First Reflection
Finding a Balance: Dark and Light
At our Thanksgiving Sunday service two weeks ago, Emmy Galbraith (our Director of Children and Youth Ministry) spoke beautifully about holding in our hearts two strongly divergent feelings. We were sharing a newly published version of the story of the first Thanksgiving. Keepunumk: Weeȃchumun’s Thanksgiving Story[1] tells the story from a Wampanoag perspective, incorporating Wampanoag spirituality and values. As beautiful as the book is, as compelling and meaningful as the Wampanoag spirituality and values are, it doesn’t erase the catastrophic impact of British colonization on the lives of indigenous people. It’s important for all of us to fully feel the heaviness, the sadness, the pain of that impact and its ongoing legacies. At the same time, it’s also essential to our ongoing spiritual health, individually and collectively, to contemplate and name outwardly the blessings in our lives for which we are grateful, to take time with family and friends to practice rituals of thanksgiving and to gather strength and resilience from such rituals. We can feel both feelings. We can hold both realities. One doesn’t have to erase the other.
For me, this holiday season, this Advent time, this midwinter time, this darkness awaiting the solstice light time, this feasting and frivolity time, causes us to feel divergent—sometimes strongly divergent—feelings; causes us to move in spiritual directions that seem—and are—contradictory.
Here in the upper-middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere, it’s a dark season. There’s so much spiritual sustenance we can encounter in the nurturing, blanketing darkness, the mysterious, magical darkness, the still, quiet darkness. In darkness we have the opportunity to settle, to center down, to turn inward, to face squarely our contradictions, our growing edges, to heal and strengthen ourselves, to nurse those parts of ourselves that feel raw and tender. In darkness, if we’re patient, we can come back to our sources of resilience and courage. We need this dark time in the cycles of our living.
And, at the same time, we instinctually yearn for the light in the midst of the darkness. The return of the sun at the solstice, the guiding star illuminating the Bethlehem manger, the menorah, the kinara—all symbols of reliability in a strange and impersonal universe; symbols of hope in moments of despair; symbols of love to counter hatred, greed and violence; symbols that invite people into community, into celebration, into joy.
We need both. We need spirituality and spiritual practices that draw us into the darkness so we can receive its blessings. We need spirituality and spiritual practices that draw us toward the light so we can receive its blessings. And, always, my concern in this season is that culturally and religiously we put too much emphasis on light, and we miss the spiritual opportunities the darkness holds or us. Let’s face it, lights are everywhere. Beautiful, yes, but so omnipresent, so pervasive they banish all shadow, draw our attention outward, orient us to the myths and narratives of light overcoming darkness. We don’t need to overcome darkness. We need balance. Our ministry theme for December is presence. My claim this morning is that in this season we tend to be present to the light. We’re insufficiently present to darkness. We need to learn how to be present to darkness.
I’ll close this first reflection with a poem by the late Unitarian Universalist minister, the Rev. Francis Anderson, that attempts to rectify this imbalance. He says:
Christmas has no right / to burst upon us / Suddenly / And loudly / From afar / Lighting up / Right where we are / With nylon trees / And a long-life / Plastic / Star…. / It is a lonely / Road / To Bethlehem / That must be walked / Slowly / And untalked .... / Where no bright / Light / Or angel song / Intrudes / Ahead of cue / to wrongly claim / Arrival of the dawn / Before the night / Is walked / By each of us / On through.
Second Reflection
Blue Christmas
With the light comes joy, celebration, singing, feasting, good tidings, good cheer. Some of you—more of you than you might imagine—confess privately that you can’t always get there, not every year. Try as you might, you don’t feel joy. Try as you might, you can’t muster the energy and enthusiasm to celebrate. The good tidings don’t resonate with you. Yes, you spend time with others, you genuinely enjoy the company, you seem cheerful enough, but you know (even if we don’t) that you’re just going through the holiday motions. You add your voice to the caroling chorus, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Glory to the Newborn King,” but the words catch in your throat, and even if nobody else notices, you know your voice isn’t as strong as it has been in other years. And you don’t even have the inner resolve to remind yourself that even though you love singing the song, you don’t agree with the theology. It just doesn’t seem to matter this year.
There could be any number of reasons for your malaise. Perhaps this is the year your spouse died. We’ve had six deaths in our congregational family since July. Maybe you lost a sibling or a close friend. This is your first holiday season without them. You are sad. And people are tip-toeing around you, not sure what to say when all you really want is for them to be themselves. Or maybe it’s your tenth holiday season without your loved-one, and you really miss them this year, more than you have in recent years.
Perhaps the holidays were never pleasant for you as a child. Challenges in your family of origin made the holidays more of an ordeal than a celebration. You thought you’d put it all behind you, but those long ago days are poking through this year.
