Today marks the winter solstice, the day on which the North Pole tips furthest away from the sun as if to peer over the edge into the dark and see how far down it is. This curious act gives those of us in the Northern Hemisphere the fewest hours of daylight we’ll get all year; it also gives us our longest night. After another year in which we’ve run out of places to stuff all of our grief, those stretching hours of darkness seem like a good time to release our suffering, to openly examine it, to call our doubt holy.
Many churches encourage it, offering “Blue Christmas” services on or around Dec. 21 as space for those hurting, questioning, and remembering. Some, as beautifully depicted in Sojourners’ short video from 2017, draw on desert imagery — placing lighted candles in the sand to recall both the reality of death and the hope that “God can, in fact, create things as wonderful as our loved ones that we’ve had to let go, of out of dust.”
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