A Reason to Go On

“It just shows you what people will endure when there’s a reason to go on.”

Since 2014, FireCloud has written and produced an annual Christmas Nativity in St Margaret’s Church, Clydebank.

This nativity always brings together our wide community of people who each contribute their gifts to this contemporary re-telling of the Christmas story. Together we create an evening filled with drama, music, light and song that celebrates the remarkable story of how Jesus entered our world.

In 2020, things were different. We have had a year without song. Our musical groups were not able to meet, to sing together, to harmonise or to hug. For people everywhere, who relied so much on love and music, 2020 was a difficult year. Then came the Omicron wave at Christmas 2021.

But…we couldn’t let our FireCloud Christmas tradition disappear, so we made a different kind of Nativity to share for the past two years. It is a patchwork of music recordings dug out from our archives, taken at different moments over the years from our wonderful community of local singers, actors and musicians. We stitched music and voices together to make something that still rings out with hope at Christmas.

Below is our FireCloud Nativity: ‘A Reason to Go On’. It’s an audio recording with very simple graphics. Listen to it on the best speakers you have, perhaps in the glow of Christmas lights or a simple candle. Gather the family or make a cuppa, or whatever settles you in for a good story. It lasts around 35 minutes and you’ll encounter all the Nativity characters along the way. Each of them has some encouragement for the road in this challenging time.

Wishing you much love and peace this Christmas,

From all of us at FireCloud xxx

A few notes

This is an original script by FireCloud © 2020. It was written by Suzanne Green; Tony Coultas kindly contributed ‘The Angel’ and Moya Keeney helped with early script development.
Five wonderful friends voiced the spoken narrations: Fiona Callan (Introduction), Paul McHugh (Joseph and King), Moya Keeney (Shepherd and Mary), Tamara Sanchez Kapostasy (Angel and Star) and James McAnerney (Innkeeper)
Marc Keenan contributed the character illustrations
Ian Green produced and edited the audio/visual content
The music is performed here by our wonderful community of local singers and musicians:
- The Angel Gabriel (Suzanne Green, Sam Begbie)
- Fall on Me (Sam Begbie, Rois Keeney)
- Your Labour is Not in Vain (Kirstie and Thomas McCabe)
- O Little Town of Bethlehem and Thina Simunye – ‘We are together’ (Gracefull: Aimee Coultas, Mairi Therese Deighan, Miriam Doherty, Kirstie McCabe and Suzanne Green)
- Prepare the Way (Sam Begbie)
- Jesus Draw Me Ever Nearer (Big Happy Noise Choir)

All musical copyright belongs to the artists who wrote and sang the original music that inspired us so much:
- The Angel Gabriel – Traditional Basque Carol translated by Baring-Gould
- Fall on Me – Written by Ian Axel, Chad Vaccarino, Fortunato Zampaglione and Matteo Bocelli
- Your Labour is Not in Vain by The Porter’s Gate Worship Project feat. Paul Zach from the album Work Songs
- O Little Town of Bethlehem – H. Walford Davies, words by Philips Brooks
- Thina Simunye – Children of Agape Choir
- Prepare the Way – Charlie Hall
- Jesus Draw Me Ever Nearer – Keith Getty and Margaret Ellen Becker

This is not a proper studio recording but something we stitched together from old recordings; forgive us any hitches or glitches in the sound.

Want more of this?

If you like the sound of this, FireCloud creates faith formation and learning experiences for schools and parishes throughout the year. Drop us a line to find out more hello@fire-cloud.org.

Help us do more

We offer this without charge, in the context of COVID19, hoping it might be inspire some Christmas joy. If you’d like to donate to FireCloud to help us financially through this difficult time, then we’d appreciate it greatly.

Regardless, we’d love if you would say a prayer for us!

Thank you!