In the story Marcia read, Jackie's Gift: A True Story of Christmas, Hanukkah and Jackie Robinson by Sharon Robinson, the Robinson family noticed what their neighbors, the Satlows didn’t have, and sought to provide what was missing. To the Robinsons, it wouldn’t have been Christmas without a tree and ornaments. To the wise men who traveled from afar to pay homage to baby Jesus, nothing said Hosanna like frankincense, gold, and myrrh. If they had thought about it, or perhaps had been parents of a newborn themselves, they might have brought nappies or some sort of luxury swaddling—but they didn’t. They brought what they knew to be valuable, just as the Robinsons did.
The gifts of the Magi and the Robinson family expressed their affection. Jackie and Rachel Robinson hadn’t encountered many Jews and certainly had no exposure to Jewish practices or traditions. Thus they had no way of knowing Sarah Satlow’s orthodox parents would have plotzed at the sight of the tree. What they knew was the same commandment baby Jesus would learn and grow to teach all who followed him: From the 15th chapter, 7th verse of the book of Deuteronomy, “If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community … do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. You should rather open your hand, willingly lending enough to meet the need, whatever it may be.”
That sensibility informed Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and perhaps inspired Rachel and Jackie Robinson to go out on Christmas Eve and get another tree, to choose from among their ornaments ones they would lend. And it is that spirit of offering what is most precious to us, that willingness, yea, that desire, to share it with others, that defines Christmas. For our brothers and sisters worshipping deep in the heart of the Christian tradition, Christmas celebrates the birth of a savior. Here, we lift up the salvific gift inherent in the spirit of generosity made available to all who heed it. We can go a step further than the Magi or the Robinsons. Like Mary and Joseph and the Satlows we can receive the gifts of our neighbors in the spirit in which they were given, even if they don’t fit the occasion. Yes, we can re-gift, but more importantly, we can see through to the heart of their intention and by acknowledging that, we give them what they meant to give us: what we all value—- to be cared about, to be recognized, to be appreciated.
So this Christmas, no matter what Santa brings, no matter how quickly you stash something into next year’s Yankee Swap pile, take a moment to consider your neighbors’ longing. Consider not just what you would want but what they need, and if you have no other point of reference than yourself, give that: give of your good heart and your kind soul, and remember what The Little Prince taught: that “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.” And perhaps less well known but no less true, “The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them.”
When Sarah and Archie Satlow see in a tree not a symbol of Christ but the love he learned from the God of their understanding, and when Mary and Joseph recognize an expression of adoration in otherwise impractical gifts, they remind us how to find meaning that can save us by restoring us to love. Amen.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Sunday, December 26, 2010
Christmas Eve Enlightenment
Parishioner's Response by Patricia Caspers
I didn't grow up spending Christmas Eve in church. In fact, I didn't spend much time in church at all, so for me Christmas wasn't about the birth of Christ so much as it was about time with family, eggnog, the scent of gingerbread cookie ornaments mingling with the evergreen scent of the tree, and laughter.
When the family scattered because of death and divorce, Christmas changed too.
Because I didn't have faith in the Christmas miracle, for many years my sense of loss at Christmas was stronger than my joy-- and that's still true to some extent, especially since moving 3,000 miles away from the tiny family I have left. I often feel like shouting a la Charlie Brown, "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?" But as much as I appreciate the beauty in Linus's heartfelt monologue, I just don't believe.
I'm learning, though, that all families change over time. Children grow and go their own holiday ways or bring families of their own to the gathering. Death and divorce happen all around, and there are enough melancholy holiday tunes to remind me I'm not alone with my loss.
This year we bundled up our children and attended the candlelight service at First Parish in Fitchburg where we have recently become members. It's a place where my atheist husband and I can enjoy the beauty of the season without feeling like frauds.
The choir carolled, Marcia read a story for all ages: Jackie's Gift: A True Story of Christmas, Hanukkah and Jackie Robinson ,
(with which I became so enthralled I forgot where I was or what I was doing until my little guy led me blinkingly back to my pew), and Leaf reminded us to accept all gifts with the spirit in which they are given.While Leaf spoke I thought about all of the Christmas celebrations I've attended with various families since the last happy eve I spent with the Caspers' clan, and I realized that those holidays were gifts, too, yet I accepted them begrudgingly or refused them altogether.
We spent a quiet Christmas morning at home with our children and, for the first time, the evening with my in-laws, whom I'm still coming to know. While I reminisced fondly about Christmases of Old, I kept Leaf's words in mind and was grateful for each gift of the day: a skype with my parents in California, the Santa sparkle in our children's eyes, a tamale assembly line and impromptu mini-feast with my brother-in-law, and of course, the pie.
