Christmas Eve Candle Light Service with Danny

 

 

Dunham Road Unitarian Chapel, Altrincham will be hosting our Christmas Eve Candle Light Service.

 

It can be enjoyed live or on Zoom ID 84190828195 no password required. It is open to all regardless of belief, doubt and other. Come and join in this universal celebration. Whether you are attending in person or watching on zoom you are asked to bring a candle or lantern and something to light it with. a light to symbolise the love waiting to be born in the mangers of our hearts.

 

Following the service folk are invited to come and join us outside to sing carols.

Zoom ID 84190828195 no password required.

 

All are most welcome…Come as you are, exactly as you are…but do not expect to leave in exactly the same condition…

The following is an extract from the service.

 

We need Christmas more than ever this year. We need its love and its joy, but as we do so we must acknowledge the darkness and the troubles that we all live with. Yes, there is new hope, but there is true suffering and fear abound too, we must not forget this. We must not pretend otherwise.

 

Christmas begins at Midnight, in the middle of the night and the darkest night, in the darkest days. These celebrations of light, predate the Christmas mythos. We have celebrated the coming of light, in the dark of winter for millenniums. The mythos at the heart of Christmas began before the nativity. Yet we need to hear this story. Why? Well perhaps because this is the greatest telling of this universal mythos, the most compelling. It speaks just as powerfully today.

 

Christmas begins at midnight. Remember it was in the lonely midnight, at the darkest moment of the night, that the shepherds heard the angels sing; remember that the wise men were guided by the star in the night sky and not the sun. That light could only shine in the darkness, or at least it could only stand out then. It is always in the dark that faith is born. It is in the dark that we light our lanterns and candles; it is in the dark that we begin to sing our songs and we tell our tales of hope and courage and in so doing we encourage one another to keep on. A light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it and so we light our beacons of hope in the bleak mid winter.