We know what to expect this time of year from the church: Celebrations! Cheery gatherings! Joyful musical performances! Christmas Eve Services with faces all aglow! It’s as though we have been programmed to have smiles permanently plastered on our faces during the Advent Season. And while it is certainly true that this is a season of joy, for many of us it is a very difficult few weeks filled with amplified grief, mourning, and sadness.
There is an inclination in our culture to bury these less-than-welcome feelings and emotions. This, of course, only heightens our sense of depression as we feel guilty for the way we truly feel.
The winter solstice is the longest night of the year. Many churches carve out space in their busy December calendars to have a worship service for those who are experiencing darkness rather than light. These ‘Longest Night’ Services acknowledge that our world can feel very dark at times. And so, instead of denying one’s feelings of pain, the Reverend Nancy C. Townley suggests that this unique worship service can be a time where we “remember those for whom the holidays are not joyful.” “Many of us,” she reminds us, “are lonely, in mourning, feeling alienated and cast apart from family celebrations.”
This year, we will be having a ‘Longest Night Service’ at the beginning of the Advent Season. We will gather in the sanctuary at 6:00 PM on Wednesday, December 5th for an informal service of reflection and contemplation about the realities of light and darkness that we face at Christmas.
Winter begins at 5:23 PM on Friday, December 21. But for many of us, the darkness began to swell around us much earlier in the year. As individuals, we have been touched by grief that was unexpected and sudden. We have suffered disappointments and discouragements that continue to haunt us. Anxiety and depression have gnawed at many of us for any number of reasons and it has felt as though our daylight was getting shorter and shorter.
For those who are grieving this Christmas season, we acknowledge that life can feel like a bleak midwinter:
“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter, long ago.”
(“In the Bleak Midwinter” by Rossetti)
Just as a ‘Longest Night’ experience can give us permission to grieve, it can also offer a hope and peace that only Christ can give. Our grief, while unique to us, is also universal. Christ was born into a dark world at a time of great oppression to a people long but forgotten. Seemingly separated by centuries of darkness and exile from the God of their salvation, God’s chosen people felt like victims. And yet we know a light shone in the darkness. And in that moment, a new era began where hope was present but not quite realized. We live in that tension. Although we know that the light shines bright and that it cannot be dwarfed by the sea of inky darkness that surrounds it, it doesn’t always feel that way.
So, in response to God’s eternal presence with us—made new again at Christmas—we choose to offer the gift of our presence to those who are grieving. We remember and share their loss with a timely note, a phone call, an invitation to join our gatherings, a simple, but extended embrace. We choose to hold one another when our arms are lonely for the warmth of another.
This is precisely when we can be church to one another. The loving presence of Christ, shared in a silent embrace, can help us know that we are not alone.
And we mustn’t forget this truth as well: ’The Longest Night’ is indeed the darkest shadow that will envelop us. But the day also marks the beginning of a new season of ever-expanding light and life.