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.

Community Carols at the Meeting House 2014

As a Unitarian I am delighted that yesterday the Meeting House committee in Ringwood held a community carols session co-sponsored by the Unitarians in Ringwood.  We had carols marking Christmas and other festivals, some more familiar than others.  The words weren’t necessarily quite what people expected, and some were very taken by that.  And the children loved it.

In Great Britain our history is a fusion of many people’s histories, and our faiths are fusions of many different faiths.   Christmas is a festival set against a Jewish cultural background, brought to these islands by Romans and grafted onto the original pre-Christian earth-spirit beliefs.

In these islands it was a pre-Christian practice to hold a festival in the middle of winter to mark the turning of the year, the lengthening of the days, and hope for the future; called Solstice.  It is Solstice today, and people gathered at Stonehenge to see the rising sun at the start of the new solar year.  Near the Solstice, pre-Christian people here celebrated their ancestors in a festival called Yule.  We still talk of Yule logs, though today these tend to be chocolate cakes rather than a smouldering log on the fire.

And brought to Britain from the Middle East, there is a Jewish miracle story from 2000 BCE of an oil-lamp, low on oil, burning continuously for eight days on no more than a drop of oil in the besieged temple of Jerusalem, though it should have gone out long before.  Coming in the dead of winter, Hanukkah celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, of purity over contamination, of spirituality over materialism.  Jewish people the world over have just celebrated Hanukkah on 16 December.

And of course some of the later Romans to arrive here told of the Jewish baby whose mother was turned away from the inn and who laid him in a manger: the baby who as an adult went on to teach that we are loved into being, we are supported throughout our lives by love, and at our ending we are received in love.  Jesus’ good news was that each of us and all of us are loved, and we must pass that love on.  The birth of the baby Jesus is what we celebrate at Christmas.

So all these festivals, and others such as Diwali from Hinduism and Eid from Islam, which also sometimes fall in winter,  are what have fused into our British cultural celebration at this time of year. 

Hope in the dark

Looking for hope in the cold and dark?

So are we, the Unitarians.

What is hope, anyway?

So many narratives of hope are remembered at this time of year.