Chalice Lighting Words
Call to Worship
“One winter morning I awoke to see magnificent lines of frost stretching across my window panes. They seemed to rise with the sunshine and the bitter cold outside. They looked like little miracles that had been formed in the dark of night. I watched them in sheer amazement and marveled that such beautiful forms could be born during such a winter-cold night. Yet, as I pondered them I thought of how life is so like that. We live our long, worn days in the shadows, in what often feels like barren, cold winter, so unaware of the miracles that are being created in our spirits. It takes the sudden daylight, some unexpected surprise of life, to cause our gaze to look upon simple, stunning growth that has happened quietly inside us. Like frost designs on a winter window, they bring us beyond life’s fragmentation and remind us that we are not nearly as lost as we thought we were, that all the time we thought we were dead inside, beautiful things were being born in us."
-Joyce Rupp, in the book, Spiritual Literacy
Meditation
In the spirit of December, the month that ends the year, we look back on the path we have been travelling:
Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place—
The road runs on—
Stand still and set my face—
The road leaps on.
Stay here, forever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh, places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The way leads on.
-Edwin Muir
Sermon -
“What is There About December?”
What is there about December…that sets it apart as a unique month?
What is there about December that fires up all sorts of expectations from out of our deepest mythic and emotional interior landscapes…?
What IS there about December?
It’s certainly not like February, which leaves me cold -–the anti-climatic month par excellence.
It’s even not like November, with its Thanksgiving that only seems to serve as the Christmas kick-off. November signals to us that we have waited just about as long as we possibly can. Thanksgiving finally gives us permission to run out to buy the tree, and set up the outside decorations. The planning, and the baking, and the family traditions are off and running. November gets us out of the gate early and into the serious run of December.
The whole year seems to be a build-up to Christmas; a time to plan for December events. The count-down is internalized.
At a Craft Show in Maine during our summer vacation, we find just the right Christmas gift for a close friend. It fills us with the pleasure of anticipation. We love the sweet waiting. We store the early presents happily in a closet at the back of the house, watching with pleasure as the pile rises and we compliment ourselves for being better organized this year.
Only 240 shopping days till Christmas!
Only 113 days…!
Only 42 days…!
Finally – the Advent Calendar!
Then, the last 12 days with all the turtledoves and French Hens and pear trees filled with partridges leave us tingling with delight. The child within is dancing. It’s showtime!
There are lots of clever special items offered in catalogs every year for storing the accoutrements of Christmas during the long time between-Christmases.
After-Christmas sales on holiday greeting cards and strings of lights, red and green tapers, and seals for gift packages keep us going just a little bit longer. There’s always a drawer somewhere in the house filled with boxed Christmas cards – ready for the next addressing season. After this weekend those drawers are going to be opened and the addressing begun. I’m gonna be into it myself this year. Some years – no! This year – YES!
December was never assigned enough days. December should have been allotted February’s 28 days. No one really likes February. (My two daughters were born in February, but, I still don’t like the month!)
We like January well-enough though; we need to take a rest after Christmas, to feel the interesting configuration of the new numbers of the year, to even consider a resolution or two, and to just bask in the after-glow of all that Christmas stimulation.
We would be ready for March after January – the coming of Spring would surely occupy our attention long enough before we realized it was only 240 shopping days till Christmas again.
And, for those of us who “don’t do” Christmas, surely you realize we are all forced into it to some extent. December IS December, and…there’s something about December!
Oh, of course, there’s a down-side to December’s Christmas – the dismantling of the whole Christmas scene, dry, dead, denuded Christmas trees lying at the curb for pick-up, the bills, the lingering run-ins with different family members you were trying to avoid, the weight-gain. But, you know there’s going to be time in February to play catch-up with bills, to apologize, to diet, to look forward to next December and to, somehow, plan it all better.
Then, of course, there’s the “religious” aspect of December to consider. December has a powerful message for a few million Christians, and offers satisfying metaphors for the rest of us.
There’s something about December that’s decidedly disproportionately and significantly religious. It always was a month for ritual, like the Pagan solstice celebration, but as these things go, at some point the Earth-based traditions got trumped by a new myth that eventually took hold…and took hold BIG!
It’s a paradigm shift month. It is a Come-All-Ye-Faithful month. Its wishes may be Peace on Earth, but its impact stems from the shock of God on Earth. It’s the theological headstone of Christianity.
No matter that it wasn’t really Jesus’ birthday – Christians assigned it as the birthday of God. The mystery of mysteries became embodied in the Christ child, looking like a human child born of a human woman---- but nevertheless, a flesh and blood Messiah! Now, how about that for the centerpiece of a month!
There certainly IS something about December!
Another aspect of December is the nature of the season it resides in: it’s winter, and it’s cold and dark and looking kind-of “dead!”
There’s the “pretty stuff” of December – like the snow, which, for most of us stays pretty a relatively short time and then just gets in our way.
But, most of all, when we look around from the thickened confines of our coats and mufflers doing their best to protect us from a cold we feel in our bones, and see the gray sky and leafless trees, we experience the feeling of bleak midwinter.
Our tendency is to look forward to only one aspect of this month, and help to create it as well – its gaiety and gifting, its parties and plum pudding, its colored lights and carols.
But, why move away from the hovering cold and darkness? Why turn away from a December that has the potential to be our teacher? The bleakness, the dark, the bone-chilling cold, the essential dormancy of the month; all these instruct.
The month of joy at the holy birth will not let us forget the dark of endings.
It is also the last month; and an end to the year, a treasured moment of measurement and gratitude; a time of looking back, summing up, facing pain, counting blessings. All endings have much to reveal to us.
I have now, as most of you know, moved into a time of endings. Retirement is a transition, just as December is; a time of endings and beginnings-- being dropped piece by piece into a whirring blender. I pour it out into my cup and it nourishes me no matter which way I turn.
