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Heading into the Darkby the Rev. Kerry MuellerService at UUCSS on December 12, 1999
Opening Words#542 Opening Hymn#51 "Lady of the Seasons' Laughter" The Lighting of the Chalice and a Uniting StatementAs we gather here for worship, Song of ExaltationFrom all that dwell below the skies Welcome and AnnouncementsStory for All Ages, presented by Natalie FenimoreParting Song for Children #413Offertory#673 Freely have we received of gifts that minister to our needs of body and spirit. Gladly we bring to our church ad its wide concerns a portion of that bounty. Sharing of Joys and SorrowsAt this time in our service we take a few moments to share what is in our hearts and on our minds. If there is an event in your life, or the life of the world, which moves you this morning to joy or sorrow hope or gratitude, I invite you to come forward and share a few words with us and move a stone into the water, letting the ripples remind us that everything that touches one of us touches all of us. If it is better for you, we will bring the microphone to you. [Sharing] Let us remember to hold in our hearts the joys and sorrows of the whole company of humanity, whether they are spoken and shared or silent and solitary. Meditation with Silence and With MusicLet us share now a few moments of silence. And in the silence may we listen for the deepest, stillest voice of holiness within. [1 full minute] Amen Reading #534 Gloria! Ask me if I have foundSpecial Music -- get from Susan Marie StedmanSermonHeading into the Darkby the Rev. Kerry Mueller My heart always lifts in the fall when the colors begin to change. But somehow this year seemed special. I don't know if it was the long drought which depressed the summer landscape and delayed the autumnal change, or whether the leaves really were more beautiful this year, whether I just was paying more attention than usual. I am no fanatic leaf peeper. I didn't travel to New England for a weekend of foliage gazing from a charming little bed and breakfast in Newfane, Vermont. I noticed these colors right here on my frequent trips up and down I95 and 29 on my way to and from church and Loyola. Patches of yellow and red and orange began to intersperse with the green. More and more trees joined the brightness. The normally drab journey took on a breathtaking beauty. Lining the exit to my development are a group of newly planted spindly little maples -- the kind I think of as twigs held up in their holes by a few toothpicks. Even they burst into color. An intense flame orange made them seem to glow from within, as if they held within them an independent source of light. On another street, the maples took on a bright red hue. Over the weeks of fall, the red deepened and darkened, becoming ever more intense. Meanwhile the hay fields tanned and browned. The colors became richer and richer. When Dave was driving, I couldn't take my eyes from the colors of the countryside. I drank in every field, every stately stand of trees lining a ridge, every cluster of oaks at the edge of the forest. Even into November and December, when the glory faded, the rich dark hues revealed a subtle play of color and texture. Orange and sun yellow yielded to russet and tan and brown. Driving to York for an installation recently, the fields and trees, no longer colorful, shone with a kind of austere beauty in a light afternoon mist. Eventually the bare branches became visible, displaying the solemn shape of the trees themselves. One afternoon at this time of year I was driving home after a long day of meetings and errands. When I came out of the last store it was undeniably evening. Stopped at a red light in a long line of traffic, I looked up idly. There was the sky, that heartstoppingly lovely color, not quite black, but a glowing midnight blue. Shining through the bare branches of a tree, a tiny fingernail sliver of a moon was visible, cradling Venus almost between its horns. It was part of a once-in-a-century display of the planets, all strung out like pearls on a string, lined up with the moon. This is an event of no particular astronomical significance, but unexpectedly seeing that beauty lightened my tiredness and eased my impatience to get home. Our Muslim neighbors -- and there are more Muslims in the DC area than UU's in the whole country -- began their holy month of Ramadan this week with the sight of a little sliver a moon. And be sure to look for the moon on December 22 -- John Boeckel tells me that there will be a special full moon, shining from the place in its orbit closest to the earth, while the earth/moon pair is as close to the sun as they come all year, making the moon brighter yet. This full moon on the winter solstice hasn't happened in 133 years, so look up! The beauty of nature can speak to us of the divinity imbued within the very fabric of the universe. I can still recall the