There’s a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference,

Where the Meanings, are –

Emily Dickinson

“Yule” (jul) means “wheel” in Norse. The Norse looked at this time of year, facing the darkest and longest night, “Mother Night,” as they called it, and told a story of the night the goddess Frigga left her spinning wheel and labored long and hard to give birth to the light of a new year.

Hiding in the Christian advent wreath is Frigga’s wheel. And the mistletoe? Well!

Odin, the All-Father, and his wife Frigga (or Frigg or “Fria” in Old Saxon) had twin sons, Baldur and Hodur (or Tyr,god of war).

Hodur was a dark and moody boy, a cold loner who spoke to no one. His brother Baldur was a beautiful, radiant boy, and all the gods loved him (excepting one, named Loki).

One day Baldur came to his mother and said, “Mother, for these past seven nights, each night I have had a dream, and that dream shows me that I will die, killed by an arrow made from the branch of a tree.”

As you might suspect, Frigga was very, very worried about her darling boy, and went around to all the trees of the wood, speaking to each one of them and imploring them, “Please, whatever you do, please do not kill my lovely boy Baldur.”

And each tree in its turn promised Frigga that no harm would come to him by one of their branches.

But in her worry and haste, Frigga failed to speak to one family of the woods—one tree—the mistletoe, which grows without having its roots in the earth.

And so it was that Loki—the terrible trickster among the gods, and the only one of the gods who resented Baldur’s radiance and cheerfulness—fashioned an arrow of the mistletoe and, going to visit dark Hodur, Loki said, “Here. Try shooting my marvelous bow! Here’s an enchanted arrow. Try shooting it over the roof of the house.”

And so dark Hodur shot the arrow made of mistletoe. And who should it hit, standing on the other side of the roof beam, but Baldur his brother, who bled to death, writhing in the lush green grass.

As you expect, Frigga was inconsolable. She wept and wept and as she wept the nights  reflected her mood, growing longer and longer. And soon darkness seized the world.

Her weeping was so terrible that Odin the All-Father at last could stand it no more, and so he saddled up his horse and rode all the way to the domain of the dead. There, he found Baldur and brought him back to the land of the living.

And so it is that in midsummer, in all the lands of the North, on those nights when the light never really goes away, there is great feasting, celebrating the sunny god Baldur, though people know that already, even on the longest of days, Hodur is notching his murderous arrow.

And in the darkest nights of winter we celebrate Baldur’s return to Frigga’s womb, because on the darkest night, called Mother Night, Baldur will be reborn, thus slowly bringing the light and warmth back again.

This is the celebration at Winter Solstice. And we remember Frigga, the great goddess of the hearth and of fertility, each week in English, with “Fri-day,” “Fria’s Day.”

I suspect nearly everyone feels a bit of desperation sometimes, looking out the window at what is supposed to be the afternoon—and it’s dark out there. It’s night. It oppresses, as Emily Dickinson says, “like the heft of cathedral tunes.”

Yes. Winter feels like a really long church service. Baldur is dead—slain by the mistletoe. That wily trickster Loki has won again and darkness and sadness rule the land.

Wouldn’t it be nice this time of year if we had something to look forward to?

Well, by golly, the ancestors thought of that. In lots of different traditions.

All those candles mean . . .  something.

Perhaps Odin is saddling up his horse again.

And Mother Night will soon go into labor once again.

Or perhaps it’s a peasant girl from Palestine.

Or Demeter wailing for her lovely daughter Persephone.

Or some other mom perhaps happy to be beating the IRS deadline.

Whatever. Whoever. It’s good—even for the most protesting of Protestants—to celebrate the circles and cycles of time because they mark a symbolic space in the chaos of reality, and add meaning to the passing of our lives.

And meaning . . . in the winter dark, meaning is a good thing.

December 10, 2013

“Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” – so begins the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948.

