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DOWNLOADING DECEMBER

A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
December 7, 2003

Dark of winter, soft and still,
Your quiet calm surrounds me…
      (-- “Dark of Winter,” hymn 550)

“Dark of Winter” is a lovely song. The author, Shelley Jackson Denham, creates a peaceful image of winter in our minds, of darkness, of calm, of love eternal--sort of a solstice version of “Silent Night.” It is out of such gentle darkness that the soul can both sing and hear something eternal that brings love and comfort and peace.

That is the aspiration of these December holidays, this “Season of Light,” as it has been called. Contrary to the image of the song, though, people long ago were wary of the long hours of darkness that is winter, and they created celebrations to bring more light into home and community. Pagans built bonfires on the hillsides on the winter solstice in the hope of enticing the sun to return. The Druids kept a Yule log burning for twelve days so that darkness (and evil spirits) could not overcome the power of light. Today, we decorate our homes with colorful strings of lights that turn the city into a fairy land.

Hanukkah, too, is a holiday based on light, called the “Feast of Lights,” and is built upon a 2200 year-old story of the Jews retaking the Temple of Jerusalem from the Syrians and finding only enough sacred oil to last eight days, thus the eight candles on the menorah, with the ninth being the “servant light.” The 2000 year-old story of the birth of Jesus involves an image of light in the form of a star whose shining brightness heralds the great event. Outside of our Judeo-Christian heritage, there are other celebrations of light near this season, one being Divali, the four-day Hindu New Year festival. Divali means “festival of light.”

Christmas traditions came out of a mix of the pagan, Roman and Jewish traditions. Christmas as the birth of Jesus wasn’t even established until around the fifth century, and the church tried to encourage worshippers to shift their focus from concern with the sun’s light in the dark of winter to an acceptance of Christ as the Light of the World. The pagan traditions, since they could not be eradicated, were incorporated into the Christmas festivities over the centuries. The Puritans in England, recognizing this, banned Christmas in 1647, and the Pilgrims in America did likewise in 1659, even instituting a fine of five schillings for observing it. These efforts didn’t last, and the riots that ensued, especially in England, were so common that people thought the madness was part of the Christmas celebrations.

From quiet darkness to festive lights, this holiday time is filled with contradiction and, in many cases, a little madness. As the holidays approach, anxieties tend to rise, and instead of creating or finding quiet time, people are confronted with the madness of traffic, of people packing the malls, of too much noise and lights and sounds. I call it the overdose effect. Our holidays have become overrun with demands and abundance and the problems of a population which turns out all at the same time, making every hour of every day a rush hour of madness. Then people begin to confuse the meaning of the holidays with the problems of over-population and overly high expectations. Bah Humbug enters the picture!

There was an article in the Arizona Daily Star newspaper yesterday morning whose front page attention-catching title was “A Whole Country Says ‘Humbug!’” They were blaming the attitude on the warm weather and melting ski runs, but the article said that labor unions in Austria were trying to pressure stores to stop “the incessant playing of carols, denouncing the practice as ‘psychological terrorism’ that grates the ears of shop employees.” They wrote about the exact problem Curtiss and I have after he has to listen to carols on Muzak every day at Walgreens all month. The article says, “It gets to the point where on Christmas Eve, when they’re at home with their families, they can’t stand ‘Silent Night’ or ‘Jingle Bells’ one more time.” (Dec. 6, 2003, p. A20)

Too much of anything, as they say, is not a good thing. Everyone needs to approach the holidays in a way that fits their tolerance and life-style and desires. Home becomes a refuge for people who work in stores all day. Inundated with Holiday Cheer at work, they don’t want the madness to invade their homes, and need quiet and calm. Those who live in quiet and work in less obnoxious holiday environments may love to decorate their homes, play carols and even dare to walk the mad malls in pure enjoyment of the colorful liveliness that is also part of this season. The right way to approach the holidays is the way that meets your individual and family needs and desires, while trying to keep in your hearts the deeper meanings of the season.

That’s a catch for many people, as well. What is the meaning of the season, and how does it relate with our daily lives? It is almost as if we have to get a special human software program and download December in order to get through the month. One of the bigger challenges I’ve seen people face every year is shifting from our rational, modern life into a time of tradition, myth, and the mystical. How do we make sense of the seeming contradictions of this “Season of Light?”