pleasure of another perfect autumn day, over twenty years ago, seeing yellow ginkgo leaves against a blue, blue sky. At that time, my life was rather a shambles, but even then I was moved to gratitude for the earth still beautiful despite the ravages of environmental carelessness, and for the opportunity life gave me to stop and appreciate the beauty. However large my troubles seemed to me, they were small enough to allow for a moment's pure joy. In appreciating the ephemeral beauty of the trees, I also feel a gratitude to Miss Whelan, my tenth grade biology teacher at Hackensack High School back in the late fifties. She had us each keep a diary of a tree throughout the school year. We were to draw pictures, to learn about its species, to take note of and record its size and shape and the changes it underwent during the year. Miss Whelan helped me to really pay attention, that first principle of both the spiritual and artistic life. My tree was a small, but perfectly shaped pin oak in our back yard. My uncle, a tree surgeon who had himself planted that tree, lent me a book for my final report. It was in that book, whose name and author are long forgotten, that I learned three amazing facts -- or perhaps one fact in three forms -- which have stayed with me all those years. First, the chemical compounds responsible for the bright fall colors are in the leaves all year around. From spring until early fall, the colors are hidden by the abundance of green chlorophyll, that miraculous substance which makes food for the plant from sunlight and water. Second, the ultimate dry brown of the leaves is also present implicitly year around, for brown is just the natural progression of the fading of the bright fall colors. Third, deciduous trees need dormant time, when they shed their now useless leaves, conserving their energies for the parts of the tree which will carry it over until the next springtime and the next generation. In each season of the year, the whole of the tree's life is present. There is no point in loving just the buds or just the new green leaves, the size of a mouse's ear. The full and lush green foliage of summer has its own great beauty, but eventually the sap must be withdrawn from leaves, and concentrated in the acorns that make the next generation possible. The sharp glory of the fall colors must give way to the poignant deepening of color, to the dry and crackling brown, and finally the stark bare beauty of the branches, so the tree will again be ready to swell with visible life when the season turns to spring. Miss Whelan's biology class project carried with it a lesson far beyond the cellular processes of xylem and phloem she meant us to learn. We must embrace the whole of life, the ups and the downs, the riotous spring, the verdant summer, the poignancy of fall, dormancy of winter. The very seasons so beautifully portrayed in the memorial quilts here in this room. You may think it perverse of me to feel my heart lift and my spirits rise as fall approaches. The autumn colors, after all, are the herald of winter -- and I confess that I am not given to the pleasures of winter. Cold snowy ski trails hold no allure for me. I prefer to sit outside of a summer's eve or take an after work swim in a cool lake. And I know there are many people who suffer from SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder -- a physiological depression that results from the diminished light of fall and winter. (There are others, though, who get depressed in spring). But winter also has other delights. Terry Tafoya, a Native American psychotherapist and anthropologist who spoke to the ministers one year at General Assembly, told us that in his tradition, story telling is reserved for winter. He had to get special permission to tell us some stories in June. Snow, stories, cold, hearth fires, isolation, sleet, sledding. It is all jumbled together. It is not logic that makes me love the fall. Perhaps it is the love of wholeness, of seeing the tree's whole life in its every moment. We human beings have a certain tendency in this culture to see things in extremes, and to value only one end of any spectrum. We praise the light and dread the dark. At this darkest time of the year, we may benefit from rethinking this attitude so as to embrace wholeness. Hear these words of Jacqui James, UUA Director of Worship Resources: Blackmail, blacklist, black mark. Black Monday, black mood, black hearted. Black plague, black mass, black market. Jacqui James makes an important point. Our conventional language can distort our thinking. If we limit ourselves to metaphors good for white and bad for black, we can subtly reinforce the racism found all around us. When we say "us" who do we mean? Do we mean only some of us humans, the ones who look like me? Or do we mean women and men, blacks and whites and browns and reds and yellows? Do we mean children and the