Today marks the 65th Anniversary of this visionary document, created shortly after the end of World War II. In the aftermath of massive global violence, the international community vowed never again to allow atrocities like those of that conflict happen again.

The decades since have been filled with violence and atrocities.

And.

And the arc of the universe has bent toward justice.

For at least there is now an international promise of how we know we are called to be together, a First Principle 
guideline leading to a Sixth Principle vision.

To paraphrase the G.I. Joe cartoon of my childhood, “Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.”

May this knowing lead to loving, compassionate doing in the next 65 years.

“As we commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, let us intensify our efforts to fulfill our collective responsibility to promote and protect the rights and dignity of all people everywhere.” ~UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon

The first sermon at the first church I ever served (which is also the only church I have served) was called “Swimming Lessons.” Countless seminary papers and exams had brought me to this moment. Now, time had come to climb into the pulpit to impart the great wisdom available to a young man with a Divinity degree on his wall.

Here’s the gist: as a swimmer learns to trust that water will hold a body, so, too, must a person learn to trust in the Holy. Have you attended any church in the world for, say, four or five Sundays? If so, you yourself will have heard a take on this very same sermon. It’s like arguing that people should remember to floss when they brush. But, with my pressed khaki pants, and a hair-cut that shone, I delivered the message with messianic conviction.

I told the Congregation that they and I would be learning to risk faith together. It would require of us allowing ourselves to be known and be held in the Spirit, as a swimmer is held by the water. As a sign of my willingness to be seen as imperfect—lest there be any doubt—I confessed to them that, at my advanced age, I didn’t know how to swim. But, I assured them, I intended to learn. So, as their new pastor literally learned how to swim, we would all learn to navigate the metaphorical waters of the newness we shared with one other. Everyone seemed pleased when it finally came time to sing the last hymn, and then go on to the social hall to drink coffee and gossip.

What I imagined the Congregation would take from the sermon was a fresh understanding of the nature of faith. But, a couple days later, it became clear to me that this was not what most had gained from my talk. What seemed to stick with most in attendance was, instead, that the new pastor was bent at long last on mastering a basic childhood skill.

Obligingly, a few of the church elders had already inquired at the Civic Center for me about adult swim lessons. They learned I’d be welcome in a morning class offered for seniors which met three times a week. It was all arranged. The coach would be waiting. The class was made up almost entirely of women several decades older than me, and was called “Swimmin’ Women.”

After a lifetime on dry land, had I really intended to learn how to swim? Well, sure. Almost certainly. Probably. I would have no doubt looked into the matter. At some point in my life. But the congregation seemed to believe that, simply because I had declared from the pulpit my intent to take swimming lessons, I had an intention to take swimming lessons. They assumed, in other words, that I meant what I said.

Growing up, my sister and I had, in fact, spent a lot of time at the faculty club pool down near the University of Tennessee. But, while my sister had spent these summer days in the water, and ultimately competed for the swim team, her stout younger brother could be found outside the fence, on a hill overlooking the Tennessee River, with a steak and cheese sandwich you could get at the snack bar, charged to the account.

It was not that I was afraid of the water. It was that, when you get in a pool, there were people who want to splash you in the face. Some want to grab you and dunk you, while others stand in the shallow end, gazing in reverie at passing clouds while they urinate. If someone offered you the choice of spending summer days being splashed with chlorinated human waste, and then dunked in it, or else going out to a hill on a river by yourself to enjoy a steak and cheese sandwich, you too might end up as an adult who didn’t know how to swim.

Either I live in a small city, or else a large town. Whichever, news here travels fast. So, within a few days, it seemed that everyone around was aware of my future with the Swimmin’ Women. At the grocery store, at the video rental store, everywhere. Wherever I went, there were kindly smiles that only barely masked gentle smirks. People knew.

To that point, my history of physical exertion had been sporadic, half-hearted. I tended to sign up eagerly, then not follow through. It was my way. No one seemed to mind, least of all me. But it seemed I was now living a life in which my preferred sluggishness might become a matter of public concern.