This place has been, for me, more than a geographical setting; a location, a compendium of rooms and stairs, light-switches and doors. It has become a sacred place filled with life and meaning. It has been a soul place – a spirit place – a space bulging with the electricity of the great mundane.
Being here has taught me that I have not been trying to get somewhere or achieve something; every moment of every day is somewhere; is achievement itself. The journey, and probably ONLY the journey, is home.
Letting go is the way to move on. December’s like that – a time of darkness, dormancy, and cold – the end of a cycle. Trees are stripped bare. We learn to celebrate the frigid stillness masquerading as death for we know that December’s FULL story is also the birth of new and blazing life, come unexpectedly in the darkest time of the year.
It is good to learn that from December.
For heaven’s sake, get out there in the cold and dark and look up! Look around. Look around in the bleak, groundless, emptiness of December -- where you’re less protected – where it’s less cozy – and regard this place in which you find yourself, and…FIND YOURSELF!
There is nothing in a different place that isn’t in this place.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin said that “This world, this palpable world, which we are wont to treat with boredom and disrespect with which we habitually regard places with no sacred association for us, is in truth a holy place, and we did not know it. Venite adoremus. Come and adore the places of our lives.
A vivid description I came upon, of the Western High Plains, is, to me, a December story – full of the metaphor of the cold and dark and holy places of our lives and how we learn to live with them.
Poet and essayist Kathleen Norris has coined the term “spiritual geography” to get at the peculiar and important ways “place” can speak to our souls and transform us. For more than twenty years, she and her husband have resided in a house built by her grandparents in Lemmon, a small town near the border of North and South Dakota. She wrote:
The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it before it bestows a blessing. This can mean driving through a snowstorm on icy roads, wondering whether you’ll have to pull over and spend the night in your car, only to emerge under tag ends of clouds into a clear sky blazing with stars. …
The land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau terms “our need to witness our limits transgressed.” Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy. …
Where I am is a place where the human fabric is worn thin, farms and ranches and little towns scattered over miles of seemingly endless, empty grassland. On a clear night you can see not only thousands of stars but the lights of towns fifty miles away. Scattered between you and the horizon, the lights of farmhouses look like ships at sea. The naturalist Loren Eisley once commented on the way Plains people “have been strung out at nighttime under a vast solitude rather than linked to the old-world village with its adjoining plots. We were mad to settle the West in [this] fashion, he says. “You cannot fight the sky.” But some have come to love living under its winds and storms. Some have come to prefer treelessness and isolation, becoming monks of the land, knowing that its loneliness is an honest reflection of the essential human loneliness. This willingly embraced desert fosters realism, not despair.
In these wonderful words, the message of the stark dark depths of December is given to us as a gift of reflection, much as the Christmas gift of the newborn child, embedded in the brightly decorated highs of December, is a symbolic offering of hope.
Yes, indeed, there certainly is something about December.
December says many things to us. This year I hear an invitation to try something entirely new and unexpected. I hear a possibility of turning Christmas around in some odd act or gesture to get another view of it; a new aspect of what it means to offer a present. Offering presence. Becoming a present. Being present.
I hear new joy coming.
What do I mean?
To illustrate -- I found this report on the Reuters internet page: Thursday, December 5, 2002. Headline – Thieves Steal $2,000 from Christmas Tree.
Oslo. A Christmas tree decorated with banknotes worth about $2,000 has been stripped by thieves at Oslo’s main railway station, police said on Wednesday.
Magne Furuholmen of Norwegian pop group a-ha made flowers and stars out of banknotes when he was paid 14,000 Norwegian crowns ($1,930.) to decorate a six-foot tree at the station.
Furuholmen, who gained world fame with the a-ha song “Take on Me – and is also an artist – used 50, 100, 200, and 500-crown notes as decorations to symbolize the commercialization of Christmas. He also hung up chains made of five-crown coins.
He shrugged off the widely predicted theft. “There was a distinct possibility that this was going to happen,” Furhuholmen told NTK public radio.
Asked if he would ask the police to track the thieves, he said, “I don’t see it that way. I see it more that a person has completed the work and taken an incredibly good payment.”
Furuhomen was paid by Norway’s state railways to decorate the tree, but decided to use his artist’s fee to create the decorations themselves.
The station is guarded by security cameras, but they do not catch everything as they turn constantly.
I would say that Mr. Furuhomen is continuing in the spirit of his famous pop song, “Take on Me!” But, this time, with his artistic sense of play and parody, his taking became giving. And those who “took,” what was given became labelled, ironically, as thieves. An ingenious political statement becomes truly an “a-ha” moment!
His idea was to make the actual currency -- material of exchange between giver and receiver -- an art form of directness and beauty. His reward was two-fold. He “took an incredibly good payment,” as he said, to create the decorations on the tree. The decorations turned out to be made of the actual currency payment he received, which was his attempt to parody the consumerism involved in Christmas giving.
Then, I’d venture the guess that he reaped another kind of “incredibly good payment” in the secondary pleasure of having the money “stolen” from the tree, the act of “receiving” not caught by the station surveillance cameras. Can the money be considered stolen if it was truly given? The gesture; the paradox, is truly delightful.
December is open to new learning, new adventures in giving, new playfulness on the old themes. Ever new “a ha” moments!
What is there about December? Much, much more, and much more surprising than we’ve been giving it credit for!
Benediction
Hold onto what is good
even if it is
a handful of earth.
Hold on to what you believe
even if it is
a tree which stands by itself.
Hold on to what you must do
even if it is
a long way from here.
Hold on to my hand even when
I have gone away from you.
-Nancy Wood
Amen, Shalom, and Blessed Be!
