NOTE: I had planned to incorporate results from the Joy Service’s joy challenge into this blog, but didn’t receive any directly. That doesn’t mean that no one took the challenge: I’m aware that at least one of you did, because it was on Facebook. My hope is that for those of you who took that challenge, that it brought some joy into your lives.
For many people, this will be more of a “blue Christmas” than it has been in the past. Even with the good news of a vaccine, our country is surely facing a difficult winter. At this point, each one of us probably knows someone impacted personally by this pandemic, or who may be in the next few months. While the pandemic makes this holiday “bluer” for many, for others, it brings up the same challenges to joy that they feel every year. The pressure to feel joy or the “spirit of the season” can at times be driven into our heads with each commercial or Hallmark holiday movie. Capitalism infects the holidays and sets cultural standards or brands the holidays in a way that even Martha Stewart on her best day couldn’t achieve.
But, I will say this about joy and the sense of the holy at this time of year. It doesn’t have to be a grand meal in a grand hall with the Boston Pops playing “Sleigh Ride” in the background. It can be putting a simple meal on the table, seeing a friend’s or relative’s face on Zoom, listening to a little holiday music or taking just a moment to appreciate the warmth of your home. We may have to experience the joy, peace and holy magic of this holiday season in ways we haven’t noticed before or maybe never thought we would. And, we may also need to acknowledge that this is a holiday season like no other.
As we make this turn into the unknown journey that will be 2021, no matter how different or difficult it may be, the need for love, for a sense of peace, joy and the magic of the holy, is something we will hold onto at UUCF. We do this while trying to hold close what we cherish in the quiet moments of deep and sincere connection to that which is between us and beyond us.
Though this past year was more complicated than most years – or perhaps any year – I want to end the year wishing you a loving, peaceful and holy holiday season, and I leave you with this poem, “Remembering That It Happened Once,” from Wendell Berry. It’s a reminder that if we look to the true meaning of the stories, there can be a thread of connection and perhaps even the holy for us all.
Remembering that it happened once,
We cannot turn away the thought,
As we go out, cold, to our barns
Toward the long night’s end, that we
Ourselves are living in the world
It happened in when it first happened,
That we ourselves, opening a stall
(A latch thrown open countless times
Before), might find them breathing there,
Foreknown: the Child bedded in straw,
The mother kneeling over Him,
The husband standing in belief
He scarcely can believe, in light
That lights them from no source we see,
An April morning’s light, the air
Around them joyful as a choir.
We stand with one hand on the door,
Looking into another world
That is this world, the pale daylight
Coming just as before, our chores
To do, the cattle all awake,
Our own white frozen breath hanging
In front of us; and we are here
As we have never been before,
Sighted as not before, our place
Holy, although we knew it not.
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