Dear First Parishers,
Sunday’s Ingathering Thanksgiving service was so much fun! It is one of my favorite services. We sang and we listened to the Meetinghouse Ringers ring. We shared different kinds of bread and the stories that came with them. We helped our larger community by collecting food and money ($2475!) for the Open Pantry of Greater Lowell. In this time of inflation and high food prices, your generosity is even more needed, a sacred gift to our neighbors. Our table was indeed wide!
This service always marks the beginning of what I call the “holiday gauntlet”, the time from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, filled with special services and events. Because Thanksgiving is late, this year’s will be particularly tight. Do read the website, the newsletter and the announcements to keep up with what is happening. There will be greens and donuts; evening Advent events and services; our traditional Christmas Eve services (the pageant at 5pm and the “Lessons and Carols” at 7pm). We conclude with our “Pancakes” service the Sunday after Christmas, a community breakfast in the vestry!
Who are we, as Unitarian Universalists, in this season? What are we celebrating when we celebrate these winter holidays? Many of us grew up with Christmas and love the traditions around it, even if we don’t believe literally in the story of Jesus’ birth. But the truth of sacred stories is rarely in the supposed facts. As Walter Brueggemann, one of my favorite biblical scholars, said: “We think in terms of systems and continuities and predictability and schemes and plans. The Bible is to some great extent focused on God’s capacity to break those schemes open and to violate those formulae. When they are positive disruptions, the Bible calls them miracles. We tend not to use that word when they are negative, but what it means is that the reality of our life and the reality of God are not contained in most of our explanatory schemes. And whether one wants to explain that in terms of God or not, it is nonetheless the truth of our life that our lives are arenas for all kinds of disruptions, because it doesn’t work out the way we planned.”
If there has ever been a time of unexpected disruptions—both positive and negative but definitely surprising—it has been these past few years. And it has only accelerated over the past year. I feel the tug of despair at times, as I watch families torn apart by cruel policies, violent political rhetoric that dehumanizes whole groups of people, and the rise of authoritarianism. In between, I feel moments of hope: the generosity I witness within and beyond our congregation; communities coming together to challenge and withstand these cruel policies, and politicians, some unexpected, taking bold stands. Our Soul Matters theme for December is “Choosing Hope”. Hope, as climate activist Rebecca Solnit notes “…locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and knowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.”
The sacred stories of this season—the Solstice, Hanukkah and Christmas—are about choosing hope: trusting in a time of unknowing and darkness, in a Spirit of Mystery, in the possibility of these positive disruptions and what might emerge that we do not expect.
Here’s hoping.
In faith,
Rev. Ellen
