The Anglican Parish of Mascouche

Christmas can make us more aware of the emptiness and the hurt in our lives: an empty chair at the table, a broken relationship, a painful illness, a lost job or lost opportunity.

Our Blue Christmas service offers space to acknowledge this pain and remember those we particularly miss this time of year.

Come join us tonight, December 23, 2011, at 7pm. Before we welcome the light of the world, let us acknowledge the darker corners of our lives.

A closing prayer from Ted Loder, Guerillas of Grace:

O God of all seasons and senses, grant us the sense of your timing to submit gracefully and rejoice quietly in the turn of the seasons.In this season of short days and long nights,
of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of endings;
children growing, friends leaving, loved ones dying,
grieving over,
grudges over,
blaming over,
excuses over.

O God, grant us a sense of your timing.
In this season of short days and long nights,
of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of beginnings;
that such waitings and endings may be the starting place,
a planting of seeds which bring to birth what is ready to be born—
something right and just and different,
a new song, a deeper relationship, a fuller love—
in the fullness of your time.

O God, grant us the sense of your timing.

(poem found on Daily Episcopalian)