Christmas: Paring Back

At the beginning of the Christmas Eve service the priest walked around the altar waving the thurible in a pendulum motion, and the smell of incense permeated the air. Many "low" Episcopal churches honor their Catholic origins during the highest-ranking liturgical days like Easter and Christmas.

The local church consolidated the afternoon family, midnight Christmas Eve, and morning Christmas Day services into one.

The reasons are connected: the church has chosen to reduce the number of in-person gatherings; volunteers are down; and attendance has fallen. We will be lucky to have normal attendance on Sunday, the day after Christmas, so perhaps two services this week are enough. Like other areas of life, we are paring back to essentials.

The Christ Child was not the Messiah that the Jews were expecting. Our own expectations have similarly been upended: two years ago we did not anticipate that we would fear meeting with friends and strangers, traveling, or even just going to school and work.

Not as mighty as we thought we were, our prayers float up to heaven on clouds of incense, trusting that there is Someone who is listening.