In our age everything has to be a “problem.”  Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so.  Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside.  We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves.

Sanctity in such an age means travelling from the area of anxiety to the area in which there is no anxiety; or perhaps it may mean learning, from God, to be without anxiety in the midst of it.
Fundamentally it comes down to this: living in a silence which so reconciles the contradictions within us that, although they remain within us, they cease to be a problem.

Contradictions have always existed in the soul of man.  But it is only when we prefer analysis to silence that they become a constant and insoluble problem.  We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them and rise above them and see them in the light of exterior and objective values which make them trivial by comparison.

The solitary life…clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things.  In solitude we remain face-to-face with the naked being of things.  And yet we find that the nakedness of reality which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor for shame.  It is clothed in the friendly communion of silence, and this silence is related to love. 

Stillness is a precious commodity this time of year!  Every winter, my body’s pace naturally slows down.  I hit the snooze button on my alarm.  I take naps.  I find myself sitting and staring.  And from my Roman Catholic background, I also feel a spiritual tug towards stillness, towards waiting and anticipation in this season called “Advent.”

But then greater forces tug at me.  While a student, I had finals to study for, papers to write, bibliographies to edit.  And now as a minister, the “holidays” are hardly a time for rest and reflection.  Unless you have an intern -- then you can take off the Sunday after Christmas!  I look forward to those days.  You may not believe this, but just as I was writing this very paragraph, my ten year-old nephew Timmy stood in my doorway and asked, “Are you getting time off for the holidays?”  When I explained that I wasn’t, he said, “Well maybe we’ll get snowed in or something and you’ll have to stay home and we can have a snowball fight.”

Seriously, it seems to me that almost everyone becomes frantic this time of year, not just students and ministers.  For many of us, one of the forces that tugs most strongly is the shopping list.  Everybody shows their love for everybody else by scrambling around to shop and making everyone else shop for them.  ‘Tis the season, whether it’s inspired by Santa Claus or Hanukkah Harry.  I think the only people who are slowing down as the winter and our souls beckon are not people at all, but bears.  They hibernate.  Good for bears.

Unfortunately, our franticness, though worse at this season, is year-round.  I recall a recent conversation with a group of friends about the busy schedules of youth and children.  We noted how their lives are packed full with martial arts classes, dance lessons, basketball camps, all kinds of classes and lessons and camps.  The parents in the discussion got tired just talking about it, rattling off the things they have to shuttle their kids to.  Not being a parent myself, I asked them, “Why does this happen?  Why are your children so busy?”

These are the responses I heard in this conversation and others like it: “The teachers are pushing them so hard.”  “Colleges demand this kind of activity or they won’t be admitted.”  “The kids want to sign up for all these things, and I don’t want to discourage them.”

One member of the discussion was a teacher.  He said, “I see those kids in class, and I think it’s the parents who are pushing them.”

This subject touched such a nerve.  Everyone felt caught up in a treadmill that was beyond their control.  The blaming was circular.  It led me to wonder, “So whose busy-ness is this, anyway?”

I am not here to say that sending your kid to a martial arts class is a bad thing.  I am envious of children today who know so much more about the world than I did as a child, and who have so many interesting skills.  But there is something about this high-pressured, no-time-to-waste lifestyle that makes me feel wary.

Thomas Merton, whose words you heard earlier, writes on this subject quite eloquently.  He calls it, “the laziness that goes about disguised as activity when no activity is required of us.”  Merton says that we are afraid of something inside of us, our inner contradictions, and rather than go through the discomfort of sitting with powerful conflicting truths, we avoid them by moving anxiously from one activity to the next.  Sadly, though, we are never able to find peace as long as we avoid the stirrings of our soul.  We become more isolated, more cut off from others and from ourselves, and often we don’t even know it.

Another Catholic Thomas, Thomas Moore, writes on this subject in his books Care of the Soul and Soul Mates.  When counseling couples, the first thing Moore tries to do is keep them from trying to solve their problems.  For instance, one can feel like leaving one’s partner.  Our Western problem-solving mind sees a desire to leave a committed relationship as a problem.  We respond to the problem with a number of strategies: trying to resolve the differences that make us want to leave, pretending we don’t have the desire to leave, or simply leaving.  These approaches may be appropriate, but often they are not.  Thomas Moore’s approach teaches us to honor the desire to flee as a natural manifestation of the soul.  It is not a problem to be solved; it is something to talk about, to learn from, to sit with, to befriend.

We don’t always have to change something to make it better.  Sometimes we need merely to light a candle in the dark, and sit.  When our struggle is in a relationship, then we can sit with our partner.  The problem may still be there, but seen in the “friendly communion of silence,” as Merton calls it, the problem may seem small.

Silence is not the only means of returning to our core, to the deeper truths that make insignificant our problems.  Sometimes what helps is taking a walk, writing a letter, or mulling things over while we take the time to cook a real dinner.  Many things can work, as long as we take our time.

It is interesting to me that we become especially busy at a time of year when stillness and contemplation are most natural.  We think of this as a dark time of year, not a time of seeing, but in many ways it is a time when we can see most clearly.  With the trees barren of leaves, we can see our neighbors’ houses!  They may be closer than you think!  And, if we follow the natural impulses of our body and soul by staying home more and moving more slowly, we may find that our own lives are put into clearer perspective.

