Ringwood acknowledges difficulties in the glitter of Christmas - Blue Christmas service led by #Unitarians

The idea of the Blue Christmas service is to acknowledge the darkness, and let it be dark.  We do not pretend that we can suddenly, magically, make it light. So we just let it be dark.  And see if we can sit with that, for a while.

We started by acknowledging some of the reasons for Christmas not necessarily being a fun and jolly time.  It might bring painful memories.  It might force us into situations we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves.  Events elsewhere in our lives, to do with health, work, or relationships, might mean we are struggling.  And it’s always worse if everyone around us seems to be having a wonderfully time.

So there was a space for people to recognise what is troubling them, and to begin to let it go, before we moved onto the Christmas story.

We heard the traditional story again, but stripped of all its glitz, and re-humanised.  We started with a stripped down version of John, Chapter 1, in a translation not from traditional Church authorities, but by an independent translator, Andy Gaus, in The Unvarnished Gospels.  The story continued via two poems: Bethlehem, by Frances Thompson, and The Journey of the Magi by T.S. Eliot.  The first tells the story of the birth of Jesus from the point of view of the innkeeper’s wife.  The second tells the story of the travels of the Wise Men, in a retrospective by one of them, many years later.

We considered what Christmas might signify to people for whom Jesus is not the traditional Messiah or Saviour worshipped by other Churches.  We heard it suggested, through some words by Rowan Williams, that "perhaps it’s not guidance about how to greet everything with spiritual joy and excitement that we need.  Perhaps it’s more like guidance on how to preserve our motivation when the going gets tough and all we feel like doing is lying down and sleeping."

There were thoughts on hope, and renewal, and the divine as appearing in the innocence of every child.  In particular, in the words of Rev Cliff Reed:

“I believe that we must seek the heart of Christmas - 

its joyous love, its star-lit mystery, its peaceful

pleasures.  Find these and we find its power.

I believe this power can redeem us - open the

heart’s doors to divine innocence.”

Echoing Frances Thompson, we remembered that, whether we are feeling strong and at peace at the moment or not, it is within our power to give a blessing, in our own fashion.  And so there were prayers, including Psalm 30, and prayer poems, that made space for us to do that, as we sat together.

The readings, poems and prayers were interspersed with Christmas music not heard quite so often, and certainly not in the supermarkets: Vigilate by Byrd; God With Us Proclamation by John Tavener; Coventry Carol (a traditional carol about the slaughter of the innocents); and we also sang a very Unitarian hymn: It Came Upon the Midnight Clear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_Upon_the_Midnight_Clear.  And not a Christmas song, but a song of hope: we finished with a Paul McCartney track, One of These Days.