a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle Massachusetts
Sunday December 14th, 2003
[Extemporaneous Introduction]
Last week I mentioned that my favorite holiday movie of all time is Frank Capra's classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life." And I have to confess, I always cry during the final scene of that movie; in fact, I've done it so often now, I'm beginning to feel a little like Pavlov's Dog: Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed embrace, the bell rings, and tears begin to form in the corners of my eyes. It's not as if I don't know what's coming; I must have seen the movie dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. But it still hasn't lost its power to effect me; I still turn on the waterworks every time.
For those of you who have been living on a desert island for the last 50 years, and are therefore not familiar with the story, in this movie Jimmy Stewart plays a character named George Bailey, the good-hearted, self-sacrificing President of the Bailey Building and Loan in the sleepy little town of Bedford Falls. The only other financial institution in town is a bank owned by a greedy, unethical man named Potter, who would like nothing more than to put the Building and Loan out of business. Then one Christmas Eve, in the excitement of season, George's absent-minded Uncle Billy misplaces an $8000 bank deposit. Potter finds it, but keeps it for himself, knowing that the Building and Loan is about to be audited. George discovers the shortfall, and, anticipating scandal and ruin, contemplates suicide in the belief that his life insurance policy makes him worth more dead than alive. So Clarence Oddbody, a rather bumbling Angel Second Class, is sent to earth to earn his wings by showing Jimmy Stewart what life would have been like in the town of "Pottersville" had George Bailey never been born. The climactic final scene, the one that always brings tears to my eyes, is when the citizens of Bedford Falls rise up in support of George, pledging their personal savings in order to make up the $8000 deficit. And maybe it is a corny story: honesty and virtue triumph over greed and opportunism, Clarence earns his wings, and everyone in Bedford Falls lives happily ever after, with the possible exception of Potter the banker (who, so far as I know, still has the eight grand). But corny or not, it still makes me cry, every time; in fact, sometimes just thinking about it is enough to start me sniffling with sentimentality.
A somewhat cynical ministerial colleague of mine once insinuated that the REAL reason I always cry at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life" is because I wish that MY Curch Fund Raising efforts would always be so serendipitously successful. And I thought that was a rather a cheap shot, actually; there I was, all choked up, daubing my red eyes with my shirt sleeve, while my colleague sat comfortably in an overstuffed chair, sipping egg nog and impugning my sincerity. And I honestly don't know why "It's a Wonderful Life" affects me the way it does. I often cry at the end of movies -- the first time I see them -- but after awhile I generally get over it. I no longer weep at the end of "Terms of Endearment," for example, and it’s all I can do now to keep from snickering out loud when Ali McGraw dies at the end of "Love Story." But for some reason, "It’s a Wonderful Life" gets me every time. And maybe it is just the corny plot. Because I WANT very much to believe that virtue always triumphs over greed, that honesty inevitably triumphs over opportunism; that the life of one truly good-hearted, self-sacrificing individual human being really does make a difference in the world, and is appreciated by those who have benefited from that difference. And maybe it’s also because I also want to become a little bit more like George Bailey myself, want to be able to look back at everything I’ve done someday and say "It truly was a Wonderful Life!"
The plain fact of the matter though, is that I'm not really feeling all that keen on Christmas this year. Oh, I'm sure the season will eventually have its moments --Christmas generally surprises me that way at some point -- but on the whole, to my way of thinking, the best thing about Christmas will be December 26th, when the hassle of the holiday will finally over, and there are 364 days before I have to go through it again. My problem is not so much with the holiday itself, as it is with the expectations we set for it. Every year I start out with such good intentions, and every year it seems as though I’m scrambling to catch up: I can’t get my Christmas letter finished on time, or I'm still shopping at the very last minute, and of course I invariably end up feeling a little awkward and embarrassed about receiving presents I don't really want or need. I generally enjoy giving gifts, but I resent trying to find something "perfect" for everyone I know; I would much rather shop thoughtfully for one or two people than worry about forgetting someone who hasn't forgotten me. I’m also not really that keen on red and green; they are OK by themselves, but together they are incredibly garish colors, particularly for socks, or a necktie. Not that my personal favorites, Purple and Crimson, would look any better. But at least no one is going to be disappointed if I decide its not the sort of thing I want to wear to church on Sunday morning.
The one thing I don't really fret that much about is the so-called "commercialization" of Christmas. I find that sort of thing fairly easy to ignore. What I can't ignore is that nagging feeling that somehow I ought to be enjoying myself more than I am, or that it's somehow all my fault if everyone around me isn't full of the holiday spirit, or that I have some sort of serious, pathological personality disorder because I'm saying "Merry Christmas" and feeling "Bah, Humbug." We do expect an awful lot out of ourselves this time of year. It's no wonder that so many of us come to feel disappointed, or even seriously depressed, in this supposed season of Peace and Good Will.