aged, and people in their middle years? Do we mean the disabled and the temporarily able bodied? Do we mean Lesbians and gays and straights? Do we mean people of all faiths or no faith? Or do we mean only those like us? Do we, even unconsciously, take one end of the spectrum and elevate that end to all the good in the world, basking in the security of knowing that "our kind" is somehow better, worthy of the privileges we seem to be so rightly given? We do not mean to, but our language of black and white may push us in that direction. That is why we must be careful, especially with our religious and liturgical language. I am so glad that we have lovely hymns now, like "Dark of Winter," to remind us of the blessings in all the spectrum of human experience. Beyond the societal risks in seeing only a portion of humanity as fully worthy, a blinkered view of the universe can distort our individual lives as well. Our seventh principle speaks of the "interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part." We are part of that whole connected in love and appreciation to the whole of the world around us. This may take a stark and practical form. I once heard on National Public Radio (Morning Edition 12/8/97) about the practice of caring for one's own dead, rather than leaving the final care of the body to professionals. Not too many generations ago, when a person died, she or he was washed by members of the family and laid out in the best front parlor for a vigil. Death was a part of every family's life. The NPR person said that avoiding the realities of death was like "missing one of the four seasons or eliminating a winter night." Some people are now trying to revive the custom of personally preparing a body for burial or cremation. This brought me up short. I doubt if I'm psychologically up to the task. It was I who conducted the burial service for my mother, just this time of year, six years ago. When we were done with words, and with tossing flowers into the grave, it fell to me to give the signal to the cemetery men to lower the coffin. My dream life told me that at some deep unconscious level, I felt obscurely guilty about this, that I had allowed my mother to be abandoned in the cold snowy ground, that I had allowed her to be dead and buried. I don't think I'm ready to take over the tasks of the undertaker. Yet I was touched by the story of a father whose baby died after only a few days of life. His expression of love and grief has helped me to reframe my role in burying my mother. The father himself made a small casket and filled it with symbols of the life that the child would never live -- sand from the beach where the family spent their summers, flowers from their garden. The father found a cooperative funeral director, and was able to do the cremation himself. He saw this all, not as ghoulish, but as a continuation of the caring process that he and the child's mother had done while the baby was still alive. He saw it as a piece with natural childbirth -- the generation that demedicalized birth is now moving to demedicalize death as well. This family knew they had done every last act of care for their lost child. It is a matter of wholeness. Our ancestors knew this in their bones. Our Neanderthal cousins buried their dead covered in flowers -- the bright symbols of life brought face to face with the reality of death. Life is meant to be whole. So I think it is not by accident that many of the world's cultures have festivals of light at the Winter Solstice, at that time when we seem to be heading into the dark. Technically, however, although we experience the Solstice as the dark time of the year, a foretaste of the snow and gloom of February, we are actually heading into the light. Since the summer solstice in June, the shortest night of the year, the days have been shortening and the nights getting longer. On September 21, the Equinox marked the equal length of day and night. Next Saturday, on the twentieth, we will have the longest night of the year. The sun will seem to stand still -- the literal meaning of sol-stice. Then it will reverse its southward path and the days will slowly grow longer. Our ancestors must have been relieved each year when the Solstice finally came to reassure them that the year would continue its cycle of wholeness, that the sun would not just continue to diminish and finally disappear altogether. In the Solstice night is the promise of spring, just as the earliest spring leaves carry the promise of the blazing colors of fall. Pagans and Wiccans regularly celebrate that wholeness, the balance of life. The Yule log is burned in the pagan celebration to encourage the sun to return. When Christianity swept across Europe in the last millennium, it was the pagans, those conservative "country folk," who held onto the old ways longer than the city dwellers, preserving a sense of balance and wholeness. At the winter