"Year After Year"

“So the year turns,” wrote Harry Gersh, “year after year. And each year we mark the seasons. Each season means something new to us. Each season means something old to our people.” These words, which opened the service this morning, capture the sense in which these holidays reinforce our connection to tradition at the same time as they show us fresh opportunity for insight and renewal.

This season has so many facets. Stories of darkness and light are universal, but are also as varied as the people who tell them. Go into any one of them and you hear about despair and struggle, miracles and joy, death and birth, fear and hope.

Unitarian Universalists enter the holiday season eager to entertain the possibilities and benefit from the wisdom that different faith traditions can offer us. This is the time of year when our religious pluralism expresses itself most actively. As last week’s delightful holiday pageant demonstrated, we are happy to celebrate the births of Jesus, Confucius and Buddha all at the same time!

During the winter holidays, different faith traditions celebrate the season in different ways. We have no difficulty seeing the universal themes they share, or appreciating the variety of approaches they use, without having to choose which one is best. People follow different paths, but we share a common humanity.

Today we turn our attention to Hanukkah and the Winter Solstice, divergent observances to some people, but not to us. Looking at them together reveals some interesting connections, historical and spiritual. Hannukah commemorates the Maccabees’ rededication of the Temple after it had been desecrated by Syrian Greeks, who practiced pagan rituals in it.

What the Maccabees saw as desecration quite possibly was a Winter Solstice celebration. According to Arthur Waskow, a progressive scholar of Jewish tradition, Hellenized Jews had adopted many of the pagan ways for themselves. So the Maccabees set out to conquer the Greeks not only for the Temple, but for the hearts and minds of their own people.

The Maccabees reestablished Jewish holiness at the Temple by setting the time of Hanukkah at the same time as the Winter Solstice. The Jewish calendar places Hanukkah “at the moment of the darkest sun and darkest moon,” assuring the highest contrast for a festival of lights. In this way the Maccabees succeeded not only in recovering the Temple, but also in luring back wayward Jews, reaffirming Jewish identity, and competing successfully with other Solstice rituals.

So the connection between Hanukkah and the Solstice is closer than we might have thought. And that is not such a big surprise. For there are many stories this time of year, but each of them leads back to common themes. One of these themes is the human experience of the season when it is darkest and the light is yet to come.

Observance of the Winter Solstice, which occurs tonight, is also a diverse array of traditions. All over the world, people have reacted to shortening days and lengthening nights by creating festivals of light and hope. However different were the narratives that arose to explain how and why such festivals came into being, they share meanings we all know by heart. We experience them ourselves, one way or another, as we go through the seasons each year. Although many of the northern Solstice customs are out of place here in southern California, houses decorated with twinkling lights are always a welcome sight after the sun goes down. Light in the darkness is a universal yearning for people everywhere.

As familiar as these understandings are to us by now, we Unitarian Universalists have our challenges during the season. Our pluralistic approach to the holidays gives us an appreciation of how many different ways there are to celebrate, but no one of them is truly our own. At least, this is how it is for me. There may be many paths to the same goal, but you have to take one to go somewhere.

Over the years I have found the exercise of reflecting on the season – any aspect of it – Christmas, Hanukkah, Winter Solstice – to give me a new appreciation of how these celebrations relate to each other. But every year I feel more like an anthropologist observing the practices of a society that is far from home. It hasn’t always been that way.

Christmas was a big holiday for us when I was a child. My mother, the daughter of Protestant German and Hungarian immigrants, went all out for the season. I have recipes for Christmas cookies and ornaments for the tree, handed down from generation to generation. I rarely use them.

Perhaps this is what happens when people don’t have children. This year David and I decided to give presents only to our dog, an agreement that we are entirely capable of keeping. We can’t let the little guy down.

As I’ve drifted away from the domestic rituals and slipped slowly but surely into the anthropologist role, I’ve wondered whether I have lost something. And many Unitarian Universalists share this dilemma. Our tradition may teach us how to appreciate all the different ways people celebrate the season, but we have no specific rituals or spiritual practices of our own. Either we borrow from our childhood – or someone else’s childhood; or we give up and go to the movies.

I cannot turn back and recreate childhood customs. But I also cannot give up. Something inside me knows that the season has something to offer everyone, even me. We still share those common themes, expressed in traditional holidays with thousands of years of elaboration behind them. Each year they mean something old, as Harry Gersh writes, and each year they mean something new. I wonder whether our spiritual path through this season is to seek the connection between the old and the new: not necessarily by reviving old traditions – although that is one way to do it – but by going deeper into their meanings to discover how we experience them today.

What we learn from studying the relationship between Hanukkah and the Winter Solstice, is that the image of light in the darkness is at the center of each celebration. It’s obvious, of course, but if two very different faith traditions each find a way to incorporate this basic theme, how can we 21st century Unitarian Universalists be all that different? Even if you don’t light a menorah, or put up a tree, or string a few lights around the front door, something is still happening to you in the darkness.

This year I notice that I’ve been sleeping more. My dreams have taken me back into the past. I awaken, surprised at how late it is, although the sun has not yet come up. My dreams stay with me for the first few hours of the day. They make me think about things I thought I had forgotten.

I’d never realized before what a contemplative time of year this is. Perhaps I had always been too busy trying to live up to my image of what people are supposed to be doing, caught up in activity and tradition. Once you stop the activity and put aside the tradition, you see how much darkness there is, and how quiet the night can be. You slow down, doing the opposite of what the season seems to be demanding, and you get to know yourself again.

There is more than one path through this season. The way of Hanukkah, or the Winter Solstice, or Christmas, all offer opportunities to remember what is old and who our people have been. But they also put us in touch with the common theme behind all these celebrations, how the darkness is a time to turn inward, to rediscover ourselves, and to rest. The darkness is a time to wait for the light. You can light the candles now, or you can sleep. Either way, the light will return.

There is something old and something new for everyone this time of year. Look all around you at all of it; see how many paths there are. And take the one that will give you peace.

Reference used to prepare this sermon: "Seasons of Our Joy," by Arthur Waskow (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982).