherd New York, shared a seven-minute Easter message from her.
She said, “Our faith gives us a spiritual conviction that we will be reborn, that God will redeem this pain, that every tear will be wiped away, that our Easter is coming. But we live viscerally in the meantime, the mean time of feeling unsure, lost, abandoned, disappointed, enraged, forgotten. Our comfort is that our God has felt those feelings from a perspective of humanity, that he has compassion on us, and that he promises, if not immediate answers, his sweet presence. He promises closeness to the brokenhearted, somehow miraculously, his loving and gentle presence that makes the mean time less mean.”
“Perhaps this is too dark a message to share on Easter morning, but I have long believed that we miss out on fully celebrating Resurrection if we do not acknowledge the feelings of loss, pain, and yes, death. It is the darkness that makes this morning’s light so magnificent, so blindingly beautiful. It is all the brighter because it is so desperately needed.”
