My Weekly Word is, actually, very simple this time around: It’s that I hope you’ll join us for our Longest Night worship service on Sunday afternoon at 4:00. Often it’s a tiny service, in a small chapel. A few recently bereaved people or families will come. It can get cast as a gloomy, sad time that’s not for most of us who are mostly feeling merry in this lead-up to Christmas Day.
This year we’ll gather in the sanctuary, where there’s more room. Room for the recently bereaved, yes. And room for the rest of us—who have almost certainly faced other kinds of darkness this year. That diagnosis. That broken relationship, or more than one, that might be looming as we face into a gathering with—or without—that person we have loved. That change in things we used to take for granted, in our bodies, say, or our household, our church, or the places we frequent. That angst stoked by the news for many this year, be it political, economic, technological, climatic, or otherwise.
Who among us doesn’t fit that description? Which is to say, who among us is not grieving in some way?
You might resist that word, “grief.” But, truly, grief is part of every one of the experiences I mentioned above. As Derek Penwell put it this week on Substack: “Grief is my soul refusing to make peace with what should never be normal.”1
What I love about a Longest Night service is that it helps us connect the joy and gifts of Christmas to these parts of our lives that might otherwise feel too dark, or impossible to acknowledge, in the midst of merriment and twinkly lights.
I’ve had more than the usual share of reasons this year to think about darkness. In March my husband was diagnosed with Stage IV pancreatic cancer. His biweekly chemotherapy treatments ever since have plunged him into an increasingly dim interlude of two days, then three, in ways that now shade further into the time between.
I find myself literally missing him until, three or four days after chemo, there he is again, thankfully, and we return to something close to normalcy, to both our relief.
It has surprised us that all this dark has been accompanied by some important gifts: A clarity about the time we do have. An intentionality about our care for one another. A leaning into the bigger things we know to be true: God, life, love, commitment. Wonder.
Even peace which is, admittedly, often elusive. But we’ve both felt it—that when you pull back the lens and look from a broader view there is, indeed, a place of peace out there that does, indeed, pass understanding.
When we gather on the shortest day, the winter solstice, for our Longest Night worship service, we name both the darkness and that bigger picture in which there can be—there truly are—peace, and hope, and a future. As Derek Penwell says of Advent as a whole:
Advent doesn’t ask us to pretend everything’s all right when everybody knows it’s not. Instead, it asks us to remember where life comes from and where it’s headed.
He goes on:
Hope that hasn’t grieved is brittle. It breaks when the truth has hard edges and sharp corners. But hope that’s survived grief, that’s laid its expectations in the cold, damp ground and wept over them, has been transformed into something sturdier. It doesn’t require certainty. Because after grief, hope knows how to live and love, without guarantees…. Hope is embracing a future you may not live to see.
On the Longest Night, we’ll acknowledge that, even in the midst of uncertainty, we trust God. We’ll recall that, no matter how hard things are, we face them better together.
Do come.
I should acknowledge that we’ll only be onsite for this service; it won’t be livestreamed. If you can’t be here in person but would like to join in “virtually,” I would be glad to send you a copy of the bulletin—which contains most of the words we’ll share that evening. Wherever you are, perhaps you can make some space, light a candle, and join that great cloud of witnesses, living and long gone, who hold the sadness, peace, hope, and light for us all.
1Derek Penwell, in his Heretic Adjacent blog entry for 12/17/2025, titled “Grief Is Proof You Haven’t Given Up.” All of the quotations in this piece come from this blog entry. Emphasis in original.
