December 2017 - Light in Winter Darkness, a meeting for reverence by Ringwood #Unitarians

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.