The Swimmin’ Women coach was named Bobbie–a retired gym coach who was all business. She lined up her swimmers according to skill. This meant that, while swimmers who had swum since the Truman administration took up the far lanes, where their perfect strokes sliced the water, I had the slow lane entirely to myself. Well, except for the kickboard. Bobbie, it turned out, was a stickler for form. I was not going to dog-paddle, nor run out the clock with my limb-draping take on the dead man’s float. No. More was expected of a Swimmin’ Woman. Bobbie was determined. And so, as I churned through the water behind a kickboard, making my way, lap after lap, there she was, right above me at poolside, calling down corrections to whatever my legs had been doing.

Four months later, at the Christmas party, the Women gave me a new swimsuit in recognition that, while any of them could have beaten me in a race, it could now charitably be said that I knew how to swim. The gap between my declared intent and my actual life, at least with swimming, had been closed. In its place, a grudging pinch of integrity.

Everyone knows that congregations are boring, old- fashioned, and more political than Congress before an election. But, on the bright side, they can also be judgmental. Think of an old friend who lets you know exactly the one thing that you need to hear. Now, picture a whole community like that in your life. Maybe how things are for you matches precisely how you intended them to be. All I know is that, when it comes down to me, for a long time, I was only floating. And it was a congregation that finally required me to apply myself to practice, and keep in the struggle of effort, which as it turns out, is what it takes to swim.

In 1642, during the British Civil War, Protestant troops of Cromwell’s New Model Army celebrated taking the city by looting the cathedral at Winchester. Troops used the stained glass windows for target practice and showed their disdain for monarchy and Catholic saints by smashing open crypts and pitching the bones through the stained glass windows. Construction on Winchester Cathedral had begun in 1079 on a site where a Christian church had stood since the 600s.

This was the second iconoclastic spasm in England. The first, three hundred years earlier, had been under the direction of Henry VIII. At that time, medieval statues had been smashed and used for building material. Perhaps the most egregious instance occurred at Canterbury Cathedral, where the shrine to Thomas A Beckett, constructed in 1220, was smashed to dust in 1538. The shrine, destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims, had long stood for the supremacy of religion over the state. Henry was having none of that.

The Protestant iconoclastic spirit traveled to the Western Hemisphere with the Pilgrims and Puritans, who built wooden meeting houses without adornment or symbol.

Religions are funny about symbols. Hebrew law forbade graven images. Muslim art is abstract and Muslims get testy about depictions of Mohammed. The Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches split over the question of icons. Worn out Torahs are buried. Don’t burn the Koran. And Bibles? Search the web on that one. Protestants are all over the map in relation to religious symbols.

First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, where I serve as minister, is a good example of what we might call the ultimate in Protestant protesting. There are no symbols at all in the sanctuary—called in classic humanist fashion an “assembly hall.” Built in 1951 in the International Style of the time, the walls are brick and wood and glass. Cromwell’s New Model Army would find nothing to complain about in the assembly hall. Kings and saints; icons and symbols have all gone out the window. There is even some suspicion of the one image—deliberately left ambitious in the tradition—of Unitarian Universalism, the chalice.

What’s up with religions and symbols? What is it about images and imagination?

It’s easy to forget that for most of human history there were no movies; no TV shows; no photographs. Not even “realistic” art of the sort that developed in the Renaissance. For the most part, realistic representation occurred only in sculpture, a 3D representation.

There is still debate about whether or not audiences ran in terror upon seeing the first motion picture, Lumiere’s “L’arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,” in 1896. Whatever really happened, the human mind began to change when pictures began to move. Previously, movement had occurred only in reality, dreams, or visions. Now, we see moving images everywhere. What has that done to the human mind?

The image, the symbol, is central to human understanding. The McDonald’s “M” speaks to more people than any other in the world. The Mercedes icon is one of the most often stolen objects in the world. We huddle around glowing screens to watch stories unfold.