I chose Peg Gooding’s poem “Why Not A Star?” as our reading today because it exemplifies this struggle many of us have. Peg was my Religious Education Director growing up in the First UU Church of Phoenix, and she influenced me greatly in ways I’m sure I’m unaware. She died this year, so I’m glad to remember her by sharing her words each Christmas, as I usually do. “Why not a star?” She asks.

They told me that when Jesus was born a star appeared in the heavens above the place where the young child lay.
When I was very young I had no trouble believing wondrous things; I believed in the star…
They told me a super nova appeared in the heavens in its dying burst of fire.
When I was older and believed in science and reason I believed the story of the star explained.
But I found I was unwilling to give up the star, fitting symbol for the birth of one whose uncommon life has been long remembered…  
      (-- #621, Singing The Living Tradition)

We are poets and we are rationalists. We are mystics and humanists, atheists and theists. Many of us flow back and forth and around amongst all of these. I think of those who say, “But there was no virgin birth in a manger with shepherds abiding in the night!” And I think of the reader of a poem, who doesn’t get it and says, “What is this ‘voice of love eternal’? How can a soul sing? What is a soul, anyway?” The rationalist wars with the poet, demanding explanations for metaphors and images and symbols which transcend such a material grasp. And beneath this resistance to metaphor may lie a history of abuse by religious “authorities” who claimed literal truth for mythical, mystical messages.

Religious dogma and literalism are continually being challenged by science which is continually changing our understanding of the universe and ourselves. It was just a few years ago that renowned theologian Matthew Fox wrote about the universal religious symbolism of light in his wonderful book, One River, Many Wells. At one point, he says that “Light is far more prevalent in the universe than is matter--indeed, for every molecule of matter there are one billion particles of light!” (p. 52) Now we have one of the greatest discoveries this year claiming the opposite. According to Discover magazine, a new truth has been revealed: “Unseen elements, collectively called dark matter and dark energy, account for roughly 96 percent of the mass of the universe. Stars are the extreme minority, making up just 0.4 percent of the total.” (December 2003, p. 42)

What meaning now do the words of the song have: “Darkness, when my fears arise, let your peace flow through me”? There is a new potential metaphor for the dark, or as Discover quoted The Little Prince, “The essential is invisible to the eyes.”

The star may have been a supernova, and it may not even have existed. People said Troy didn’t exist before it was uncovered. There is much in history which cannot be proven, and much which has been disproven, so we are faced with deciding how we will enter this Season of Light: with disillusion or with an embrace of the illusion. Either way, the power of tradition and sacred space and time cannot be denied. We will be transported anyway, when the carols are sung and the candles lit, when the flickering firelight reaches our eyes and the smell of peppermint and pine lends its share of memories. When the colored lights capture us, we will know this is a special season, in spite of whether any story was ever true, ever really happened in history. These stories are our heritage and live in our psyches and we cannot escape their transformative power.

These are the poetics of our lives. This Season of Light is a sacred time which ties us in story and tradition to our ancestors’ hopes and dreams for the world. This Season is an experience of the power of myth and sacred space to transform us and remind us of what is important: children being born as the hope of the world, the importance of lending a hand to those who are wanting, the delight and care shown in gifts given with love, families gathered and stories shared.

We need to seize the sacred times that present themselves and make the most of them. Last Christmas Eve I was on sabbatical and didn’t have to prepare the service, so what should happen but that it snow on Christmas Eve. In Tucson!! I dropped everything, packed my daughter Kat and her friend Morgan into the car, and drove up to the little town of Oracle to throw snow balls at each other and eat snow cones. It was a miracle it snowed in Tucson, a miracle it snowed on Christmas Eve in Tucson, a miracle I didn’t have to work, and a miracle that we could share such a miracle with each other.

We both respond to and create our own sacred spaces and times to live on into the future in cherished memory. Will you download December in the same old way, or create some fundamental changes to how you approach and respond to the holidays? Will you let in the light, and still cherish the dark? Will you find a metaphor that is meaningful for you? Will you sing a song of love eternal in the quiet, calm of winter’s night?

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson