Spirit Of Life

The Rev. John Scott Millspaugh
December 11, 2005

This is the season when UUs celebrate . . . all manner of things.  I have an atheist friend who, unsurprisingly, is not affiliated with any religious community.  He recently said to me, “I like atheism, but it doesn’t have enough holidays.”

Sometimes as a Unitarian Universalist, I feel the same way.  I like Unitarian Universalism, but it doesn’t have enough holidays.  We’re in that season when other religions are celebrating or preparing to celebrate things like Hanukkah, Christmas, Diwali, Bodhi Day, and Winter Solstice, to name a few.

What’s a UU to do in the midst of such festivities, none of which are exactly our own?  Miracles are happening all around us, saviors of the world being born, angels singing, the sun-god being born again after a long period of darkness—and the miracle that I think I hear being clamored for most these days: oil that lasts eight times longer than anyone thought that it would.  All these fantastic miracles, none of them ours, or all of them equally ours, which in some ways can feel like it diminishes the miracle of each.

What to do with all this religion surrounding us this time of year?  Where is a Unitarian Universalist to find the holiday spirit?  I suppose we could sidestep the theological quandaries involved in looking to several holidays simultaneously by seeking the holiday spirit in the secular side of things, but I’m not sure that much comfort is to be found there.  In line at the grocery store the other day I noticed magazine covers advertising articles like, “300 Ideas for the Best and Happiest Christmas Ever,” “323 Great Gifts for under $25”; "112 Cookie Recipes” and “10 Ways to Look Dazzling for the Holidays” and, finally, “50 Ways to Cut Holiday Costs.”  To me, this doesn’t sound like anything approaching the holiday spirit.  To me it looks like work — if not guilt, anxiety, and confusion.

Culturally, we tend to agree that the holidays feel different than the rest of the year.  We say, “The holiday season is a happy time,” or alternatively, “The holidays are depressing.”  And when we say this, we mean that the holidays actually exert a force on us.  The “happy time” school of thought suggests that the holidays make us feel more generosity, good cheer, and deepening spirituality, whereas the “depression” advocates cite studies that prove the winter holidays are difficult.  At the moment, the "happy holidays" group has a slight edge, the freshest crop of Ph.D.'s having studied our December moods and found them to be merry after all.

Well, I beg to differ.  With no empirical work at all to back me up, I'd like to make a case for people being regular people even when December rolls around.  That's my theory.  Perhaps the holidays just heighten the emotions and the personality quirks that are already there.  Sure, Mom is frantic after Thanksgiving, but she is a frantic person in general.  Brother Larry is nonchalant about the holidays, but he's always been the laid-back type.  Aunt Jessie gears up for a family squabble, but remember, she set up a round or two in July.  Uncle Abram is a natural Santa, but he's a sweetie all year long.i

Maybe the holidays just heighten what we are already feeling, not only as we relate to other people, but also as we relate to other religions.  Some of us, who are already intrigued with other religions, take on things, enjoy hearing the seasonal stories one more time.  We love to hear about the ragtag band of rebels called the Macabees who squeezed eight days of light out of one day’s oil.  We feel a sense of wonder as we learn about a young virgin’s vision of an angel, who tells her that she is destined to bear a child who will bring new hope to the world.  Or we’re intrigued by paganism, and listen with attention about how sun’s sinking lower in the sky, leaving us in the cold and dark, then deciding to turn around again, mirrors the cycle of our internal seasons, our times of death and rebirth, our spiral of despair giving way to a new current of hope.

So for some of us, who are already compelled by the wisdom found in religions of all flavors, the holidays heighten our appreciation of other religions' stories and rituals and beliefs. But others of us, I know from talking to some of you, just can’t understand how intelligent people can tell these same stories year after year.  “We know that Bible scholars now agree that word describing Mary was as a ‘virgin’ was actually a mistranslation, and that the word in Hebrew actually means ‘young woman.’  Don’t the rest of these people know that?  We know that most Jewish scholars believe that the Hanukkah story about the oil was inserted long after the event, by later authors who wanted to give a straightforward military victory a divine seal of approval.  Don’t the rest of these people know that?”, ask some of humanists among us.