I personally find far more joy in the memories of Christmas Past than I do in the anticipation of Christmas Yet to Come. Memory is thankfully a selective thing, a fact which can in itself make memory a double edged sword. Were those old-fashioned Christmases really as good as we remember them to be? And ironically, the more fondly we recall them, the more pressure we put upon ourselves to make this year's Christmas "the best Christmas ever" -- to out-do years of accumulated recollections in one huge orgy of holiday merriment. Or in some cases, I suppose, to make up for them; for although it is in the nature of things to remember best the good times while gradually forgetting the bad, there are certain times that are just so terrible there's no forgetting them, no matter how hard one tries. Every one of us, I suspect, harbors memories of both kinds: the Christmas we endeavor to recreate, and the one we hope we'll never see again. And both influence our expectations of the current holiday season, the Spirit of Christmas Present.
And then, just beyond our personal holiday ghosts, lurk our cultural Christmas traditions: sleigh bells and mistletoe, stockings hung by the chimney with care, Jack Frost nipping at your nose -- things which make perfect sense if you lived in this part of the world a century ago, but which can be awfully confusing for a small child growing up on a ranch in West Texas, or a condominium in Southern California. Over the Freeway and to the Beach to Grandmother's house we go? Throw another Mesquite Chip on the Barbecue? The first year I lived in Texas I received a card from my brother asking me whether I was going to decorate a cactus for Christmas. But it didn’t take me too long to appreciate the advantages of being able to draw upon Mexican Christmas traditions as well as those of Northern Europe. To my way of thinking, Piñatas filled with candy and candle-lit Luminarios lining the sidewalk beat the heck out of having to shovel a foot of snow just to get to the firewood. I love looking at pictures of a one-horse open sleigh dashing through the snow dragging a freshly-cut Christmas tree back to grandmother’s house, but it’s not really something I feel compelled to do personally.
There is, of course, a symbolic quality to Tradition as well, in that Tradition often points to meanings which lie beyond itself. But traditions also tend to take on meanings all their own, through repetition if nothing else, as our personal experiences intersect with it and are shaped and influenced by it. A child who has grown up with an expectation of a "White Christmas" is going to be disappointed if it doesn't snow, just as children who have always smashed a piñata won't feel as though Christmas is really Christmas unless they go home with a pocket full of candy.
But whatever traditions we chose to observe, the one thing we must never allow ourselves to forget is that this is a religious holiday we celebrate here in the shadow of the winter solstice. And the thing we celebrate is not so much the miraculous birth of a special infant some two millennia ago, as it is the knowledge that, indeed, the life of one good-hearted, self-sacrificing, honest, virtuous, compassionate individual can make a difference, has made a difference, and still continues to make a difference, here in the here and now; and that this difference is appreciated by those of us who have benefited from it, who still believe in Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All. Call him George Bailey of Bedford Falls; call him Y'shua ben Joseph of Nazareth, the Anointed Messiah, the Christ: call it whatever you like, It's a Wonderful Life. It's the life we celebrate at Christmas, the miracle of a new light come into the world.
A living tradition can be a bridge to our appreciation of that miracle, while empty traditions are often barriers to our ever experiencing it for ourselves. And we bring our traditions to life not through the futile attempt to resurrect the Spirit of Christmas Past, but by our openness to life in the here and now, our willingness to let honesty and virtue, good-heartedness and self-sacrifice, live within us, take vitality from our laughter, and courage from our tears.
I used to feel kind of embarrassed about always crying at the end of "It's a Wonderful Life." After all, it's not a very manly thing to do -- you'd think I was still a small child or something. Lately I find that I don't worry about that kind of thing too much, at least not among my friends. Because Christmas truly is a holiday for children, mostly. For those still young enough to believe in Santa, still naive enough to believe that the world can be saved by a child, and for the child in us all who wants to believe in George Bailey, and in Clarence, an Angel Second Class, who is counting on the likes of us to help him earn his wings.
READINGS: Two Christmas poems by Ursula Askham Fanthorpe
BC : AD
This was the moment when Before
Turned into After, and the future’s
Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.
This was the moment when nothing
Happened. Only dull peace
Sprawled boringly over the earth.
This was the moment when even energetic Romans
Could find nothing better to do
Than counting heads in remote provinces.
And this was the moment
When a few farm workers and three
Members of an obscure Persian sect.
Walked haphazard by starlight straight
Into the kingdom of heaven.
What The Donkey Saw
No room in the inn, of course,
And not that much in the stable
What with the shepherds, Magi, Mary,
Joseph, the heavenly host -
Not to mention the baby
Using our manger as a cot.
