Selections for the Holidays

Throughout December, I'll be posting selections from my recently published Holiday Anthology on a new blog "If Only for the Season."   UUism's openness allows us to celebrate the many Mid-Winter Festivals with gusto.  Here's my first selection.

Keep the “X” in Xmas

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One of my earliest Christmas sermons (c. 1980) was titled “Keep the X in Xmas.” And that would have been more than twenty-five years ago in a far-away place called Youngstown, in a long-ago time called the 20th century.

I recall that I was playing off a then current campaign by certain Christian groups not to use this common shorthand of Xmas. They contended that this was just one more ploy–a conspiracy really–by a Godless and hostile culture to secularize the Christian spirit of Christmas.

If you Google the four letter word Xmas, you can navigate to the Wikipedia notation (it’s first in the list) that says, in part: “Some people believe that the term is part of an effort to 'take Christ out of Christmas' or to literally 'cross out Christ';[citation needed] it is also seen as evidence of the secularization of Christmas or a vehicle for pushing political correctness, or as a symptom of the commercialization of the holiday (as the abbreviation has long been used by retailers).”

There are time-honored justifications to use X to represent Christ, but I took the clever tack a quarter a century ago, that X stood for an x-factor: the mystery and wonder of the traditional Nativity tale. 

I also strained to explain a deeper quality in X, something that is truly timeless at the Winter Solstice, as enacted by the ancients who built bonfires on hilltops and rolled flaming wheels down those hilltops to coax the waning sun to once again wax toward the spring equinox.

For me the X-factor is real and still beyond my ability to describe fully: it’s what converges within and beneath and beyond at this time of year, something that motivates our spirits to break out in Mid-Winter festivals.

Then and now, I liberally call myself a pagan drawn to the natural, cycling rhythms of our earth-home. [p. 45]

Thanksgiving Meditation: An Apple Accounting

[This is a personal favorite, inspired by a year spent in the region of  the great orchards of central New York State.  It appeared in my 1998 book A Place of Your Own.]

I know of no better way to stimulate the Harvest Season's deep sense of gratitude then to make an Apple Accounting.

Indulge your senses, awaken memory, and stimulate gratitude with an ordinary, humble apple – fresh, waxy, plump, and red. Take one from the bowl. Polish it to a rich glow, in which you can see your reflection. Encounter its natural beauty.

Before that first wonderful bite, imagine:  The March thawing of the earth and the first flow of sap rushing through winter stiff branches – aching from dormancy and itching for life. The cool showers of April seeping into roots and swelling buds. The May perfume of astonishingly white apple blossoms, blushed with pink– buzzed and kissed by bees. The steady green growth of youthful June. Swelling days and the embrace of heavy nights in July. August's ripening and deepening colors. September's coolness penetrating deep into the tangy flesh, sweetening as it chills. The yellow glow of October’s harvest moon waxing the red skin.

Winter melts to spring; spring matures to summer; summer ripens to autumn: the unity of life from blossom through fruit. In the intimations of the cold and heat, drought and rain, sunshine and darkness, fair weather and storm, envision the roundness of the days and the cycles of the earth. And hidden deep in the flesh, know that seeds wait to renew life through eternity.

As you pause, hold the fruit in your hand, feeling its heft and hardness. Run your fingers over the smoothness of the skin. Smell the sweet, fruity perfume. Once again see your reflection, as though the apple holds you in its meaning even as you hold the apple's meaning in your imagination.

Now take a bite. Savor textures and tastes. In the crunch and juice, in the firmness and yielding of the flesh, in the tartness and sweetness, you know the proportion and goodness of things. Here is evidence of Nature's beauty, bounty, and order.

Remember your reflection in the Apple skin. Nature has blessed you, too.

Let your personal memory quicken and take an accounting of your life through your days and seasons – an accounting that brings you the realization of your good fortune to be a living, sensing, feeling, thinking creature.

In this apple accounting, you experience firsthand a genuine Thanksgiving for the natural miracle of Life, in the scheme of things so improbable yet inevitable; so fragile, yet tenacious and abundant.

Respectfully Yours and Mine

I have one daughter, now an adult living in Brea, CA with two young children of her own.  One of my great pleasures is watching her being fully embedded in the timeless  art of being a nurturing mother—providing physical care yes, but more, passing through the generations love and guidance, while taking joy and satisfaction  in her 7 year old son Brett and her 2 year old daughter Bridget.

