Cathedral’s Blue Christmas Service Offers Space for ConnectionJanuary 2, 2025 • Marti Pieper  • DIOCESAN FAMILY • LEADERSHIP • REACHING OUT

(L) Canon Patricia lifts the chalice high during the Cathedral’s Blue Christmas Eucharist. (R) Canon Gordon Sims, deacon, assists as Canon Patricia burns cards denoting each Blue Christmas service participant’s loss. | Photos: Michael J. Orlando

The Rev. Canon Patricia Orlando, canon priest for spiritual formation and pastoral care at the Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, knows about pain. Not only has she lost both of her parents in recent years, but like many of us, she has also experienced other deep losses. But it was not her grief that drove her to create the Cathedral’s first annual Blue Christmas service in 2023, followed by a second Blue Christmas event on Dec. 19, 2024.

Instead, her desire to minister in this way grew out of her previous position as a hospice chaplain, where the Holy Spirit gave her a sudden insight after an encounter with a woman grieving the coming loss of her estranged father. As the daughter cried and screamed, Orlando listened quietly, allowing her to process her pain.

Canon Patricia prays during the Blue Christmas service. | Photo: Michael J. Orlando

“We need to be a space for people to take their pain and give it to God,” she said. “That’s the impetus: giving the space for that, for someone to be able to express their grief, whether they express it in screaming, or they express it in tears or they express it in silence, whatever it is – but not to have to comment on it or try to make it better,” she said.

That focus was reflected in St. Luke’s invitation to the Blue Christmas event:

For many people, Advent and Christmas bring thoughts of good times with family, friends, and loved ones. We are told this is the “most wonderful time of the year.” But for those who are experiencing or have experienced loss, grief, or hardship, the festive season can be particularly painful and isolating. The Cathedral Church of St. Luke is offering a service tradition where those of us in the community who find the holiday season painful or difficult are offered a space for prayerful care and compassion.

 
“We are grief deficient in America,” Orlando said. “We don’t know how to grieve. We’re afraid of it; we think that it shouldn’t be, somehow. And some people have experienced grief in a way where they have allowed others to shut it off, and this service could open it up for them.”

The grief addressed in the service doesn’t have to involve death, she explained. “There are many types of losses. It could be the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship, anything someone is grieving.”

Orlando planned the service to allow appropriate time for liturgy, reflection and prayer. “I do an invitation, a welcome and invitation at the beginning of the service,” she said. “When they come in, we give them empty cards, and I ask them to write their loss on a card and put it into the collection plate. And then we bring that plate full of loss and put it on the altar, and I cense it [perfuming it with the smoke of aromatic incense].

The cards denoting each loss are offered in sacrifice to God. Photo: Michael J. Orlando

The celebration of the Eucharist comes next, followed by an invitation to follow Orlando in silence out the back door of the sanctuary to the courtyard. With accompaniment by Cathedral musicians, she silently reads each statement of loss, then lights it before dropping it into a fire pot, offering it to God as a sacrifice.

The Blue Christmas service was not only well attended but “very healing for people,” she said. More than 50 came in 2023, with approximately 60 attending in 2024. “One woman didn’t want to come to the service last year because she thought it was going to be sad,” Orlando said. “She had lost her husband. But she came anyway, and this year, she came to me and said, ‘I need extra flyers because I have friends I want to invite. I know they’ll benefit from this.'”

In this way, the service is an outreach event, she explained. “It’s not ecumenical, so it’s not watered down, but it is gospel liturgy that offers living hope, and it’s open to our neighbors, to people who aren’t churched as well as for those who are churched.”

Orlando has been reading “Lead From the Heart” by Mark C. Crowley and said the Blue Christmas service is an example of heart-centered ministry. Of the churches who let the Episcopal Diocese of Central Florida know of their plans, St. Gabriel’s, Titusville; St. Mary of the Angels, Orlando; and St. Michael’s, Orlando, also offered Blue Christmas services this past December, and Orlando hopes to see this type of ministry grow. “I would hope that leaders would begin to discover the heart of people and begin to minister in that way, and not just through cognition,” she said. “Cognition is a part of our process, but it certainly is not everything.

“A lot of people believe that feelings are out of control, and we need to control the feelings,” she said. “Well, I would disagree. I would say our feelings of grief are a yearning for connection. People possess a deep need for connectedness. And by creating a Blue Christmas service, we give space for connection, a deep connection that people both within and outside the church yearn for and need in order to grow spiritually.”