Even atheists, in the unadorned walls of an assembly hall, imagine a symbol—even if a negative one—called “god.” John H. Dietrich, a minister at the church I serve and one of the originators of “religious humanism,” said, “The human mind invariably confuses the symbol with the thing symbolized.” The implication: mistrust symbols. Yet, oddly, it is not only the most protesting Protestant who believes this. A Byzantine hymn contains these words: “Free me from symbols, from words, that I may discover the signified.” And Hindu thinkers, in their own forest of symbols, said, neti, neti, “not this, not that.”

We may hurl bones through all the windows of stained glass, yet, somehow, as happened at Winchester Cathedral after the Civil War, the windows will be restored. The citizens of Winchester could not afford to repair the windows to their former glory, so they glued the pieces back together as a hodgepodge, a mosaic. The symbol always comes back.

Thanksgiving American style. The day declared a national holiday for the purpose of giving thanks. Despite the best efforts of those of a theocratic bent, who or what to thank remains open to interpretation.

My thanks goes to the universe that just keeps cranking out good things. As the fifth chapter of the Daodejing puts it,

The space between

sky and earth is empty,

like a bellows, moving

and moving, and

out comes more.

That’s something to be thankful for. Yet problems begin when all of that “more” between earth and sky begins to get divvied up. And, Thanksgiving being a national holiday, I can’t help thinking of the portion of the universe’s “more” taken by this particular nation and how that “more” is divvied up within our borders. It its harsh realism the Daodejing says,

The universe is neither

“good” nor “evil” outside

of human standards.

The universe treats all things

like so many straw dogs.

Recent survivors of various weather-related calamities might agree with that. Then there are these next lines:

Earthly rulers treat people

like so many straw dogs.

Well, maybe in the China of 400 BCE rulers treated people like so many straw dogs, but here in the US . . .  Oh, wait. There was that government shutdown. There is that sequestration. There is that surveillance. Those drones. Oh, and then there’s work on Thanksgiving. And Black Friday. Rising poverty. Rising hunger. Straw dogs.

For Daoists, the answer is clear: the universe itself has no morality—it is neither good nor evil, and governments almost inevitably act in self-interest without regard to the greater good. It’s not what we learn in school, but evidence indicates another story.

I lost my childhood faith for the “big guy in the sky” when I began to suspect the moral calculus of the universe. When I began to suspect that “good” and “evil” are thoughts only in the human mind.

Does “god,” or does “god” not, decide who gets the cookies? And what is the basis for that judgement? Nation of birth? Social class? Skin tone? Religious affiliation?

Is it a moral act to thank such of deity for choosing me? Or my nation? My social class? My skin tone?

It’s not that I’m not thankful. But I’m not thankful to a deity that would put one child in Switzerland and another in Somalia. Such a deity does not deserve thanks, however mysterious “his” ways might be. And a deity that merely reflects the workings of the bellows of the universe? What’s the point?

Government? Yes, I grew up with those cardboard Pilgrims with their very white faces taped to the classroom windows. I understand what I was supposed to take away. Am I thankful to a government that protects the rapacious while ignoring the basic humanity of most of its citizens? Not so much.

Where might the thanks go? To luck? To fortune? To randomness? To that bellows that just keeps pumping?

Perhaps, finally, all we can do is watch and try as hard as we may to resist cynicism and complicity with the powers of what we human beings view as evil.

Here’s the advice to the Daoist:

Take care of what

is within yourself;

the outside will never

stop moving

and moving.

Thankfulness in the face of what we human beings call good and evil must serve as a reminder to think through who and what is dividing up the blessings. Yes, tornados and typhoons sweep away both the good and the bad. The universe treats us all like so many straw dogs. We find ourselves enmeshed in systems of oppression. Our choice is our work against those systems, and how we treat each other.