The lighting of the menorah and the Advent candles reminds us to settle into this relaxed, reflective way of being.  While reading Chanukah history in preparation for this service, I was puzzled by the modern emphasis on the lighting of the menorah.  The history that produced the holiday is one of creative, heroic responses to oppression, culminating in a military victory and a reclaiming of the Temple.  This could easily be a holiday when human heroism is lifted up above all else.  But, no, the holiday has been known as “The Dedication of the Temple” and “The Festival of Lights.”  Jews look back and remember Mattathias and Judah for their heroism, but stronger in people’s minds is the cleansing of the temple and the legendary miracle of light, when a small flask of oil found in the temple burned for eight days instead of one.  This miracle is now the primary symbol of the holiday.

Why is this story of burning oil so important? Isn’t the real story the stand against oppression and the human effort that led to the recapture of the Temple?  Why does this story of surprisingly efficient lamp oil take center stage? Who cares about the lamp oil?  It didn’t save anybody’s life.

The miracle remembered now by the lighting of the eight-candle menorah reminds us that the Chanukah story is not primarily a tale of military victory or human heroism.  It is concerned with that which heroism restored – namely, the Maccabees’ house of worship, their means of connecting with God, with the sacred.  Thus, the Dedication of the Temple takes precedence over the preceding years of struggle.  And the Festival of Lights, the miracle of the lamp oil, reminds us that when we take the time and effort to create a sacred space for encountering the divine, we are often met with a pleasant surprise: God reaches out to us as we reach out to God.

The Christian Advent season reminds us to “make way for the Lord.”  The birth of Christ is not anticipated the way one anticipates other birthdays; it is seen as a time when we invite Christ into our hearts.  I say “Christ” here and not “Jesus” because I am speaking of a mystical experience, of inviting a manifestation of God into one’s heart.  Advent says: For this to happen, one must create a space and wait, with hope and love.  Perhaps the waiting in hope and love is itself the entrance of God into one’s heart.

I believe that we need these holidays.  The pace of American life is increasing.  It is not just a skewed sample of unusually overscheduled parents and children I have observed.  If individuals jump from one thing to the next as a way of avoiding the difficult task of sitting face-to-face with reality, however complex or challenging, then I wonder if our society is not doing this as well.

Joanna Macy, a Buddhist scholar and social activist, believes that we are becoming increasingly agitated over the mess we are making of the world.  She says that if a person tells a therapist she is upset over the state of the environment, the therapist is likely to wonder what this really means.  Obviously, the patient is projecting.  Macy’s response is this: Isn’t it natural to care about the world, and to be sad or angry when we see it mistreated?  She is highly critical of thinking that revolves around a separate self, ignoring our interconnectedness with all.  Of course we are hurt when the larger ecosystem is hurt.  We are part of that system.

As the century and the millenium draw to a close, perhaps we are becoming agitated as a society in the same manner we feel upset before an important birthday that reminds us of the disappointments in our lives.  There are so many contradictions in the soul of our civilization. We are safe because we have enough arms to destroy the world one hundred times over. We live in the wealthiest, freest country on earth, and our infant mortality rate leads industrialized nations.  Our technological advances take us “onward and upward” while the environment on which we depend for survival is losing its ability to support us.  Computers allow us to do so much, but our dependence on them could lead to disaster.   Communication advances have indeed created a Global village, but we are less and less connected to our neighbors, if indeed we know what a village is anymore.

I don’t have any “answers” to these contradictions and challenges.  But I believe that we are making ourselves busy as a way of avoiding our anxieties about these serious threats to not only our way of life but to human life itself.

I believe we need to stop, and light a candle in the dark.  Sit with our anxieties, sit with the difficult truths of our situation without trying to affix blame.  We need to slow down, and move through our lives with a greater sense of connection with others, with ourselves, and with that which supports us all.

In March, this church will be providing multiple overlapping venues for exploring that sense of connection.  What started as an abstract concept in my supervision session with Ken has become a “theme month”: worship services, social action, some religious education classes, and other parts of First Parish will all address different aspects of a single theme.  We have tried out many names for this theme: Wholeness, Sustaining Life, Mindful Living.  Finally we decided that all of these words speak to a part of what we were trying to get at, but we will center our discourse on beautiful language we find right in our hymnal and posted on our walls.  In March this community will be immersed in the seventh of our Principles and Purposes: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

The worship services in March will relate to interdependence; the Social Action Committee will help us live more mindfully with regard to the environment; and the Religious School will engage our children with lessons and activities related to this theme.  If you have any questions or ideas how the church can pursue this plan, please speak with members of those committees, with Ken or myself.

In the meantime, let us sit with some questions…

How can we live our lives in ways that our nourishing to our souls?
How can we return to our true selves?
How can we return to each other?
How can we return to that which binds us together?
 

I will close with a pagan prayer from the Cakes From the Queen of Heaven group:

All the land is wrapped in winter.
Not just the winter of the travels of Mother Earth around the Sun,
But the deeper winter of human greed and selfishness,
The deeper winter of disconnectedness from the Wheel of Life.
 
Lord of the Sun, Horned One of animals and wild places,
Unseen, you have been reborn of the gracious Mother Goddess,
Lady of all fertility.
Hail Great God! Hail and welcome!

We beseech you:
Awaken the land and its people with your warmth,
the deep soul-warmth of love and connection with the Mother and all her creation.
Let the lengthening of the days also be
A strengthening of the bonds between us all,
So that, together, we may heal the wounds of the Earth and the sorrows of Her Children.

Blessed be.
Amen.
 
 

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