Hand-in-Hand

There are so many themes that offer themselves up for consideration to a preacher at this time of year, that just choosing a sermon for the week before Christmas, the week of Chanukah, the week of Winter Solstice, is a challenge in a diverse congregation, not only theologically but emotionally, as well. The holiday season is so loaded down with cultural symbolism, with personal memory, with religious profundity, and with trite platitudes.

We must be honest with the tensions inherent in the holidays. The season is neither pure nor simple for any of us. On one level, the season is a perennial call to our hearts to find reason to celebrate here in the darkest time of year; to sing a carol, to give a gift or two, to put a light in the front window, to try seeing the world – for a few days at least – through the eyes of a child again. And on another level, all this celebration, we know, can carry a fair emotional price tag.

There is – let us be honest – a hint of cultural anxiety not far below the surface, a little persistent voice in the back of the brain that can’t help wondering what all the forced gaiety and relentless Muzak assaulting the senses is really all about.

I hope I don’t sound too heretical to suggest that the answer, in my opinion, is probably not to be found in too literal a reading of the holy days. The birth of a great prophet like Jesus is a worthy cause for celebration, a worthy call to all humanity to consider matters of the soul. But my own theology sees something more at work here in the spirit of the season.

A holy day is a marker in the calendar of our lives; a way of telling what time it is in our journey. It is a point of reference joining us – by memory, by story, and by experience – to our past, and inviting us – by faith – to imagine our future. In the words of Antoine d’St. Exupery, “in a house which becomes a home, one hands down and another takes up the heritage of mind and heart, laughter and tears, musings and deeds… it is needful to transmit the passwords from generation to generation.”

That’s why it is hard to experience the holidays without being drawn back into the holidays of your own childhood, your own formative years. And that, of course, can be both a blessing and a bane for many among us. As the products of imperfect families and imperfect communities, (which all of us are), we carry within us not only the joys and happiness of childhood, but also its sadness, its fears, and disappointments.

This time of year, especially, invokes within us not only the memory and nostalgia of good times past, but also the ache and emptiness of missing loved ones now gone.

I think what all holy days and holy seasons are about is a fundamental, inescapable recognition of the profound mystery of our connectedness, one to another, and each to the whole of creation. We don’t really understand the depth of our connectedness, or how it works, or why it has such a binding claim on the human soul.

But if anything is becoming clearer to us as human knowledge advances into the twenty-first century, it is that we participate in the mystery and glory of the interdependent web of all existence. This is a bedrock principle of our Unitarian Universalist faith. We are responsible to and for one another; we are joined in ways that we are only now beginning to fathom in every area and discipline of our learning.

Dr. Barbara Merritt at our church in Worcester, MA says that the image of the interdependent web of existence is more than a poetic metaphor of philosophy. It is increasingly the working model of both our physical sciences and our social sciences, from physics and socio-biology to history to organizational management and dynamics. She offers as example the interdependent web at work on a sub-atomic level.

“From Bell’s Theorem in Quantum Physics,” she writes, “we know that if we take two paired photons, one charged positive, one negative, and we alter the polarization of one from negative to positive, instantaneously the other photon changes its charge. Separate the two photons with 8,000 miles, and six feet of lead, and again the moment that one charge is changed, its bonded pair responds in kind. The connection between the paired particles is so profound, that the change occurs no matter what the distance, or the obstacles that seemingly separate them. Put them far enough apart, and the change occurs faster than the speed of light.

As physicist Brian Hines writes, “nothing material links the two photons. The connection cannot be shielded by any type of matter or energy, and the strength of their linkage does not diminish with distance.” (Quoted in God’s Whisper, Creation’s Thunder: Echoes of Ultimate Reality in the New Physics.)

This extraordinary connection between two particles in the subatomic level offers a glimpse of just how interconnected our existence really is.” (Barbara Merritt, essay in With Purpose and Principle: Essays About the Seven Principles of Unitarian Universalism, edited by Edward A. Frost, Skinner House Books, Boston, 1998. P. 91-92)

And how does it play out on a human level, this interdependent connection? In some extraordinary and sometimes inexplicable ways.

Joseph Campbell, the anthropologist, in his lectures used to tell a dramatic true story of two policemen who were driving up a road in Hawaii when they saw, on a bridge, on the other side of the guardrail, a young man preparing to jump. The police car stopped, and the policeman on the right jumped out to grab the man. But he caught him just as the man jumped. As he himself was being pulled over, the second policeman arrived and pulled the two of them back in time. Campbell wrote of this:

Do you realize what had suddenly happened to that policeman who had given himself to death with that unknown youth? Everything else in his life dropped off – his duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own life – all of his wishes and hopes for his lifetime had just disappeared. He was about to die.

Later a newspaper reporter asked him, “Why didn’t you let him go? You would have been killed.” And his reported answer was, “I couldn’t let him go. If I had let that young man go, I couldn’t have lived another day of my life.”

“Why?” asked Campbell. Why should any human being suddenly defy the law of self-preservation, supposedly the first law of nature? Perhaps, he argues, it is because there are deeper laws at work within us. There is a deep mutuality that resonates within us, an inner knowing that we share the same life, the same breath, the same spirit, and the suffering of any single being somehow diminishes us all. “Our true reality,” said Campbell, “is in our identity and unity with all life.” (Quoted in Wayne Mueller, Legacy of the Heart.)

The poet philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote: “Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are. What we choose to pay attention to determines to a large extent what we become. We are not only a part of the grand design of natural selection and evolution; by the decisions we make, by the way we take care of, ignore, or increase the brokenness of the world, we ourselves are profoundly changed.”

Journalist Alice Lesak tells a story about what happened at the Seattle Special Olympics a few years ago. Nine young contestants, all physically or mentally challenged, assembled at the starting line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun they all started out, not exactly in a dash, but with a relish to run the race and cross the finish line. All, that is, except one boy who, early on, stumbled onto the track, tumbled over a couple of times, and began to cry.

The other eight kids heard the boy. They slowed down and paused. Then they all turned around and went back. Every one of them went back. They pulled him up on his feet, dusted him off. And then all nine linked arms and walked together across the finish line, while everyone in the stadium stood and cheered.

“Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are.”

Someone once asked G.K. Chesterton once why he was such a convinced monotheist. He wrote back,

“…. I believe that all good things are one thing. That is what I’m feeling now every hour of the day. All good things are one thing. Sunsets, schools of philosophy, babies, constellations, cathedrals, operas, mountains, horses, poems. One thing is always walking among us in fancy-dress, in the gray cloak of the church or the green cloak of a meadow….The Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third…. They were not thrilled, as some ancient Israelite was, one night in the wastes, by the sudden blazing idea of all being the same God….”

“Our true reality is in our identity and our unity with all life.” I don’t know if it’s good physics. Or good socio-biology. Or good management technique. But I can tell you I’m a Unitarian Universalist because I believe it’s good theology.

May each of you find good reason to sing and childish cause to dance this season. I wish you all a Happy Hanukkah, and a Joyous Solstice, and a Merry Christmas.

Amen.