But every year, out they come, songs about the virgin birth at the shopping malls, menorahs with spots for eight candles appearing in neighbors' windows, even some of our UU neighbors' windows, holiday cards arriving in the mail bearing mostly news of our friends' lives but also the occasional reference to the coming Kingdom of God.  For those in our ranks who prize reason above all else, the cultural display this time of year can just heighten the conviction that most world religions are not for us, and, we have little to learn from them.

So, the holidays heighten our sense of other religions – for some of us, our appreciation, for others, skepticism.  Well, I think that there is a different way.  I don’t think that we need to suspend our disbelief and act as if we believe things we don’t in order to appreciate the winter holidays.  And I don’t think that turning on our rational minds means that we need to turn off our spirituality. 

As Unitarian Universalists, prizers of reason, worldly fact-beswaddled, lovers of spirituality, we can choose a third way.  True believers define religion narrowly and embrace it.  Skeptics define religion narrowly and reject it.  Our task is to define religion broadly and embrace it.  Unitarian Universalism is not an alternative to religion, but an alternative religion.  An alternative to being religious or irreligious in absolute ways.

In fact, there are three things I suggest you keep in mind this holiday season, three ways that, in combination, can help you find the spirit of the holiday in a decidedly Unitarian Universalist way.

First, look up.  This is the darkest time of the year, The time when nights are longest and we can see the most stars  Does anybody know how many stars there are in the universe for every living human being?  There are 1.7 trillion stars for every living human being.  The star to person ration is 1.7 trillion to one.  That is awesome and it leads us to a sense of humility.  It certainly should discourage human smugness and self-importance.  But does it?  No.  Instead, we sit on this tiny, munificently fixtured rock…arguing over who has the best insider information on the creator and the creation.  Is it the Christian?  The Buddhist?  The Athiest-Rationalist?  The Humanist?  The Theist?  

Please!  We humans trumpet our differences, some even kill one other over them, while, in every way that matters, we are far more alike than we are different.  We are certainly more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge.  In fact, by the time we die, we will barely have gotten our minds wet. The wisest of us all will have but the faintest notion of what life was all about. This counsels humility, but it also affirms oneness. So for a UU sense of the holiday spirit, begin by looking up to the stars.  Doing this reminds us to begin in a space of humility.  You know, humility is part of a set of words, all derived from a common Latin root, humilitas, meaning "lowness, insignificance.”  Words derived from humilitas include humus, the soil, as well as humility, humanitarian, humane, and human.  Insignificance, dust to dust, humility, humanity to one another, human.  The mortar of mortality binds us fast to one another.ii

So the UU sense of the holiday spirit begins with humilitas, not only humility but a humane spirit, caring for others who have been made, low, and recognizing that it is only human to fix on certain stories to guide our way.  Religious stories are not unlike stars that guide us on our way, and some people only need a few stories or a few stars to guide them on their way.

Unitarian Universalists, rather than dismissing the stars that others have chosen, send others blessings on their journey as we set about our own.  We begin by looking up, remembering our humanity and our humility, in marveling at the wonder of the whole.

Second.  We look around us, right where we are.  The second focus of a UU winter holiday, I think, would be our connection to the earth, to the physicality of our lives right here, not life in some more spiritual plane, or life as it could be, but life as it is, now.  Remember the interrelated words, humility, human, humus.  The soil.  The physicality of our living.  The miracle of the now.  We have a song, “Spirit of Life,” and my favorite part of that song is its title, particularly its middle word, "of."  The spirit is OF life.  Not separate from you and me or the trees, but of life itself.  The miracle is life itself. 

Unitarian Minister Ralph Waldo Emerson did not believe in the miracle of the parting of the red sea.  He did not believe in the miracle the Bible claimed, that Jacob had stopped the sun.  He did not believe in the miracle of the creation of the earth in six days. 

But he did believe in the miracle of the sun shining upon this earth and the miracle of the oceans teeming with life. He did believe in the miracle of a newborn child.  He looked at a newborn and saw not just the newborn, but the MIRACLE of the newborn.”  He felt not just the sun on his skin but the MIRACLE of the sun and of the oceans teeming with life.  The miracle of consciousness.  The miracle of hope.  Fundamentalist and orthodox believers find their miracles in Scripture.  Secular materialists discount the very idea of miracle.  Unitarian Universalists follow Unitarian sage Ralph Waldo Emerson and say "All life is miracle," from "the blowing clover to the falling rain."  We look to the here and now and call it miracle.

