A congregation of the United Church of Canada
Hollywood Christmas
“Coming to a theatre near you…”
The Christmas season always lays on an unreasonable and idealized set of images. We watch all the Christmas movies, and specials, and we love them, yet we come away with a vision of Christmas that can only exist in the rarified dreaming of Hollywood – with seemingly perfect families who all get along swimmingly. Hollywood Christmases all miraculously work out in the end, and family squabbles are seamlessly settled, and unlikely romances blossom, and everyone gets along. (Sh’yeah, right!)
Is your Christmas this year shaping up to be a ‘real’ Christmas, or are you expecting a ‘Hollywood’ Christmas? I don’t know about your family, but while my extended family generally get along, it never seems to work out that ‘Hallmark’ way. We’re way too quirky a family for that. (So is yours!)
Family gatherings tend to be messy – at times very messy – with strange and often charged interpersonal challenges because of the vast variety of family quirks that always seem amplified at such times. Let’s face it, none of our families will likely reproduce any cinematically perfect Christmas movie plots. Real people’s lives tend not to work that way.
As a ‘church family’ we’re not immune to such struggles either, but hopefully we have some spiritual insight to help us navigate them. Most obviously, we have our personal faith, and we have one another. We have a church family that would move heaven and earth to provide care and comfort for one another. We have quiet worship gatherings like our Lighting the Darkness service on Friday December 22nd at 5:00 pm where we can acknowledge how we are doing this season and be comforted by God’s Presence, and by one another’s support. And we can continue to hold the sacred story of how God’s love was specially incarnated in the life of an infant all those years ago, and how that same love is incarnated in each and every one of us – waiting to be born into the world again and again.
The care, comfort, and support of a loving church family doesn’t get expressed in very many holiday movies. But there are some. My favourite is the remake of “The Preacher’s Wife” (which also features the divine singing of Whitney Houston). My only quibble with it is that they portray the pastor as doing all the heavy lifting of the care and comfort part. My real life experience in church tells me that it’s the congregation that really does it, and does it joyfully. I don’t think “A Faith United Christmas” will be coming to a theatre near you anytime soon – but who needs movies when the real thing is so much better?