You couldn’t have squeezed another cherub in
For love or money.
Still, in spite of the overcrowding,
I did my best to make them feel wanted.
I could see the baby and I
Would be going places together.
Sunday, December 14, 2003
Sunday, December 7, 2003
HOME FOR THE HOLY DAYS
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday December 7th, 2003
[extemporaneous introduction]
When I was a kid, growing up in the Bay Area, my family lived in what I suppose might be thought of as a nominally Catholic neighborhood. Most of my playmates had names like Ridley, O'Hare, Callahan; and they were never available to play on Wednesday afternoons because it conflicted with their catechism classes. The smell of fish (or, more often, macaroni and cheese) wafted through the air on Friday evenings; conversations were ripe with references to nuns, confession, and who had given whom their Saint Christopher medal; and the season of Lent was serious business -- there was no candy or ice cream to be found anywhere on our block, except perhaps at my house, making me a pretty popular kid for the six weeks prior to Easter.
Of course, these were the perceptions of a twelve year old child some thirty-five odd years ago. But to my mind then, there were a lot of advantages to being the only Unitarian-Universalist family in a neighborhood such as this. We went to the library on Wednesday afternoons, often ate steak for Friday dinner (since that was when my Dad, who traveled all week for work, was home for dinner), and no strangely-dressed little Priest in a Box was ever privy to my innermost secrets. But every year as the month of December rolled around, I began to wonder whether I might be missing out on something: the Advent wreaths, with their three purple candles and the solitary white one; and the Advent calendars, with those amazing little windows: one window for each day that remained in the countdown to Christmas. I was fascinated by those windows, with their tiny paper shutters; and behind each and every shutter, something different, something special, there in the window: and each window more amazing than the previous one; and oh! -- what a privilege to be the child selected to open the window for the day!
I recall one year, after much urging on my part, my parents finally gave in and brought home an Advent calendar for our family. I could hardly wait! In fact, I didn't wait: as soon as I was alone in the house I opened all of the little shutters on the very first day, and then had to try to close them up again so my parents wouldn't notice (which of course they did) -- but it didn't make any difference: the magic had already gone out of the thing anyway; the anticipation, the mystery, had disappeared.
I suppose, had I actually been reared a Catholic, I would have gone to confession years ago and told the priest in the box about my little indiscretion, and that would have been the end of it. Instead, I recall this memory every Advent season, with shame, and reflect upon my youthful impatience, and the priceless gift it stole from me. As Unitarian Universalists we studied ALL of the winter "Holy Days" in our Sunday School classes this time of year. We learned about Hanukkah, and various other winter "festivals of light”...it really wasn't all that different from being in the public schools, only better and more fun. And yet, there was a strangeness to it all as well: a feeling, almost, of being on the outside looking in. We might overhear adults complain about the "commercialization" of Christmas, but where was the "holiness" to replace the secular holiday? We went to elaborate parties, and were thoroughly "entertained," but would WE have actually offered hospitality to a pregnant woman far from home? Food and football and family obligations; shopping and snowmen and time off from school: the holiday season was basically defined by its possibilities for sloth, avarice and gluttony, rather than by qualities of any particular spiritual or religious significance.
In the secular world, the holiday season begins Thanksgiving Day, with its parades, its traditional football rivalries, and of course the big Department store sales which begin the countdown of "shopping days." And it ends, at last, on New Year's Day, with one final blow-out, more parades and more football games, and a plethora of unkept promises that somehow this next year will be different than the last. But within the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks prior to Christmas are known as the season of Advent, and harbor a far different connotation. The word "Advent" comes from the Latin adventus and means "to" or "toward [the] Coming." Interestingly enough, it's the same Latin root as our English word "adventure," which my Unabridged Webster's defines as "a bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered and the issue staked upon unforeseen events" In the traditional Christian liturgical calendar, the four weeks of Advent are both a time of joyous anticipation for the coming birth of the child Christ, and also a time of solemn preparation for the unforeseen "Second Coming" at the end of Time, when all the world shall be judged. In the Medieval Church, Advent was observed with the same strict penitence as Lent, and even today Roman Catholicism discourages the solemnization of marriage during this period. It's this mythic tension between the physical presence of the deity here in this world, in the innocent form of an infant child; and the ultimate sovereignty of Divine Creation and Judgment, which gives this season its peculiar ethos: We look toward the Coming of we know not what, in anticipation and fear of a transformation for which we can never be fully ready or prepared.
In her poem "Feast Days," found in her collection Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Annie Dillard writes:
Let me mention
one or two things about Christmas.
Of course you've all heard
that the animals talk
at midnight:
a particular elk, for instance,
kneeling at night to drink,
leaning tall to pull leaves
with his soft lips,
says, alleluia.
