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A Liberal Meditation on Advent

A Liberal Meditation on Advent

Last updated on: November 1, 2011 at 3:07 pm by James Ford

A Liberal Meditation on Advent 2011-11-01T15:07:34-07:00 James Ford

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The cold has firmly settled into my chest. I don’t feel very bad but yesterday I nearly lost the use of my voice and today while better is more than scratchy and I’m quite worried in anticipation of my need to be able to speak at tomorrow’s worship service.

So, I’m not making the ten hour round trip drive to Woodstock to attend the funeral service for Daido Loori, the late abbot of the Zen Mountain Monastery and head of the Mountains and Rivers Order of American Soto Zen. I’ve just sent an email with my regrets.

As I said, I absolutely must have my voice for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is our Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant.

Thinking about a UU Christmas always reminds me of an incident many years ago when I was in seminary. I was at a cocktail party for some reason or another. I was talking with a woman who asked the perennial “What do you do.” I’d not yet picked up the equivocation about this that some embrace (one UU minister friend when flying and asked this question said, “I’m a garbage man…”) and simply said, “I’m in seminary in preparation for the Unitarian ministry.” (Actually, of course, the Unitarian Universalist ministry, but to unpack all that belongs to another time…) She replied, “Oh, I tried the Unitarian church. But it’s too Christian for me.” This was in Berkeley. We don’t have any Christian Unitarian churches in the Bay Area, or, for that matter the west. A few historic Christian UU congregations in New England, yes. A couple others all quite small scattered about the South and Midwest, but none in the West.

So, I asked, “Where did you go?”

She replied, “the Marin Fellowship.”

Now that’s a conundrum. In an area dominated by a humanist theological perspective this was perhaps the most humanist. Certainly an argument could be made for that assertion.

Then the light dawned.

“When did you go?” I asked.

“Why, on Christmas,” she replied. And then added, “And, just to make sure, I came back on Easter.”

We Unitarian Universalists have a long and somewhat complicated relationship with traditional Christian holidays. I’ll leave Easter for another time.

Christmas, however, we can claim as our own. Even when we are humanist, pagan, or as in my case, Buddhist.

In the Massachusetts colony, the Puritan and Pilgrim divines were of a scholarly nature and they saw how Christmas was a very late innovation. Reading Luke it seems probable the nativity of Jesus was likely sometime in the Spring. But what was unchallengeable was how the observation of Christmas on the 25th of December was a conscious act in Rome to suppress the older Saturnalia with its celebration of the divine Sun. And, hey, it was just one letter different… (Okay, a pun in English. So sue me…)

In Massachusetts if Christmas rolled around on a Sunday it was an ordinary Sunday. If it occurred on any other day it was a fast day.

And this was enforced with the authority of law.

By the early nineteenth century with the emergence of the Unitarian movement (and yes, Universalists, as well. But this is a Unitarian story) a lot of the liberals found themselves visiting Germany, the then hotbed of rational and liberal theological thought.

They saw yule logs. They saw Christmas trees. They saw the whole mishmash of pagan Christianity in full bloom. And they liked it.

The first Christmas tree in Massachusetts was erected at the Unitarian congregation in Lexington.

And it has continued since.

My wise and good friend, Thomas Schade wrote of Christmas and the Unitarian Universalist enterprise:

“Christians used to maintain that the birth of the saviour was an event that had at least the potential of saving all of humanity. Explicit, overt and self-proclaimed Christianity is retreating into tribalism in the face of the far-more dynamic and diverse secular (and commercial) global culture. Implicit, covert and self-emptied (kenotic) forms and descendants of Christianity (like Unitarian Universalism) are still working on the project of universalizing the meaning of the birth of Jesus.

“Most of us will preach and enact a meaning of the birth of Jesus this season, that of a winter festival that reminds us that what we hope for will come from the most unexpected places (a poor baby), in sudden and seemingly miraculous reversals (like light in the darkest hour, kings worshipping in stables, virgin births), and be incarnated in acts of generosity, kindness, hospitality and rootedness. We are telling the same story, but stripped of all the elements by which Christianity has traditionally claimed earthly power by holding the keys to the Kingdom.

“We tell of a salvation that spreads from hand to hand like the candlelight in a darkened sanctuary on Christmas Eve.”

I’ve embraced Zen practice in a pretty fierce way. This discipline is one of watching, of witnessing. It breaks open so much, and it reveals so much. And I will spend my entire life unable to repay the gift of my teachers in opening this discipline for me.

And what it reveals in me is a Western seeker.

Moses and Miriam, Jesus and the Marys all occupy my dreams.

The Christian story is deeply a part of who I am. I mean I learned to read out of my grandmother’s King James Bible.

And, this more universalised (finally that wonderful saving word enter the reflection) Christmas works very much for me in very authentic ways.

This is about the birth of hope. An endless bottomless life giving well…

This is at once the most ancient and the most advanced of spiritual realities.

We are in the midst of the dark, seeking light.

All of us.

Of course as we come to our truest encounter old certainties begin to fall away…

Buddhism, well, the Zen school, has shown what the darkness really is.

In the Sandokai we learn:

Within the light there is darkness, but do not try to understand that darkness: within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light. Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and the foot behind, in walking.

For me Christmas reveals it all.

In a story about the birth of a child…

Happy advent.

And soon, Merry Christmas…

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