Perhaps this year you, or someone close to you, is living with a debilitating illness. The treatment is overwhelming—and not just the treatment, but the trips to the doctor’s office, the poking and prodding, long hold-times on the phone with the insurance company, and having to explain over and over again what you’re going through to well-meaning people who ask how you’re doing.
Or perhaps you’re down because every day your wide-open heart reaches out to the world and bears witness to some new problem, some hard news, some ominous rumbling on the horizon, some new violence, some frightening new climate data. The emotional energy it takes to process it just so you can get through your days leaves you with little to no capacity for joy and good cheer.
Sometimes we call this Blue Christmas.
It’s OK.
It’s OK to be blue at this time of year. There’s no rule that you have to feel joy when the larger culture says it’s time to feel joy. And so much of the joy is contrived anyways. But it’s also true that we typically don’t make sufficient room for these harder, more difficult feelings during the holiday season. We’re conditioned to be present to joy, but not present to this particular species of darkness. Again, we’re out of balance.
I’m not urging you to impose your blues on someone else’s holiday party. That’s not the path to balance. I am suggesting it is healthy to make room in which to experience and name what is hard for us in this season. Not as a “bah humbug” to other peoples’ joy, but as a full statement of who we are right now. I say we owe it to ourselves and to our loved-ones to make room for our blue feelings, precisely because they’re real, precisely because it’s unhealthy to silence them.
And I’ve noticed over the years, when we intentionally make that room, when we have the opportunity to name what is hard for us, when we can be present to it, and when those around us can be present to it, that presence creates balance. And, sometimes, not always but sometimes, in the midst of our outwardly-stated blueness, joy and good cheer come upon us unexpectedly.
So I say, bring your whole self to this holiday season. Bring every blessed piece of you. Strive or balance. There is room or all of you. There is room for the whole you.
Third Reflection
I Will Be Present Tomorrow
In planning this service, Mary (Bopp) and I talked a lot about music that evokes multiple, often contradictory feelings at the same time. She kept referencing a scene from the early 2000s remake of science fiction television holiday classic, Battlestar Galactica (I know, not a holiday show). The scene features the fighter pilot, Starbuck, reminiscing about her childhood when her father would play music that made her feel happy and sad at the same time. Mary said she’s always looking for music that has the effect on her. The music she’s offering today is such music. Human beings are capable of experiencing the light and the dark, the joy and the sadness at the same time. Music can do that too.
Every year when we come to these first Sundays in December, when we come to Advent, when we begin that period of waiting and anticipation for Christmas, for the solstice, for the beautiful lights; and when it is also dark, also time to turn inward, we sing “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” It’s a Christian Advent hymn, one of the most famous. For me, the words are important, but the music is what really resonates. The music orients me toward mystery, toward silence and stillness, toward darkness. Yet it’s also a hymn of rejoicing, full of anticipatory joy. “Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come within as Love to dwell.” For me joy is finely woven into the hymn’s darkness. There’s a wonderful balance. Multiple feelings simultaneously.
I’ve been making the claim that it’s important for the quality and health of our spiritual lives to be present in this holiday season to the full range of our emotions, to the full spectrum of light and dark. Given that, I can’t resist showing you a message hidden in the original Latin version of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Apologies if this is a tad nerdy.
I’m basing this sharing on a 2013 article by C. Michael Hawn, a former professor of Church Music at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” in the form we sing it today, was composed in Latin likely between the 9th and 12th centuries, though it is made up of more ancient components known as antiphons. If I understand correctly, an antiphon is a sung response to a Bible reading in a worship service. In this hymn, those more ancient antiphons are various references to Jesus, preceded by “O.” O Emmanuel. O Splendor. O Dayspring. O Wisdom. Historically there are eight antiphons: wisdom, Adonai, root of Jesse (who is the father of King David), key of David, Dayspring, King of the Gentiles, and Emmanuel. Take the first letter of each name (in Latin) and you get the word SARCORE. As far as I know, this is gibberish.
However, read it backwards! You get Ero Cras, which in Latin means, “I will be present tomorrow.”[2] (My wife, the Latin scholar, says that’s one way to translate it. It could just be “I will be tomorrow” or “I will exist tomorrow.”)
Regardless of what it means or what the original composers had in mind, I like that there’s a hidden message that can be interpreted as “I will be present tomorrow.” I like it as a call to us to be present in this season, present to the dark as well as the light, present to the sorrow as well as the joy, present to the full range of who we are and all we can hold. Rejoice, indeed.
Amen and blessed be.
[1] Learn more about this book at:
[2] Hawn, C. Michael, “History of Hymns: ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’” Discipleship Ministries: United Methodist Church (May 20, 2013). See: https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-o-come-o-come-emmanuel
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