solstice, says Wiccan thealogian, Starhawk (who writes with Diane Baker and Anne Hill in Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions): the balance has tipped as far toward the dark as it can go. We are ready for the light to come back, and we must do all we can to help it. . . . Many Pagan grown-ups stay up all night to keep the Mother Goddess company as she labors to five birth to the sun. . . . Children and grown-ups who can't stay awake ask for special dreams as they sleep in the womb of the Goddess. . . . Old and tired by the longest night, the God goes to sleep in the arms of the Goddess and is reborn at dawn as the sun, the new year, the fresh possibilities reborn in us all. He brings all of our hopes and wishes and dreams for the new year with him. From him we learn to rest and be renewed when we are tired, and to trust, even when life seems hard, that change will come. The ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia at this time of year -- Saturn was the Old God, from before the coming of Jupiter and the later Roman pantheon. Feasting, drinking, dancing, music and riotous living marked the days of Saturnalia. There is a hint of the love of wholeness in this celebration, for during Saturnalia, everything was turned upside down. Behavior prohibited most of the year was given a controlled outlet. Social relations were topsy turvy, with slaves ruling the household, and dignified masters behaving ridiculously. For these few days at least, no one was excluded from the full joy of life. Echoes of Saturnalia lived on well into the Middle Ages when a Lord of Misrule was chosen for the winter celebration, again a feast of wild abandon. Christmas itself, with all its freight of pagan customs, was moved in ancient times to the winter solstice. Scholars tell us that Jesus' birth would have been in the spring -- but when Christianity became the legal and official religion of the Roman empire, some celebration was needed to take the place of the holiday of Sol Invictus -- the Unconquered Sun, which itself had displaced the earlier Saturnalia. Christmas candles, electric lights, and Yule logs -- nowadays mostly a Bouche de Noel, made of cake frosted to look like a real log -- these all still call the sun to return. In Japan, the Shinto religion celebrates the Solstice as the end of the Yin period of the sun, when it ends it decline in strength and begins its growing period -- the Yang. Ying and Yang make a wholeness throughout East Asia: the two interlocking commas cannot exist without each other, and each half of the symbol has a bit of the other in it. The Zoroastrians celebrate the winter solstice on Yalda Night -- when they banish the spirits of Darkness by eating, singing, dancing and playing a fortune telling game. (WP 12/6/97) The Zoroastrians, however, do not celebrate the wholeness of the world. They hold a dualistic view, seeing Good and Evil, Light and Dark, as implacable enemies locked in combat, a war which will ultimately be won by the forces of Good. There are other winter celebrations which use light and candles at this dark time of year. Last week we heard that Hannukah may have roots in the solstice. And in the modern cultural celebration of Kwanzaa, many African Americans light candles to reinforce traditions and values such as self reliance. This holiday was placed in the week after Christmas, a time when many families can be together. It is meant to be a homemade holiday, not commercialized, but a time for reflection and rededication, activities suited to the dormant quiet time of the year. And today is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe. On this day in 1531, the Christian figure of Our Lady appeared to a Mexican Indian, Juan Diego, in the very place which was sacred to Tonantzin, the Indian mother goddess, the female figure of the supreme deity, a deity neither male nor female in essence, but appearing sometimes as a woman, and sometimes as a man. The Virgin of Guadalupe is to many the dark-haired, dark-skinned bringer of compassion and liberation to all oppressed peoples, especially the Indians who were brutalized by the conquering Spaniards. Her image is surrounded by symbols of day and night, the wholeness of life. Celebrations of light in the time of greatest darkness, the dark and light making a balance, promising a balance in the whole cycle of the year -- every season of the year showers beauty on us. Every part of life is precious. Every kind of human being deserves respect and care. Every human faith offers treasures. We are blessed by the whole of life in all its variety and glory. Let me end with a blessing by Unitarian Universalist Kathleen McTigue: #706 May the light around us guide our footsteps, May the darkness around us nurture our dreams, Let us seek to remember the wholeness of our lives. Amen, Shalom, and Blessed Be Hymn #55 "Dark of Winter"Closing Words#691 |