It's a good and sometimes difficult lesson for every day, to be present to the gifts instead of the trials-- remembering the woman who let me and my over-tired, tantruming preschooler ahead of her in the grocery line, instead of the tantrum itself.
But that's the great thing about life; it offers ample opportunity for learning, and failing, and learning again. And that's a bit of miracle I'll carry into the New Year.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Of Solstice and Fullness
For ancient agrarian cultures, the growing darkness signaled infertility, the sun standing still, the encroachment of uncertainty in the world around: the fallow fields beneath indigo skies, sleeping bulbs beneath frozen ground—no way of knowing what would come to pass.
Tuesday’s solstice comes with a full moon and a lunar eclipse. Wholeness and obscurity. A reminder that we, like the moon, are always full. We may feel empty or partial, a sliver of our total selves as we wax and wane. But at any given moment like the moon our fullness is there even when not apparent.
The poet Denise Levertov describes it this way:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life… (The Great Unknowing)
Winter solstice with its womb of solar darkness birthing lunar light invites us re-imagine ourselves—to glimpse the forgotten truth of our wholeness as we daily unfold into our own re-making. The childhood that shapes us, accords us the tenderness and bruises we spend our adulthoods learning to recognize, and if we are lucky, heal, contains the seeds of fullness whether they fall on fertile soil or settle on arid land.
The novelist Darin Strauss, writes in his new memoir, Half A Life: “Things don’t go away. They become you. …We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
We see ourselves reflected in a moon that in turn reflects light from a source both distant and present. Thus we are beings able to achieve incandescence by reflecting and synthesizing light, be it solar or divine.
Perhaps that is why I love the line: We walk in all the light we have. For like the moon, we have moments of brightness that set snowy fields awash like the dawn, and moments of eclipse when darkness penetrates our core.
Yet eclipse like shadow exists only in the presence of light.
In Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, she writes: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we are formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
Several years ago, when I volunteered as a chaplain in a county jail I encountered a man I’ll call Tom who felt victimized by a system that was out to get him. I listened sympathetically for many weeks. After Tom got sentenced to the state prison, I went up to visit him, along with another fellow I’ll call Bob I also met in the county jail. Unlike Tom, Bob took responsibility for his actions and blamed no one else. I visited with Bob first, mentioning my intention to see Tom. That’s when Bob told me that Tom had worked for him in a community-based treatment program for sex offenders. According to Bob, Tom had shown no remorse then for the poor choices that had led to his dismissal, just as he showed no remorse for the sex offense he had been convicted of.
Bob’s information took me by surprise. I let my visit with him run so long so there was no time left to see Tom. I reconsidered whether to answer Tom’s letters. Apparently, he had misrepresented himself and the truth.
But in that way that grace appears, I remembered the other line that instructs me: it is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change.
This is, of course, a story of my stumbling in the darkness, not Tom.
It was not my role to judge him, but only to detect his light and reflect it back.
I decided to answer his letters and over the years I saw the shift from blaming others to expressions of remorse. Tom had enough light to take responsibility. He owned his offense. He recounted his therapy, named his addictions. Recognized his shadow and more remarkably, his light.
The darkness of eclipse is but a testimony to the hidden moon.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins writes:
The moon is full tonight…
It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
The long night with its full moon bright and then eclipsed, then re-emergent gives us a way to visualize the interior process of spiritual journey. The way we each travel a path or blaze a trail in order to return to our essence.
It’s easy to lose sight of the moon in the ambient sulfur glow of human-made light. So much of it we create to find our way out of the darkness when instead we are called to go in, to inhabit the darkness in all its fecundity. Yet how do we enter into the darkness if we walk in all the light we have and don’t wish to stumble or worse, crash headlong into something or someone?
If we take darkness as metaphor for the moments in our lives we lack awareness or necessary insight, if darkness represents the blind spots, the defenses that obscure our ability to see the needs or wants of others, or to recognize the deepest longing within ourselves, why seek to spend a minute longer in it?
Again a poet, this time Wendell Berry, provides an answer:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
When I was a child after I had cut my eye and been told it was a miracle I had not lost my sight, I used to practice walking with my eyes closed, feeling for walls and doorways, my fingers splayed across emptiness. I spent decades trying to find my way back to that original wholeness we come from, that oneness with creation, or as I like to imagine it, the great tree of life. And in that search for connection, that yearning for spiritual intimacy I stumbled a lot. Not unlike Tom when I first met him, I too blamed the furniture someone had carelessly left in my way. I cursed the darkness instead of getting to know it.
