Blue Christmas

"'Cause even when there is no star in sight
You'll always be my only guiding light"

 - Guiding Light, by Mumford and Sons 


For the first time, I attended a Blue Christmas service. I hadn't heard of the concept before then; simply put, it's a service which acknowledges sadness in the midst of holiday joy. A service which encourages people to cry if that's what they need to do. The holidays are, after all, certainly not a season immune to grief, loneliness, and other heartaches. One of the Casa Gabriel boys puts on a brave face but tells me, "I don't really like Christmas." It's not even something he can pinpoint with true clarity, just a sense of loss from having come from a broken family, plagued by poverty and scattered around under the care of various relatives or others. 

A good friend invited me to the Blue Christmas service. When I arrived, it was after a long hard day of a long hard week. I hadn't slept well, had been going full-tilt working with a team, and had been so stressed by various things that I locked my keys in the office twice in one week, which was only the third time in my life I could remember having done that. In the midst of it, I hurt my eye but couldn't go home and take out my contacts for hours because of the missing keys. The result was that several people thought I was crying, when really I had something under my contact which simply wouldn't flush itself out, no matter how many drops I applied or tears leaked through. I arrived at the service wearing glasses, fighting a headache, and feeling utterly spent. 

It was a small crowd that night. The lights were dimmed for music, responsive reading, and a moving message. My friend handed out cards, pens, and tiny candles in jars to everyone who entered. I kept the candle cupped in my hands, opening it repeatedly to inhale the Christmas scent. I liked how the glass caught the light, and how small and simple and lovely it was. Towards the end of the service, there was a time for writing down anything difficult we wished to give to God. I wrote down the fact of me leaving Ecuador in two months, after what will be five years here. Then, I wrote down a second grief; how little I've been able to see my family in the past five and a half years (counting the six months I was away in language school). For the first time, I tallied up how many weeks I had been home during that time, coming up with a total of about twelve weeks or less. (two weeks between language school and the field; a week for my brother's wedding and then not home for a year and nine months before visiting for a six-week furlough; a week for Christmas a year later; a week for a wedding; a week for a funeral and visa paperwork followed by another very long stretch of  a year and four months before I fly home for good). 

For so long, the short, scattered visits had simply been a part of life overseas, hard and sad yet unavoidable, pushed to the back of my heart so they wouldn't hurt too much. Yet that night, I felt the heavy weight of that sacrifice. I wrote them both down, folded the paper, and dropped them into a basket in the front of the church. I sat back down and held up my tiny candle to be lit when my friend passed by. Little flames flickered throughout the church. In the row in front of me, a woman wept. 

I feel both brave and small when I think about the future. That my life will be different very soon is certain, but what it will really be like is unknown. It is frightening and thrilling. 

In the dim church, the service ended, yet no one left. After a few heartbeats of stillness, when the only sounds were of a few people softly crying, the musicians played two more songs while people slowly wiped away their tears and blew out their candles. I stayed in the back with my friend as everyone left. When there were only five of us there, her husband turned on the lights he had set up for the Christmas Eve service. It was one of those lights which scatters green and blue dots over everything, such as the front of a house. There inside the church, covering everything from the white wooden pews to the high beams of the ceiling, it was magic. We adults gazed around in wonder, walking into the lights and becoming sprinkled in them as well. After sadness was joy, simple and pure. 

Once again, I did not have a white Christmas, as in the songs and stories, yet overall it wasn't very blue either. In the way in which only Christmas can be, it was nostalgic and wistful and magical. My hope for those who feel that Christmas is sad because of past experiences is that they can come to find the wonder and newness of it all. My hope is that we can acknowledge sadness yet also find joy. Like lighting a candle in a blue Christmas service while crying in the dark before being scattered with lights, lights dancing into every corner and transforming the darkness into something breathtaking.