The meeting for reverence for December 2017 was on the theme
of “Light in Winter Darkness”. Our
president for the day gathered together a wealth of thoughts and references to
the kinds of celebration that people have felt moved to make at this time of
year, since well before written records.
At our very fundamental core, there seems always to have
been a fear that, as the nights grow longer and the sun’s effect weaker, the
sun may soon fail to rise at all. Life
may be irretrievably lost. But just when
all hope can be lost, there is a pivot point, which can be marked and measured. And this turning point brings more than hope –
it brings a promise to replace the hope.
So we can see why so many long established world faiths
build on those Earth-centred, earlier beliefs, and choose the dark of winter in
which to locate one of their big celebrations.
The Winter Solstice is but one way of seeing that pivotal event. Christians at Christmas see the promise of
redemption in the birth of a child.
Jews
at Hanukkah see the saving of a whole culture and history and narrative of the
divine, in the unexpected continued burning of a light in the darkness. Diwali
for Hindus is a celebration of lights in the darkness, lights which cannot be
doubted.
We sang a very Unitarian hymn which has words by John Andrew
Storey: “But not alone on Christmas morn / Was God made one with humankind: /
Each time a boy or girl is born, / Incarnate deity we find.” And we may have been a little surprised to
hear a quotation from a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, William Temple (1881
– 1944), referring to several other world faiths and saying, “....There is only
one Divine Light, and every man in his own measure is enlightened by it...”
We heard readings from Forrest Church, from The Cathedral of the World, and from
Walt Whitman, I Thank You, and we had
some moving recorded music from Robert Prizeman and John Rutter, interspersed by
some very intense silences.
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