by the Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger
First Unitarian Uniiversalist Church in New Orleans
Sunday, December 23, 2007
This is now the 5th in a series of 10 linked services for the holiday season, entitled “Lessons From the Holidays.” So far, we have journeyed through Advent and learned about waiting, celebrated the wonderful story of the Christmas menorahs, been lectured to by Charles Dickens in the person of the Rev. Roger Brewin, and coped with the holiday blues. Today we take lessons from Yule, or the Winter Solstice. Tomorrow, we will celebrate Christmas Eve in grand style, with 2 special worship services: a 5 pm Peace Communion in the UU tradition (if you don’t know what that might mean, we invite you to come find out!), and then at 7 pm our familiar and beloved Family Christmas Tableau service, re-enacting the old story of Christmas. Before and after those services, there will be a Holiday Open House, with wassail and goodies to share. Please bring a plate of something delicious and sweet and join us for this holy, and fun, night. Next Sunday, we continue the series with a New Orleans Jazz Funeral for the Year 2007. We’ll bury 2007 in a casket from the Charbonnet-Labat Funeral Home, have the TCB Brass Band to lead us in the traditional first-line tunes, and we’ll end with a joyous secondline around the room. Don’t miss it! On January 6th and 7th, we’ll host Connie Barlow and Michael Dowd, who will lead us into a spiritual appreciation of evolution in a worship and workshop. Our series will end on January 13th with a look at the Magi for Epiphany, and there will be kingcake at Coffeehour to celebrate the opening of Carnival season. Please come to these special services, and see how UUs celebrate the holidays!
Despite our recent warm temperatures, it is the time of the winter solstice. That is, it is the time in the Northern Hemisphere when the earth is tilted on its axis furthest from the sun and the effects of its rays. It is the time for the shortest day and the longest night of the year – which this year, occurred exactly at 8 minutes after midnight Central Time yesterday morning. From here on, the days will slowly grow longer.
The word “solstice” is made up of 2 Latin words meaning “sun” and “stopping,” for ancient people believed that the sun literally stopped in its tracks during the winter and summer solstices, causing the shortest and longest days to occur. The early Celtic peoples of the British Isles called the winter solstice “Yule,” which has come to be synonymous with Christmas, but it was not always so. “Yule” comes from an Old English root that means young or youth; the pre-Christian Celts, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, thought of the winter solstice as the sun’s birthday, the day when the sun begins to come back after its winter journey away from the earth. As with many of the celebrations now considered Christian, Christmas was simply laid on top of the winter holiday of the sun’s rebirth that people had been celebrating for thousands of years. (The return of the Sun Child on the winter solstice is why some UU churches hold a Child Dedication in their service at that time of year. This year, we did not have any families desiring a dedication, but hopefully we will in future years.)
It is difficult now to cast ourselves back, to put our modern selves in the place of the folks of the Northern Hemisphere during pre-urban, pre-Christian times. These agricultural peoples were dependent on the sun for the growth of crops and for their survival through the deprivation and bitter cold of the winter. Just living through a northern European winter in those days was quite an accomplishment. During the long winter months, people were cut off from their normal outdoor occupations, were faced with un-certain supplies of food and fuel, and were unable to easily communicate with friends and neighbors. Almost as deadly as the possibility of starvation was the certainty of long stretches of both fear and boredom.
The earliest peoples were afraid because they may have thought it was possible that the sun might not return, that spring might not arrive. It would be only natural to fear that you yourself or members of your family might not survive to see the spring, even if it did come. There was no reliable means of weather forecasting, so the fierce winter storms must have seemed even more deadly, arising as they did with so little warning.
What is truly wonderful is the reaction these people had to their straitened circumstances during the winter solstice. With all they had to worry about, you might think the Celts would have come up with a winter ritual of sadness and grief, or at least full of intercessory prayer to assuage their troubled hearts. Instead, these humanistic pagans developed Yule, a holiday time full of parties, feasting, drinking, and play-acting. They splurged their food and fuel supplies on gatherings of friends and family, spiced with song and laughter, lit with bonfires, Yule logs, and candles. They dragged evergreens into their homes, somehow assured by their eternal greenness that spring would indeed come and death was not the end of everything.
The highlight of Yule was something like Mardi Gras – the “Feast of Fools,” a tableau or informal play where everything of importance was mocked and turned upside-down. No subject was too painful to made fun of; no personage or personality too exalted to escape the unerring needle of the people’s satire. From among the villagers, they chose a Fool King, whose every command had to be obeyed, no matter how ridiculous or how licentious. They sang silly, meaningless songs, whose lyrics of “fa la la la” come down to us today in certain carols. They got drunk on homemade mead, a beer made from honey, and overindulged in pies made from everything in their cupboards: preserved meat and dried fruits and honey and nuts and spices – the precursors to our own minced-meat pies. They were afraid of the dark and the cold – so they ate, drank, and made merry. They were afraid of death, so they had a party to make fun of death. How touching! How brave! …how very human. I love them for it, and we all owe them a debt of thanks. (Indeed, if our spiritual ancestors had had THEIR way, we wouldn’t celebrate Christmas at all! Let alone with all these admittedly pagan trappings.)