The year Katie was 9, I was intern minister in Syracuse NY.  We lived in a government subsidized town house packed together with other town houses in a little complex.  The complex was atumble with kids.  I remember most of all the sound of plastic tires—Big Wheels—racing over the asphalt pavement at all hours of the day.

Katie had a lot of playmates in that confined and family-packed place, including several girls her age.  Some were nice and some weren’t.  One girl, her name was Becky I remember, lorded it over Katie throughout the year we lived there.  Becky took every opportunity to tell Katie that whatever she had or did was better than what Katie had or did.

This irked Katie to no end.  However, Katie, even at  9 was able to process Becky’s ways.  Once Becky blurted out in the presence of Katie's Mom, “I like my Mommy, better than your Mommy.” 

Now think of all the possible responses -- different ways of tearing down Becky’s Mom and lifting up Katie’s own Mom.  But Katie gave a response that is among the wisest responses possible, which I’ve long considered to be among the best insight/advice I’ve ever heard.

Katie said simply, “Of course you like your Mommy better.  She’s your Mommy.”

Think about that inborn wisdom – that whatever is ours we like the best, whether it’s our political party, or our sports team, or our school, or our whatever…  (Notice that we claim so many things as ours.)

Just because something is ours and we like it the best, doesn’t mean it’s categorically the best, but from within our own experience we like it better than anything, anywhere else.

My daughter taught me to let others take pride in and express loyalty to what is theirs, while maintaining my pride in and loyalty to what is mine.  I've found this outlook/strategy anxiety-reducing and respectful.

Exultation and Imitation

Gingko Outside My Front Door

Being the oldest
  of its kind –

It is the gingko's

Solemn duty

To speak

On behalf of all trees.

It does this

By waiting

And by holding

Until kindred trees

Have given their color

And dropped their leaves.

Then, having distilled

  a season of sunlight,

And having bided its time, –

Almost overnight, –

The gingko's

Fan-shaped leaves

Take on the color

  of the sun

So that

The waning days

  of autumn color

Are a yellow exultation;

When

  in a final act

  of imitation

The ginkgo

Drops  leaves

  to the earth

  in a rush –

Like sunlight

  radiating across

  the cosmos

To puddle

  On a barren planet.

Philosophy of Life, Yes

So, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry believes that he has been called by God to politics generally and by implication specifically to be President. That sort of thinking characterizes a significant branch of evangelical Christianity – that there is intimacy and communication between the believer and God. At the very least, such thinking is prideful. At the worst, such thinking leads to unexamined righteousness. When God is on your side, whatever actions you take are justified. (I remember what Bob Dylan wrote long ago:" You don't count the dead, when God’s on your side.")

I'm thinking about this as I'm double tasking: watching a CNN news report on Perry’s religion and reading a New York Times interview with poet laureate Philip Levine, now a wise 83 years old. In the interview, Levine, a blue collar intellectual, muses, "There is a kind of Protestant ethic that believes that if you're really a good person, God will reward you with a full table and a garage full of automobiles and a beautiful husband or wife – that we should be judged by what the world has delivered to us."

When this outlook is magnified, it often leads to a theology of prosperity, that the Bible proposes Christians will reap financial and other material rewards by virtue of their faith. This is a distorted and malicious doctrine of how Jesus lived and what he taught. It is a slippery slope to unrestrained materialism and the perversion of greed. 

Yesterday, in my Sunday sermon, I spoke to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism. In my preface, I described my own long progression as a student of religion and ethics. As a matter of personal choice, but also as a teacher with my own liberal assembly, I'm now most interested in advocating an effective philosophy of life free of the traps and trappings of traditional religion.

As I prepared yesterday's remarks on the philosophy of Stoicism, I was pleased to find that that much of my outlook and many of my disciplines resonate to the Stoic way. In particular, I admire and cultivate character based upon virtue: the macrocosm of Nature rflected in the microcosm of Self.

I envision the notion of a philosophy of life becoming increasingly my focus – a focus well-suited to an age seeking a center that will hold.  Where is that center?  Where it's always been: in the Self.