Blue Christmas 2023: A Reflection

This is our first Longest Night or Winter Solstice without our parents and Betty who was Denise’s sons’ grandma. We attended our first Blue Christmas service at St. Agatha’s Episcopal Church in DeFuniak Springs, Florida in 2014. It was a powerful and moving experience for us and for all who attended. We took this worship tradition with us to Estes Park when I was called to PCCR in 2015.

The service occurs on the longest night of the year or Winter Solstice which falls on December 21st. During this season, so many people are focused on last minute Christmas shopping or family gatherings and the expectation is that everyone is happy and excited for Christmas. Often though, that isn’t the case. During my thirty-six years of ministry the season leading up to Christmas was often exhausting. It was an incredible blessing when we discovered this beautiful opportunity to reflect on the reality of grief and loss that gets pushed aside in the race to Christmas Day.

Tonight we attended a lovely service with two pastoral colleagues who also happen to be dear friends. As we gathered, candles were lit, music played, prayers were lifted, and a time of reflection was offered. Kim and Christy gave all who gathered a beautiful gift. In the midst of this season of commercialism and “false smiles” we were given the opportunity to simply be still… be still with our grief… be still with our loneliness and pain… to be still with the One who loves us unconditionally.

This Advent season can be full of distractions and false expectations. It can be full of disappointments and heartache. Yet when I think about that first season of preparation for an unusual birth, I can’t even imagine what was going through the hearts of Mary and Joseph as they made their way to Bethlehem.

Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst. — Thomas Merton, “The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room” in Raids on the Unspeakable, pages 51-52