Hush the sadness with a Blue Christmas
Jamie Campbell, chaplain at Aberdeen Methodist Church, is organising a Blue Christmas to respond to the needs of his community.
03 December 2024
“I’ll have a blue Christmas without you” by Elvis Presley is of course the opening line to a song that has named part of many churches Christmas offering. “Blue Christmas” services have sprung up everywhere from Cathedrals to village chapels in response to the very real need to accommodate the people who feel “blue” at Christmas.
I started my role as Open House Chaplain at Aberdeen Methodist Church on 1 September and at the time of writing have dealt with three bereavements within our little community. I have also had many more conversations with people who have been bereaved over the year and for whom their thoughts are turning to their first Christmas without a loved one. A lot of our guests also carry the pain of having lost a lot of friends and family often in rapid succession and that brings a wealth of emotions at this time of year.
The other thing I have noticed in society more generally, is that we don’t like dealing with death. We use euphemisms to talk about it when we really must. Yet, at the heart of the Christian story is the death of Jesus – a death we are baptised into as Christians.
So, I decided that this little community needed a space where they could contextualise their grief at Christmas within the hope we have in Christ. A space where they can “hush the noise.” The liturgy will be very quiet and simple and allow people to know that “the light shines in the darkness, but the darkness cannot overwhelm it.”
Christmas Carols are very useful for this. Especially those written at a time when infant mortality was high and there was a need to contextualize that within the Christian faith. Once in Royal David’s City is an excellent example of this – and one that will feature in the point of the service where we will actively remember people.
The congregation will be invited to light candles, write down names and fix them to a star. My hope is that in doing this the words of that final verse will come alive:
Not in that poor lowly stable,
With the oxen standing by,
We shall see him: but in heaven,
Set at God’s right hand on high,
Where like stars his children crowned,
All in white shall wait around.
I say this because, as Christians, we do not believe that death is the end. Our faith is fixed firmly in the love of God made known in Christ Jesus who lived, who wept, who died and who was raised to eternal life.
This is the hope that we cling to “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor hight, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”