The dark wings and feet scared me.
But that is the beauty and gift of solstice, the long night, the bridge of darkness that delivers us, if we are willing to inhabit it long enough to know the moon is there when we do not see it, to feel the light of our fullness in that dark.
When we can view ourselves with compassion, when we can reach out to the parts of ourselves that feel horribly broken, whether shattered by dysfunction, ambition or grief, and run our fingers ever so gently around the sharp edges, when we can embrace the wisdom of an ancient poet’s line—“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I would not lose one”—we enter into union with the darkness and whatever we conceive of as the divine. When we can hold ourselves in gentleness not judgment, even the sharp parts, we glimpse the entire moon in a silver crescent.
I realize now, when Bob first told me what he knew of Tom, it’s as if he cracked open a vial of darkness and spilled it over Tom’s light. For a few minutes in a prison visiting room, I let Bob’s experience of Tom eclipse mine. The light I thought I’d seen in Tom became a mirage. But the grace that blooms in darkness, as Wendell Berry writes, sang to me again the truth that we walk in all the light we have. Just as Tom could not yet see his fullness, or understand how life bends us into shapes not entirely of our own making, neither could I. What I could detect however, was that in reaching out into the dark uncertainty that was Tom, I splayed my hand once again to comb my own darkness. To brush against my own edges and unfamiliar forms. To recognize compassion leads us back to our essential selves.
I imagine us coming into existence as an orb of glowing light, and then dispersing as experiences split us open and apart.
It’s so easy then to deny our missteps thinking they lead us away from God or whatever we name the sanctity of deep connection with all that is. It’s easy in these days of self-help and pop psychology to pathologize or rationalize, to slip into the chasm of sinner or saint, lout or victim. But that is not what allows us to come into our fullness. Compassion does because it lights the darkness, because it hold us in the same precious love Julian of Norwich promised six centuries ago.
Compassion for our true whole selves, scattered or reconstituted, and compassion for the thousand pieces of everyone else is what makes it possible to “gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself and carry him outdoors… steady[ing] his lolling head with the palm of your hand.”
As we enter the darkness solstice brings, and let it inhabit us for a while, we too will see in
“scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
… sky-moon complete, transcending
all violation
… talking to herself about
the shape of a life”
born into wholeness, rising full.
Amen.
Tuesday’s solstice comes with a full moon and a lunar eclipse. Wholeness and obscurity. A reminder that we, like the moon, are always full. We may feel empty or partial, a sliver of our total selves as we wax and wane. But at any given moment like the moon our fullness is there even when not apparent.
The poet Denise Levertov describes it this way:
Scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
but sky-moon
complete, transcending
all violation
Here she seems to be talking to herself about
the shape of a life… (The Great Unknowing)
Winter solstice with its womb of solar darkness birthing lunar light invites us re-imagine ourselves—to glimpse the forgotten truth of our wholeness as we daily unfold into our own re-making. The childhood that shapes us, accords us the tenderness and bruises we spend our adulthoods learning to recognize, and if we are lucky, heal, contains the seeds of fullness whether they fall on fertile soil or settle on arid land.
The novelist Darin Strauss, writes in his new memoir, Half A Life: “Things don’t go away. They become you. …We contain more than our understanding allows us, at a given moment, to understand.”
We see ourselves reflected in a moon that in turn reflects light from a source both distant and present. Thus we are beings able to achieve incandescence by reflecting and synthesizing light, be it solar or divine.
Perhaps that is why I love the line: We walk in all the light we have. For like the moon, we have moments of brightness that set snowy fields awash like the dawn, and moments of eclipse when darkness penetrates our core.
Yet eclipse like shadow exists only in the presence of light.
In Mary Karr’s memoir, Lit, she writes: “Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we are formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential.”
Several years ago, when I volunteered as a chaplain in a county jail I encountered a man I’ll call Tom who felt victimized by a system that was out to get him. I listened sympathetically for many weeks. After Tom got sentenced to the state prison, I went up to visit him, along with another fellow I’ll call Bob I also met in the county jail. Unlike Tom, Bob took responsibility for his actions and blamed no one else. I visited with Bob first, mentioning my intention to see Tom. That’s when Bob told me that Tom had worked for him in a community-based treatment program for sex offenders. According to Bob, Tom had shown no remorse then for the poor choices that had led to his dismissal, just as he showed no remorse for the sex offense he had been convicted of.
