Christmas is a funny thing.  Christmas is simultaneously soft and loud, comforting and unsettling, hopeful and demoralizing.  Some of that paradox comes from the Christmas story itself, but some of that paradox comes from our hopes and memories of Christmas verses our lived experience of Christmas.  I remember all the loveliness of Christmases past:  of familiar foods shared, of gifts exchanged, of the aunts and uncles verses cousins football games in our grandparents’ yard.  But as I aged, the veneer wore off:  aunts and uncles divorced, hurtful things were said and done, and older generations began sharing the “behind the scenes” version of our Christmases that I never knew – and wished I didn’t know now.  And, slowly, I began reshaping what Christmas meant for the next generation – with a sense of certainty about what I wanted them to experience and a sense of anxiety that they might someday lose the magic of a once special time. 

We hold this Blue Christmas service every year because somewhere in the midst of shopping, caroling, worshiping, and partying, our world – both the secular one, with Hallmark movies and glossy advertisements, and sometimes even our sacred one, with familiar carols and perfect pageants – our world offers us dissonance.  In the merry making, there is little room for the parts of us that are not merry – whether those parts are due to lingering Christmas grievances, visitations from the grief fairy when we least expect her, economic pressures and worldly anxieties, the open wounds from the brokenness of our country from a nasty political year, or relationships that are broken or are limping along.  The world and even the Church rarely makes space for our inability to fully embrace the merriness of Christmas. 

As I pondered this disconnect this year, I stumbled on a reading from Gertrud Mueller Nelson.  Nelson describes about this time of year – of this season of shortened days and lessened light, “Pre-Christian peoples who lived far north,” she writes, “and who suffered the archetypal loss of life and light with the disappearance of the sun, had a way of wooing back life and hope.  Primitive peoples do not separate the natural phenomena from their religious or mystical yearning, so nature and mystery remained combined.  As the days grew shorter and colder, and the sun threatened to abandon the earth, these ancient people suffered the sort of guilt and separation anxiety, which we also know.  Their solution was to bring all ordinary action and daily routine to a halt.  They gave in to the nature of winter, came away from their fields and put away their tools.  They removed the wheels from their carts and wagons, festooned them with greens and lights, and brought them indoors to hang in their halls.  They brought the wheels indoors as a sign of a different time, a time to stop and turn inward.  They engaged the feelings of cold and fear and loss.  Slowly, slowly, they wooed the sun-god back.  And light followed darkness.  Morning came earlier.  The festivals announced the return of hope after primal darkness.

This kind of success – hauling the very sun back:  the recovery of hope – can only be accomplished when we have the courage to stop and wait and engage fully in the winter of our dark longing.”  Nelson goes on to say, “Perhaps the symbolic energy of those wheels made sacred has escaped us and we wish to relegate our Advent wreaths to the realm of quaint custom or pretty decoration.  Symbolism, however, has the power to put us directly in touch with a force or idea by means of an image or an object – a “thing” can do that for us.  The symbolic action bridges the gulf between knowing and believing.  It integrates mind and heart.  As we go about the process of clipping our greens and winding them on a hoop, we use our hands, we smell the pungent smell that fills the room, we think about our action.  Our imagination is stirred.

Imagine what would happen,” Nelson adds, “if we were to understand that ancient prescription for this season literally and remove – just one – say the right front tire from our automobiles and use this for our Advent wreath.  Indeed, things would stop.  Our daily routines would come to a halt and we would have the leisure to incubate.  We could attend to our precarious pregnancy and look after ourselves.  Having to stay put, we would lose the opportunity to escape or deny our feelings or becomings because our cars could not bring us away to the circus in town.[i]”

In some small way, that is what tonight does.  Tonight, we take the wheel off our cars, and place the wheel in the wreath right here in this little chapel.  We take away our ability to bustle about, and we sit.  We sit in the dark, we sit in our discomfort, and we sit in our un-merriness.  We take time, listening to a story about some shepherds who were similarly uncomfortable in the dark of night, dirty among their sheep, in the fields – doing their daily, maybe sometimes demoralizing, work of shepherding.  We pray, we mark our specific sense of loss or pain with the lighting of candles, and we bless our lack of merriment – we receive permission to tarry for a while in the darkness.  We do that all because we know that after today, the light will start to come a little earlier, will start to last a little longer, and will start to kindle hope in us.  We may not yet be ready to leave this place, glorifying and praising God like those shepherds.  But we are able to receive the gift of this sacred inside time, knowing that light is coming – that days are coming when we, too, will remember joy, and life, and praise.  We tarry here because this is where we also find hope.  That is the Church’s gift to you tonight – space and a tiny little sliver of hope.  Come, gather by the wheel, and tarry a bit longer.  Amen.

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[i] Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance With God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration (Mahwah, NJ:  Paulist Press, 1986), 63, as quoted in An Advent Sourcebook, Thomas J. O’Gorman, ed. (Chicago:  Liturgy Training Publications, 1988), 141-142.