I hope you were here for our Christmas Eve pageant with our children. It was a wonderful night. If you missed it, or even if you were here, you can read about how it came about through the work of parents and kids in our religious education program, and the members of the Worship and Music committee, in the February newsletter.
In the pageant, we told the story about the birth of Jesus as it has been handed down to us, respecting the mystery and wonder of that tale. And we invited some characters from other traditions to join us in our celebration of Christmas and the Winter Solstice. Wise people joined us on the backs of the winged dragons of the Solstice, bringing their presents to the Children of Wonder everywhere. We sang traditional Christmas hymns, along with Starr King Fellowship’s own traditional song, “Christmas Morning,” and a newer song, “Song of the Dragons,” for the solstice. It was so much fun. I think we’ll do it again next year.
The thing is, if you had asked me a few years ago what I wanted out of a Unitarian Universalist celebration of winter holidays, I would have said I wanted to be faithful to the tradition or traditions we were honoring. I would have said that however much the Christian celebration of Christmas and the pagan celebration of the Winter Solstice had in common, they were really two separate things, and ought to be celebrated separately. I would have said that we ought to sing hymns that reflected Unitarian or Universalist theology or history. I would have said that it’s hard to celebrate Christmas, as Unitarian Universalists, because we tend to hunger after the feeling and wonder of Christmas while not believing in the story it tells in any literal or historical way. I was pretty committed to my own vision of what a Unitarian Universalist Christmas should look like.
When the idea for a new approach to our Christmas Eve service was presented to me, though, I had the good sense to let go of my ideas. I thought to myself, “Let’s try this. I won’t worry that it’s not something I thought up.” It helped, too, that I went on sabbatical last spring. The idea for a pageant for Christmas first came up a year ago–last February–and I wrote to all the people who I thought would be involved before I left on sabbatical. I said, “Here’s a new idea for Christmas! Let’s go with it. You work out the details.” Then I left. I highly recommend this planning strategy.
In working with many of you on our Christmas Eve service–including many members who had been to one or two previous Starr King Christmas Eve services, as well as with members who had been to dozens–I was reminded of the importance of letting go of our own ideas and plans some of the time.
This is especially important for us as a fellowship to remember as we continue to grow. Each year, the governing board drafts a covenant, which is an agreement among its members of how they will work together as your board. This year, Paul Tierney brought a concept he learned at a Unitarian Universalist leadership school from my colleague Erica Baron, the minister in Rutland, Vermont. It was: “Like a new idea for five minutes.”
Think about that. “Like a new idea for five minutes.” This is excellent advice. Someone suggests changing the Christmas Eve service. Try liking that. See how it feels. Someone comes to a committee with an idea for a change or a new program. Like what they have to say for five minutes.
I have often been so pleasantly surprised when I opened myself up to the enthusiasm another person has for their passions. Sometimes I am even infected by them. This fellowship already has 140 members in it, and even more friends, and visitors and newcomers all the time. Those adults have children with their own unique souls and ways of being in the world. With so many of us, spreading out into our new, shared space, surely there is room for more than one way of doing things.
We ministers are supposed to learn the basics of our work in divinity school, but it is widely understood that we don’t really know what we are doing until we have been in the thick of ministry for a few years. For me, part of learning this work as I do it has been becoming a parent. I think I have become better at being your minister since I became a parent.
Now, this is not to say that ministry is like parenting, or that the relationship between a minister and the congregation is like the relationship between a parent and her child. I try to stay away from family metaphors to describe the relationship between a congregation and its minister. Rather, it’s that both families and congregations are like another group: a team. A team (or a family, or a congregation) works best when all the members enjoy working together and understand that they’re on the same side.
Of course, in a family, the other team members are often people who share your genetic code. And sometimes they are also small children who are capable of driving you out of your mind. (I understand that teenagers may also have this special ability.) One of the ways I think parenting has made me a better minister (and my children have made me a better parent) is that it has given me the gift of self-reflection. This is another way of saying that I have realized that some of the things that can drive me crazy in my children are also qualities I possess.
It makes me stop and think, for a moment. It gives me a certain amount of understanding and fellow-feeling with my child. If I recognize a quality in him that I think has also been a part of me for thirty-plus years, what are the chances that I am going to get him to change by tomorrow? Not trying to get him to change at all, but rather figuring out how we can both be who we are and still live together and enjoy the days peacefully, has so far been a better strategy–when I am calm and reflective enough to remember that approach.
Being open to new ideas is also something I’ve learned, not just from spending time with my children, but from work that involves so many other people so much of the time. I’ve learned that I do not have enough energy or enough good ideas to be in charge of everything that happens all the time. I don’t even have enough of those things to pass judgment on everything that happens all the time.