Bob’s information took me by surprise. I let my visit with him run so long so there was no time left to see Tom. I reconsidered whether to answer Tom’s letters. Apparently, he had misrepresented himself and the truth.
But in that way that grace appears, I remembered the other line that instructs me: it is only in an uncondemned state that any of us can change.
This is, of course, a story of my stumbling in the darkness, not Tom.
It was not my role to judge him, but only to detect his light and reflect it back.
I decided to answer his letters and over the years I saw the shift from blaming others to expressions of remorse. Tom had enough light to take responsibility. He owned his offense. He recounted his therapy, named his addictions. Recognized his shadow and more remarkably, his light.
The darkness of eclipse is but a testimony to the hidden moon.
The former poet laureate Billy Collins writes:
The moon is full tonight…
It's as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby's face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth's bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.
And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.
And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.
And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
The long night with its full moon bright and then eclipsed, then re-emergent gives us a way to visualize the interior process of spiritual journey. The way we each travel a path or blaze a trail in order to return to our essence.
It’s easy to lose sight of the moon in the ambient sulfur glow of human-made light. So much of it we create to find our way out of the darkness when instead we are called to go in, to inhabit the darkness in all its fecundity. Yet how do we enter into the darkness if we walk in all the light we have and don’t wish to stumble or worse, crash headlong into something or someone?
If we take darkness as metaphor for the moments in our lives we lack awareness or necessary insight, if darkness represents the blind spots, the defenses that obscure our ability to see the needs or wants of others, or to recognize the deepest longing within ourselves, why seek to spend a minute longer in it?
Again a poet, this time Wendell Berry, provides an answer:
“To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.”
When I was a child after I had cut my eye and been told it was a miracle I had not lost my sight, I used to practice walking with my eyes closed, feeling for walls and doorways, my fingers splayed across emptiness. I spent decades trying to find my way back to that original wholeness we come from, that oneness with creation, or as I like to imagine it, the great tree of life. And in that search for connection, that yearning for spiritual intimacy I stumbled a lot. Not unlike Tom when I first met him, I too blamed the furniture someone had carelessly left in my way. I cursed the darkness instead of getting to know it.
The dark wings and feet scared me.
But that is the beauty and gift of solstice, the long night, the bridge of darkness that delivers us, if we are willing to inhabit it long enough to know the moon is there when we do not see it, to feel the light of our fullness in that dark.
When we can view ourselves with compassion, when we can reach out to the parts of ourselves that feel horribly broken, whether shattered by dysfunction, ambition or grief, and run our fingers ever so gently around the sharp edges, when we can embrace the wisdom of an ancient poet’s line—“My heart is broken in a thousand pieces. I would not lose one”—we enter into union with the darkness and whatever we conceive of as the divine. When we can hold ourselves in gentleness not judgment, even the sharp parts, we glimpse the entire moon in a silver crescent.
I realize now, when Bob first told me what he knew of Tom, it’s as if he cracked open a vial of darkness and spilled it over Tom’s light. For a few minutes in a prison visiting room, I let Bob’s experience of Tom eclipse mine. The light I thought I’d seen in Tom became a mirage. But the grace that blooms in darkness, as Wendell Berry writes, sang to me again the truth that we walk in all the light we have. Just as Tom could not yet see his fullness, or understand how life bends us into shapes not entirely of our own making, neither could I. What I could detect however, was that in reaching out into the dark uncertainty that was Tom, I splayed my hand once again to comb my own darkness. To brush against my own edges and unfamiliar forms. To recognize compassion leads us back to our essential selves.
I imagine us coming into existence as an orb of glowing light, and then dispersing as experiences split us open and apart.
It’s so easy then to deny our missteps thinking they lead us away from God or whatever we name the sanctity of deep connection with all that is. It’s easy in these days of self-help and pop psychology to pathologize or rationalize, to slip into the chasm of sinner or saint, lout or victim. But that is not what allows us to come into our fullness. Compassion does because it lights the darkness, because it hold us in the same precious love Julian of Norwich promised six centuries ago.
Compassion for our true whole selves, scattered or reconstituted, and compassion for the thousand pieces of everyone else is what makes it possible to “gather into your arms the sleeping infant of yourself and carry him outdoors… steady[ing] his lolling head with the palm of your hand.”
As we enter the darkness solstice brings, and let it inhabit us for a while, we too will see in
“scraps of moon
bobbing discarded on broken water
… sky-moon complete, transcending
all violation
… talking to herself about
the shape of a life”
born into wholeness, rising full.
Amen.
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