Unlike our early human ancestors, for the most part we moderns no longer fear the dark time of the year (especially not here in New Orleans, where, as Mark Twain once famously said, we have only 2 seasons, one being summer and the other not.) But we are still afraid of the dark – we fear the dark parts of ourselves and the dark unknown of the future. We have made darkness a villain, as UU Jacqui James has pointed out, even our language proclaims it. But we forget the importance of balance; we forget our own mixed-up natures; we forget and begin to demonize all that we do not like and do not understand and fear. We need to be reminded that all life needs sunlight and dark, growth and rest, summer and winter; that all beings are made of good and bad, strong and weak.
Years ago, Audubon Montessori School gave my son Stephen a science assignment: he had to develop his own experiment. He came up with the idea to discover under what conditions plants grew best. He and I went to a nursery and purchased 3 nearly-identical plants, and got advice on how often to water them and what to feed them for optimum growth.
When we got home, Stephen put one in a dark closet, one in a closet with the light turned on all the time, and one on the living room windowsill, where it received the benefit of both sunlight and darkness. All 3 plants were otherwise cared for in exactly the same manner – all 3 were watered regularly and all 3 got calcium feedings made from water and crushed eggshells.
After the first week, we noticed some slight differences among the 3 plants. For one thing, the plant in the dark closet was not quite as green and healthy-looking as the other 2. Secondly, the plant in the lighted closet was definitely the tallest and had grown the most. After the second week, however, the differences became much more marked. The plant in the dark closet was really sad-looking – some of the leaves were brown and curling and the entire plant had lost even more color. The plant that got light all the time was no longer the biggest or the greenest – that honor went to the plant on the windowsill. By the third week, Stephen had 2 plants that were nearly dead: the one in the dark and its opposite, the one in perpetual light. The only plant that continued to thrive was the one in the living room window, receiving both sunlight and darkness in the natural way of things.
Everything living on the earth needs both light and dark for growth and health and wholeness. This is known in every culture around the globe, and there are dozens and dozens of origin stories about the beginnings of creation, when earth-beings complained either of perpetual day or perpetual night, and received the gift of both. In her insightful book, Dreaming the Dark, published by UU publishing arm Beacon Press, Starhawk reminds us of the healing power of darkness, and encourages us to look deeper into our fear of the dark:
…Where there is fear, there is power.…We need to dream the dark as process, and dream the dark as change, to create the dark in a new image. Because the dark created us.…The dark [is] all that we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see – fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.To answer Starhawk’s heart-felt question, I look to the same playful spirit that animated the pagan Celts celebrating Yule, a childlike spirit that befriends that which we fear. In the wonderful bedtime book, There's a Nightmare in My Closet, children’s author and illustrator Mercer Mayer tells of a young child who is afraid of the dark and is convinced that a Nightmare lurks in his dark closet. The story does not assert that there is nothing there – instead, the Nightmare comes out of the closet and turns out to be more frightened of the child than the child is of the Nightmare. The child comforts the ugly Nightmare when it cries and tucks it tenderly into bed – a not neglecting to carefully shut the closet door. The book ends with the child musing, “I suppose there's another nightmare in my closet, but my bed’s not big enough for 3.” (I suspect that if a second Nightmare did materialize, this kid would find a way to fit it in.)
The turning dark: change. The velvet dark: skin soft in the night, the stroke of flesh on flesh, touch, joy, mortality.…Birth-giving dark: seeds are planted underground, the womb is dark, and life forms it-self anew in hidden places.
The question of the dark has become a journey… How do we find the dark within and transform it, own it as our own power? How do we dream it into a new image, dream into actions that will change the world into a place where no more horror stories happen, where there are no more victims? Where the dark is kind and charged with a friendly power: the power of the unseen, the power that comes from within, the power [that] is the spark of every nerve and life of every breath…
We in New Orleans have had to face our worst nightmares – What if the levees broke? What if we lost everything? What if our church was filled with dirty floodwater? What if the city was crippled and broken and wounded? And we found out, somewhat to our own surprise, that we could survive, that we could even, at times, thrive, that we could hope and plan for a better future, that we could even retain our grit and sense of humor. Our worst fears came true, and we came out on the other side – not unscathed, certainly, but at least still whole, still able to cope, still able to love each other and this exasperating city of ours. Yes, there is still of lot of darkness to be faced – the lack of grocery stores, the dearth of healthcare professionals, the scarcity of high quality, reliable childcare, the many schools that have not reopened, the shrinkage of affordable housing, the malfeasance and unreliability of too many of our elected officials – but still we carry on, facing what must be faced, fighting we needs to be fought, and still managing to celebrate every small recovery, every tiny victory, every insignificant holiday, let alone Christmas and New Year’s.
We can learn from the dark – the real dark, that we need for rest and respite and creativity and new birth, and the metaphorical dark, our shadow sides, our fears. Let us make friends with the healing dark, and connect with those feelings and emotions of which we are most afraid. We need the balance. May we strive for the balance, and reach for the healing darkness when we need it. So might this be! AMEN – ASHE – SHALOM – SALAAM – NAMASTE – BLESSED BE!