This has been a hard lesson for me, because I like to be in control of things, and I like things to be organized. (This is why I’ve taken up knitting.) But there is more grace, more abundance, more freedom, more movement of the spirit, there is more of what is good when many people contribute and lead their own passions and enthusiasms. There is also more joy, because people doing things they love, and having the chance to share that love with others, makes those leaders really happy, in my experience. Congregations do many different things. One of the best things they do is to give people the chance to be human in a way they had never tried before. Openness and possibility get us there, while grasping after control does not.
There is a balance to this openness and trying new things, which is ritual. All of us, children and adults, crave things being the way we expect them to be. We want to try new things, but we also want a touchstone of the familiar so that we can relax into something we know. A certain amount of ritual and sameness allows many other things to flow and change without becoming overwhelming.
I’m reminded of a children’s book, in which a Jewish boy is given a prayer shawl by his grandfather. That boy brings it with him from Europe to America. He grows up. Parts of the shawl wear out: it needs new fringes, sections of it need to be rewoven, the hem is resewn. By the time that immigrant boy is a grandfather himself, almost nothing is left of the original shawl. But when he gives it to his grandson, it is still the same shawl his own grandfather gave him. It is the same because the boy, who became a man, and then an old man, wore that shawl for Friday prayers week in and week out. It was used for the same holy occasions, day after day, week after week, year after year. It participated in the rituals of the man’s life. Even if every stitch in the shawl had been replaced by the time he handed it on to his grandson, it would still have been the same shawl his grandfather gave him. The rituals spun into its threads were the warp over which the shuttle of change flew.
Now that both my boys are sitting at the table, my younger son in a high chair, we are trying to eat dinner together as a family. Some nights this works better than others. When it works at all, dinner itself is the culmination of a mad application of will to the chaos of the late afternoon and early evening, to reheat leftovers or cook something quick and easy and get everybody sitting down to eat before anyone melts down from hunger or exhaustion. Some nights it doesn’t happen at all, despite our best efforts.
When it does work though, Andy and I have found that we can move finally from the chaos of preparation to the ritual of eating together by saying a grace. We are teaching Benedict, our three-and-a-half-year-old, what grace involves. We have told him that prayers around the dinner table can be to ask for help with something ourselves, to say thank you for something, or to ask for help for someone else. We pick a theme for the prayer and each take a turn giving our contribution to that theme.
When we sit down in the hullaballoo of the evening and say, “It’s time to say a prayer,” Benedict quiets down and holds out his hands to us. The ritual of the prayer brings our spirits to the table, even though our bodies may already have been there. It is a constant amidst the change and sweep of our lives. Andy and I were haphazard about table graces before we had children eating with us. But now that we are doing it regularly (ostensibly for them) it turns out to be healing for our souls also. I know that on a night when I am alighting at the dinner table to eat for 20 minutes before going back out into the winter night for a meeting, that prayer makes it feel like I had real time with my family, real communion around a shared table.
I think that Unitarian Universalist minister Robert Fulghum was on to something with his essay on learning everything we needed in kindergarten. Learning things by being in the team, of a family or a congregation, is really relearning things we once knew when we were children. When playing games, sometimes I get to decide on the game, and sometimes you get to. Stick around a try out new games even if you don’t know how it will go yet. Try new things.
But also, keep some things the same. Have there be some things that you do the same way every day, every week, and every year. Accept who you are, and let other people be who they are. Most importantly, perhaps, think of your group as a team. On a team, all the members are on the same side. There is no “us” and “them,” even if some of us do different things or play the game in different ways. Everything we need to know, we have already learned. We continue to remember together, in beloved community.
Please join me in prayer, with these words inspired by Sara Moores Campbell.
Spirit of beginnings, of growth and generations, Spirit of connection and love, be with us this morning.
“Give us the spirit of the child. Give us the child who lives within: The child who trusts, the child who imagines, the child who sings, The child who receives without reservation, the child who gives without judgment (Campbell).” Help us remember the children we once were and still are. Help us forget our own self-consciousness. Help us relax our vigilant anxiety. Help us live now, in this place, in this moment.
“Give us a child’s eyes, that we may receive the beauty and freshness of this day like a sunrise; Give us a child’s ears, that we may hear the music of mythical times; Give us a child’s heart, that we may be filled with wonder and delight (Campbell).” Help us see the possibility and promise of each day, and not count the failures and disappointments of the past. Help us dream, and play, and do things for the fun of them.
“Give us a child’s faith, that we may be cured of our cynicism; Give us the spirit of the child, who is not afraid to need, who is not afraid to love (Campbell).” Let us know that we all need one another, need the love and companionship another human can give. And let us know that we all have love and companionship to give another. Even when we feel empty, that spring may well within us again. Give us the comfort of your spirit, as we know it in our hearts and through the care of other people. Amen.
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Sources
Campbell, Sara Moores. “Give Us the Spirit of the Child.” Singing the Living Tradition. Ed. Unitarian Universalist Association. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. 664.
Fulghum, Robert. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Ballantine Books, 2004.
Oberman, Sheldon. The Always Prayer Shawl. Boyd’s Mills Press, 2005.
Tags: Sermons, Spiritual growth