May Sarton writes, “... if one looks long enough at almost anything, looks with absolute attention at a flower, a stone, the bark of a tree, grass, snow, a cloud, something like revelation takes place…Whatever peace I know rests in the natural world, in feeling myself a part of it, even in a small way.iii

This might sound like a shallow theology, but it is a profound theology.  Sarton speaks of finding the sacred in the here-and-now, in the mundane and the everyday. 

The atheist Unitarian minister David Bumbaugh writes:  “Humanism…gave us a doctrine of incarnation which suggests not that the holy became human in one place at one time to convey a special message to a single chosen people, but that the universe itself is continually incarnating itself in microbes and maples, in hummingbirds and human beings, constantly inviting us to tease out the revelation contained in stars and atoms and every living thing.”

The sacred is right here.  What we have to do is look for it.  The holidays, as we watch the ways other religions celebrate their versions of the sacred, can be a reminder to look for it, right here, right now, to breathe life into it and let it breathe life into us.

So the first focus for Unitarian Universalists during the holiday season can be humble appreciation for the night sky, for all the stars guiding our brothers and sisters home.  The second focus is more earthbound, noticing the sacred that is part of the everyday, which the holidays bring into sharper focus.  The holidays are a time to reclaim the sacred, however you find it, and recommit to honoring the sacred in your life.  So we look up.  We look right here and now.

And the third way to find the spirit of the holidays in a decidedly Unitarian Universalist way is to look behind us to see the long line of forebears who we stand within religious community.  Look behind you to all your ancestors in faith, those who have seen a night sky as expansive as the one you see, those who have perceived miracles in the everyday, those who have found gospel not just in books of scripture but also in nature and poetry and human love.

Remind yourself of the stories.  Of the Unitarians and Universalists who came before you just in this country.  Of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two of the five Unitarians who have served as President of the United States.  Both flawed men, but both committed to democracy, both advocating vigorously for the religious liberty and the separation of church and state that became founding principles of this country.  Remind yourself of Charles Darwin, who both fearlessly and fearfully extolled the use of reason, helping humanity learn about its origins and kinship with all life.  Look back to Henry David Thoreau, who extolled the simple life, and cautioned against rampant consumerism, Thoreau who still inspires the simplicity movement of today.

Think of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and of Susan B. Anthony, abolitionist and suffragette, who helped to bring women’s voices and those of people of color into our political life.  Look back and remind yourself of Florence Nightingale, the nursing pioneer who revolutionized hospital sanitation methods, and of Henry Whitney Bellows and Clara Barton, whose combined efforts led to the establishment of the American Red Cross. Look back and see standing behind you in this faith Horace Mann, who founded public education in this country, and Albert Schweitzer, whose reverence for life brought new meanings to the words compassion and respect.

See standing there Lydia Maria Child, the anti-racist abolitionist who wrote “Over the River and Through the Woods,” which many of us will be singing this holiday season.  See Charles Dickens, whose “Christmas Carol” forever changed the way we think about the meaning of Christmas.

Look behind you and see the long line of forbearers who we stand with in religious community.  Touch the power of this faith.  Begin to learn its stories.  We can do more than embrace or react against other stories, we can also claim our own.

Looking up, looking here and now, looking behind.  In spite of what the tabloid magazines say,
I think that these are the “ideas for the best and happiest holiday season ever.”  These are the “great gifts under $25.”  We can look up, and see not just one star but more than 1.7 trillion stars for every human person. We are reminded of our humanity, of the need to be humane to one another as we celebrate the light we perceive this season.

We can look right here, right now, and find the sacred in the miracles of the everyday.  And we can look behind us, to the ancestors in this faith, urging us forward, encouraging us to live from this faith and say “yes” to the Spirit of Life as they did.  For the spirit of the holidays is the spirit of life, the source of love at the center of our lives.  In looking up, in looking here and now, in looking behind us to our ancestors in faith, we say yes to that spirit.  It comes unto us, our hearts begin to sing an old song or a very new one, our hands begin to make the movements of justice, and we are set free, if we but welcome that spirit of life and make space for it in our holiday celebrations.  That spirit of life is ever ready to be discovered and let in. 

This holiday season, let us worry less about what to say no to, and more about what to say yes to.  This holiday season, may each of us take the space and find the strength to say to that spirit, yes.  Yes.  YES!

So may it be.  Shalom, Salaam, Namaste, Blessed Be, and Amen.