On December 21st, Sunday Fellowship hosted our first “longest night” service. Longest Night Services are sometimes known as Blue Christmas Services like the Elvis song Blue Christmas. We called our service a longest night service because it took place on the winter solstice when the hours of darkness are longer than they are at any other time of year.
Longest Night Services are intended to provide a space for lament. A lament is a passionate expression of pain, grief or sadness. Some people might say that lamenting means you don’t have any faith because you don’t trust God to make things right. But that’s not true at all. Lament has always had a very important place in scripture and in religious practice. Many of our psalms are laments. Jesus utters a lament from the cross (My God, my God why have you forsaken me?).
Sharing our laments is important because the holidays can really sharpen feelings of loss. Many of us feel sadder during the holidays because we’re grieving and lonely. Some holiday traditions make the gap between the poor and the wealthy feel even bigger than it does at any other time of year. And constant advertisements seem to everyone’s draw attention away from welcoming a world-changing child even if that’s what the Christmas story is really about.
It can help us to carry on and even find hope when we share our laments in community and in God’s presence. Many of the readings and songs we shared that night were written by members of our own community. There was a song by Pastor Hannah called Dim the Lights, a lament about the way immigrants are being treated by David Steele, beautiful new words to the song Hallelujah from Sky Martin and Nan Gibbons wrote the music for a candle lighting time. There was also a short excerpt from Alice Wong, a disability saint who collected first person stories from others with disabilities into her incredible book, Disability Visibility.
As we entered the space that night, we all received paper hearts, some with laments from our readings already written on them and some ready for people to write their own. We used blue and purple water-based markers to decorate the hearts. Later in the service everyone received droppers filled with water that we used to turn our hearts of lament into beautiful art. The drops of water symbolized ours tears and the tears of God. After they tried, our hearts of lament were placed on the sanctuary Christmas tree. Please enjoy the photos.
