Blue Christmas

Rev. Meg Barnhouse

December 23, 2012

We will have merry holiday celebrations this year. We had a wonderful pageant last Sunday, and afterwards we had a feast. Tomorrow night we will have our traditional Lessons and Carols service with candlelight and Silent Night. This morning we are going to talk about another reality of this season: the blues. This is a hard time for some among us. Maybe you are one of those. The whole world is celebrating, and you are terrified because you can’t make the house payment, or you have had to let your insurance lapse. People are glowing in green and gold and you have lost someone close to you this year. This is the first Christmas without them. You are feeling the loss keenly.

Maybe you are alone in the world. Your family is gone, or they are toxic to you, and the world is papered in snapshots of families eating together, laughing and watching movies and going over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house. You feel like a motherless child.

You might look around you and see people who look like they have plenty of money, lots of friends, a good love life, radiant health and all their thoughts in order. You are comparing your insides to other people’s outsides, and that is a no-win situation. It’s hard to keep that in mind, though, as you feel tendrils of shame invading your spirit.

We are having a Blue Christmas service this morning to give ourselves a place to recognize this element of the holidays together. The shadow side of all the good cheer can get to us, and it can make confusion and heartbreak more keenly felt. If your marriage is in trouble, or if you or your parents or kids are going through a divorce, the “empty chair syndrome” can make everyone miserable. Everything is different this year. It’s harder, it’s easier, but it’s different. If you are in any of these hard situations, you’re probably having a hard year this year. Your feelings are reasonable and appropriate. You can’t stick the grief and confusion into a little closet for the duration of the season. It’s good to have a time when you can feel its weight and sorrow. Perhaps that will make room for some of the more joyous feelings too. It’s not all or nothing. How do we take care of ourselves and those we love when the season is a hard one?

They say “lower your expectations,” but I don’t like that. It sounds like we’re going to have something that’s not as good. I would say “lighten your expectations.” Having a house that’s decorated to the nines, saddling your family with debt so everyone can have what they think they want, cooking until you are grumpy, snapping at your family members because you are so stressed by giving them the Christmas they want — well, it’s not a “higher” realm in my book.

This is the celebration of the return of the light. Light means love and truth. Those things make room for sorrow.

Look for little things to enjoy. Before the house is decorated, before the presents are bought and wrapped and sent, it’s okay to breathe in the air of a day like today. Just breathe in and breathe out. Wear brown if you want to. Yellow. Watch people do the good cheer rituals as if you were an anthropologist studying the customs of a strange tribe. Look how they totter on ladders to put the icicle lights on their houses. Look how they run from one store to the next buying plastic things. Look how they make mountains of food to eat with people they ordinarily don’t get along with that well. Before you get too smugly above it all, though, remember that you may be doing exactly what they are doing in another year and that it will feel just right.

Instead of carols, listen to the music that speaks to your soul. Hang out with friends. Let yourself be sad that you are going through a hard time this year. Let your friends be happy. It takes a spiritual discipline sometimes, a maturity, to be glad for other people’s good lives. You can smile at them and in the spirit of truth, say “I’m so glad things are going well for you and your family.” Or you could take a sarcastic tone and say “I’m glad things are going well for you and your family,” and then they would have to take care of you for a few minutes, but that’s not quite as mature.

Notice your habits of attention. Are you making yourself worse by focusing on the contrast between your inner state and the one everyone else looks to be in? Are you like someone who has a sore tooth and keeps moving it with their tongue just to make sure it still is hurting? Gently shift your focus to something else. I’m not saying cover up your blues. I’m just reminding you they are not all there is to you.

Sometimes just acknowledging that this is a hard time of year can help. When you make room for the truth of what you are dealing with, the clamps come off of your heart and movement can occur.

More practically, or maybe I should say more biologically, if you are feeling depressed and sad you should lay off alcohol and recreational drugs. They cause depression to get worse. Exercise and eat well. Nutrasweet has been shown to lower your serotonin levels. That is a body chemical that helps with a feeling of well-being. Try to surround yourself with people who are good for you. Don’t force yourself to be around the awful people this year.

Usually your instincts will kick in and your spirit will try to make itself well again.

One friend, the year her husband died, was so mad about Christmas and all the expected good cheer that she painted the front door of her house yellow. Then she went shopping for the worst looking tree she could find. Finally she found one – a scrawny white number flocked with diseased-looking fake snow. She found some khaki colored balls to hang on it and stuck it on a table in the living room. Her intention had been to sneer at it every time she walked past, but she found herself feeling kind of sorry for it. Then affectionate toward it. They bonded, my friend and that ugly tree. It looked like she felt, and they were companions in sorrow.

If you are not the sad one, but if it is someone you love, here are some things to do. Keep in mind that this is a hard time for them. Listen with compassion if they want to talk. YOU DON”T HAVE TO FIX IT. Don’t try to cheer them up, to change their inner weather. You don’t have to be sad just because they are sad. It’s fair to be happy next to someone who is not. It’s not fair to demand that they be happy too. That’s all. Let’s be easy with one another at this time of year. Let’s be grateful that we have hearts that are big enough to feel loss, to feel complicated combinations of happy and sad, cheery and mad. A friend of mine was telling his mentor that he was getting a divorce. The old man is very hard of hearing, so my friend had to shout several times “I’m — getting – a – divorce!” Finally his mentor, a man with ninety years of living behind him, held his hands up in the air, and with a gentle smile and merry eyes, said “Life.”

Thank you for coming here this morning as we all move through life together. Merry Christmas, or —whatever.

Podcasts of sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776