St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church held its Blue Christmas service last week. For more than a decade, this mid-December gathering in Santa Monica, Calif., has been a time to acknowledge holiday grief and sadness.
"Grant to all who seek you the assurance of your presence, your power and your peace," prayed longtime member Deborah Kaufman Giordano, who helped lead the service. "We call from our hearts."
The two dozen or so congregants sang their response in the candlelit sanctuary, "Oh Lord, hear my prayer."
Kaufman Giordano is part of a group of lay leaders here who pray with those in need.
"Those times where the heartbreak has come," says Kaufman Giordano, "the struggle with things like staying sober, a heartbreak over a child who's making different choices. And so to be able to be that good accompaniment, that's something that really gives me a lot of hope."
Hope can be scarce for those feeling sad and alone at Christmas.
"It takes a lot of spiritual courage, emotional courage to basically say, you know what, I'm feeling terrible," she says. "I just want a friend to walk me home. I want a friend to listen to me."
Services like this have been increasing as more and more clergy and congregations find a need to give voice to the less-than-joyful emotions people experience during the winter holidays.
Each element of the Blue Christmas service is chosen with care to be attentive to the less-than-joyous moments people might be experiencing.
St. Augustine member Lynn Blair read these words of comfort from Philippians during the midweek service: "Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything. But in everything by prayer and supplication. With Thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God."
Following the sermon and before communion, more than half of those gathered came forward to pray one on one with healing ministers on either side of the chancel while a harp and piano played meditative music.
Familiar hymns speak to longing and need
It's not just at this service that St. Augustine's associate rector, the Rev. Katie Cadigan, hears yearning.
"It was the entrance hymn last Sunday called 'Hark, a thrilling voices sounding,'" she recalled. "The fourth verse: 'So when next He comes with glory, and the world is wrapped in fear."
That phrase — "the world is wrapped in fear" — startled Cadigan.
"I was coming in from a week of person after person sharing the intimate reasons why the incoming administration is a huge threat to them," she said.
Some have transgender children. Others have families with mixed immigration status. Cadigan says being attentive to those who are afraid is a deeply Christian message.
"Christ knows the world is a mess," she said. "It's not all come into fullness, wholeness, and justice yet. And God is with us in that."
She points to hymn "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," often sung this time of year, which speaks of a world in mourning and exile. The word Emmanuel itself means "God with us."
That God is present in the difficult times is a theme in many Christmas hymns, says Mark Hilt, who leads music at First Presbyterian Church of Santa Monica.
"If you look at 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,' for example," he said while leafing through a hymnal, "the poet writes, 'Still through the cloven skies they came with peaceful wings unfurled above its sad and lowly planes they bend on hovering wing and ever o'er its babble sounds the blessed angels sing.'"
The words sad and lonely appear so often, he believes, because they speak to the real condition of much of the world much of the time. Hilt hops onto the organ bench in the sanctuary on a recent afternoon to play another example: "Lo how a rose e're blooming."
As the pipe organ fills the room, Hilt speaks the lines he finds most poignant: "It came a floweret bright amid the cold of winter, when half spent the night."
It's a verse aching with longing and the not-yet. Hilt says that many traditional Christmas hymns operate as mini-sermons, speaking of hope and expectations as well as longing and expectation. The trick, he says, is for good church musicians to help people hear beyond the phrase "joy to the world."
Churches become communities of care
At Westwood United Church of Christ in West Los Angeles, longtime minister the Rev. Kirsten Linford has organized and led Blue Christmas services for more than two decades. Addressing the difficulty of the season is more than pastoral for her.
"Personally," she said, "for a number of years when I was longing to become a parent, the loneliness and the longing was about that not existing yet in my life and not being sure that it would."
A feature of regular Sunday worship has become a central principle of how Linford plans her Blue Christmas services. On any given Sunday, during the prayers of the people, congregation members raise concerns from their own lives, from the death of a spouse to their work with migrants at the border.
"There is a lot of relief and healing in just being able to say, 'Here is what I'm holding,'" said Linford, "and for somebody else to say, 'Let me hold it with you.'"
Members of the congregation buoy each other through difficult times. Giving voice to their deepest sadnesses allows them to lay down their burdens and look to something beyond grief or loss. Because, Linford says, while sorrow is real, the final word is joy.
"Look for the hope that you can count on — the hope that we find in each other and in the holy."
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