That the soil and fresh-water lakes
also rejoice,
as do products
such as sweaters
(nor are plastics excluded
from grace),
is less well known.
Further:
the reason
for some silly-looking fishes,
for the bizarre mating
of certain adult insects,
or the sprouting, say,
in a snow tire
of a Rocky Mountain grass,
is that the universal
loves the particular,
that freedom loves to live
and live flesh full,
intricate,
and in detail.
God empties himself
into the earth like a cloud.
God takes the substance, contours
of a man, and keeps them,
dying, rising, walking,
and still walking
wherever there is motion.
My very favorite holiday movie of all time is still Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life," in which Jimmy Stewart plays a character by the name of George Bailey, who sacrifices his own ambitions of a college education and world travel in order to remain in the tiny town of Bedford Falls and manage the Bailey Building and Loan following the untimely death of his father. At the critical turning point of the film, as George is about to commit suicide by leaping from a bridge, he is given an opportunity, by a rather amusing Angel Second Class named Clarence, to see what this sleepy little town would have been like had George Bailey never been born. All the lives he had touched, all the people he had helped, all of the good that he had done, suddenly become conspicuous through their absence -- and George comes to see that despite the difficulties, despite the frustration, despite the disappointment and even the despair, he truly did have a Wonderful Life.
Not many of us are given this kind of opportunity: to open up a little window and see the effect of our lives upon the world, the multitude of ways in which that tiny spark of the divine within us all exerts its influence for the good on those around us. A little piece of God in human form, "dying, rising, walking, and still walking wherever there is motion." No doubt we see it first more easily in others than we do within ourselves. But this is the message of the Advent season: the coming of light into the world, the coming of goodness into the world, the opening of a shuttered window, which allows us a glimpse our own potential divinity, reflected in the face of an innocent child; yet which also calls us simultaneously to accountability for that gift in the instant that it is revealed to us. Will you chose a wonderful life? Or will you hide your lamp under a bushel, preferring to curse the darkness than to light a single candle?
Many Unitarian Universalists, I find, are uncomfortable with the mythic dimensions of religious meaning. We like the tangible, the pragmatic, the rational; all this heavy-handed symbolism leaves us feeling a little queasy in the stomach. We scoff at the notion of an infant God, a virgin birth, of angels, and astrologers who left their homes and followed a star in the sky to a distant land. We prefer to speak of the coincidence between the Christmas season and the winter solstice, trace the evolution of the holiday and identify its cross-cultural parallels; we want to throw open all the windows at once and shine the light of reason into every nook and cranny. All too often we seem to forget that much of the meaning is in the waiting, the preparing, the anticipation — that as we allow the story to unfold at its own speed, as we participate in it in "mythic time," other levels of meaning are revealed to us which are not readily comprehensible to the analytical mind.
We're always in such a hurry! We have shopping to do and packages to wrap, cards to write, meals to cook — at times it seems as though we'll never get caught up. Yet in our haste to get everything under control the real opportunities often pass us by; or rather, are quickly left behind in the whirlwind of activity to get it all done. Jesus built furniture in Nazareth for thirty years before he did anything truly worthy of remembrance! Insight particularly is not always the product of a linear process; more often our learning tends to be circular, as we return again to that which initially sparked our curiosity, and discover that we finally understand it. Time is meaningless when it comes to Truth. Let the story speak to you in its own voice, in its own language, on its own terms, and eventually the message, in its own good time, will become crystal-clear.
Christmas is an invitation to participate in a miracle: a miracle of change, of growth, of renewal and transformation... but mostly a miracle of possibility and hope, the promise of a thing rather than the thing itself. It's the drama of a child born in a stable to a very special destiny, and the anticipation of that destiny by those who may never live to see its fulfillment, but who nevertheless take the time to respond to the call for preparation. Is this the child who has been born king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, sleeping in a manger -- a feed trough! -- in the midst of all these animals? And this is the mother, this naive teenaged girl, who swears she's never been with a man? From unlikely origins comes the King of Kings, the Prince of Peace, to preach the good news that we, too, are God's children, inheritors of a special destiny regardless of our birth or background.
The story of Advent is the story of the Adventure of Life: that "bold undertaking in which hazards are to be encountered, and the issue staked upon unforeseen events." It is a lesson in learning to wait upon the unknown; a lesson in the suspense of disbelief and the confidence of hope, of patient trust in the process of living between the margins of our accidental birth and our inevitable mortality. It teaches us to open the shutters one window at a time, and fully savor the vision which we find there: a promise, a potential yet to be realized, a helpless child who will someday become a most remarkable adult, and reveal to the world an authentic glimpse of the divine.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
