Home for the Holidays

A Sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette, Indiana

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

December 23, 2001

Reading: -- Rev. David E. Bumbaugh, adapted

A spiritual community begins with the knowledge that there is a place in the world where we are spiritually at home:

A place where memories are rooted,

Where mysteries are pondered,

Where dreams are nourished,

Where love is freely given,

Where failures are owned and accepted,

Where sorrows are transformed,

Where our lives are deepened,

challenged, and uplifted.

Let this be such a  place.

Here let heart and mind,

            reason and intuition come together.

Here let us be at home, centered,

            Together, once again.

Sermon

D.W.Winnicott said that “home is where you start from.” Some famous person said that “home is where they have to take you in no matter what.”  Thomas Wolfe said ‘You can’t go back home.”  And Dorothy of Kansas, though quite an extensive traveler, said, while clicking together a pair of what were actually silver shoes, “ there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.”  Up here, I have one of those little electric candles that people put in their windows in the winter holidays.  Frankly, I am a chump for them – they make me imagine all sorts of warmth taking place in those houses, coziness – a real quality of home.  And sometimes I refer to this as our church home.

            You know how sometimes you get an idea and this little voice in your head says "Don’t go there!” But this other little voice says “Go there because that’s where the real treasure is!” Well, one of the rules of preaching or what we call in the business homiletics – now that might bring at least a guffaw from a room full of ministers – you know the little play on the topic of home and the word homiletics…Oh never mind.  Anyway, one of the first rules of preaching is to take one simple idea and slowly work through it until your twenty or so minutes are up.  And I work on this – I really do – but I am reminded of the acerbic words of an eighty five year old woman named Marcia Elder in the book Southwest Corner by Mildred Walker. Marcia, a happy homebody, says she would rather stay at home and read her Bible than “listen to that preacher going back and forth over one idea like a stocking darner.”  Well, I’ve never darned a sock, though I expect that the socks in Marcia Elder’s day may have been a little humdrum.  I guess I’d rather think of darning a sock more like this – that seems like more of – an event – and then – well, I get too excited by you.  See, you’re not some sort of “mass” so to speak “out there” you are each a holy shrine that I get to visit – that you each have the opportunity to visit.  A community of people whose lives and struggles are shared.  Naturally there is a place for this – simple darning -- some weeks it is just what we need -- yet when I get together with you I want us each to walk away our tootsie’s warm again in something with a pattern that interests, that perhaps, challenges the conventions of fashion, and that respects the keen eyes of insight that I look into every week. And sometimes I want to reach in and also see the darning egg – the egg any darning person needs to use – you have to touch the egg again and again to get the shape of the sock right and the weave firm.  This week, I am thinking about home and it’s a simple word with complex meanings – it reverberates with meanings – particularly at this time of year.  Home – means comfort, warmth, welcome, getting caught up, nesting in, sharing changes, breaking bread – and then – and then – it’s not always so sugar coated.  How many of you – you don’t need to raise your hands -- are going to see your parents this year? – Can you see the complexity emerge already?  I mean canned or fresh cranberries, ham or duck or stuffed squash – it’s enough to shake a person to the core – though actually I mean something else something a little deeper.  Which parents, parents separated, alienated, deceased…

Or how many are spending your holiday without … that other parent or without your life partner?

            How many of you are going to visit your children or grandchildren?  Again the complexity begins to emerge. Are you a college student going home and hoping to reconnect but maintain your autonomy?  Or the parent of a student coming home who you’ve ached to see and cuddle but need to give them their space?  

And, then, of course, there are those of you staying home.  Maybe quietly – or maybe some thundering crowd or peculiar small contingent of people is coming to see you.  They’ll hang their towels in the wrong place, rearrange the silverware drawer.  Or, more deeply, bring to the surface again the ever unfinished business of intimate relationships – joyful and painful.

            I know that some of you have helped parents, friends, or children move in the last year – that some of you have moved in the last year – for school, for work, for the pleasure of it, for a safer, or a better place.  And I know among you those whose long time in your home has ended and who have moved to smaller, easier places, to Greentree, or Rosewalk, or Westminster, who have left behind the walls of memory and habit. 

            And there are those of you for whom the holidays will not take you to any place you know as home.  I have a friend flying to Maui – with her sister – and her sister – well never mind.  And are the places that you are going to visit are home in some sense for you – in any sense?  Marcia Elder had lived in her house all her life – born there.  Home.

            Home is a dense idea – full of expectation and wishes, yearnings, disappointments, discoveries, and losses.  And our expectations of home magnify exponentially at the holidays.              Added to that is the reality that before 9/11 we, as United States residents had a more secure sense of home – a sense of our country as a home set apart in the world.  There is no doubt that this has changed – that our sense of home is changing.  More than anything I wish that you – that we will all -- go into our holidays and find a sense of true home and real light – that you feel its strengthening heat within you amid the changes and challenges, amid the unfinished business, the pressures that followed you, the wounds yet to heal or half healed, the losses or dislocations, the frozen places that may begin to thaw – a sense of true home and real light – within you -- profound and hard to extinguish.  I would wish for such a miracle at this time when miracle stories are told and retold.

Yet, I know that humans are afflicted by a longing for miracles as told in ancient scriptures.  And perhaps there are miracles – I believe that there are – but I must share with you my conviction that they will not resemble the miracles of ancient scripture but will yet be more humble and glorious at the very same time.  So today, I want to share with you two miracle stories, holiday stories that may act – if we are fortunate, intentional, and attentive – as reminders of the very deepest home and the brightest light.

Our first story takes us back to the year 165 before the Common Era.  When Antiochus the IV, King of Syria outlawed the Jewish religion.  A small band of fierce warriors – led by the Maccabee brothers -- led a long campaign to regain their land and to win back the Temple of Jerusalem.  When finally they won, they cleansed and rededicated the Temple and then the Bible says they found a small bottle of sacred oil for the Temple lamp – enough to last one day.  But, as the story goes – eight days later the flame still burned – a miracle.  Light candle

Five hundred years later the Rabbis reexamined the message of the Hanukkah – which comes from the Hebrew word for dedication – and decided that the battle was not the “moral of the story” and that victory was far less important than the miracle of faith and light that cause the lamp to burn for eight days.  A friend sent me a Hanukkah greeting last week in which it was claimed that the real miracle was that a band of men actually cleaned up – though I have seen some evidence that this can come to pass in fact.  Myself, I am tired of battles, but I believe absolutely in the miracle of enduring light – in the holy fire that burns at the core – brighter than the electric candle at the hopeful window -- the hearth the heart -- the human spirit – though it reminds me of a hymn – one we borrow from the Quakers.

Walk in the light wherever you may be -- walk in the light –wherever you may be – in his old ragged britches and his shaggy, shaggy locks – you are walking in the glory of the light said Fox.

  Light candle.  Sometimes it banks low – the holidays, our losses, the suffering of the world can bring low the flame into an ember almost ashen grey.

The poet William Stafford wrote

You live your life by the light you find

And follow it as well as you can,

Carrying it through darkness wherever you go

Your one little fire that will start again.  Light candle

Caroline Barnhart pointed out a story to me that was in the paper a few days ago – of a woman in New York City, feeling that despair that has touched so many of us.  In her walks through her neighborhood passed one of the fire stations that had lost so many fire fighters in the attacks.  The grounds around the station were dry and weedy, trashy, neglected.  And she then decided to make it her practice to clean that up – to clear away the dead weeds and trash and to tend the grounds and sort and share out the many gifts and honors sent to the fire fighters.  She not only rekindled her own flame but spilled light out all around her. Light candle.  For herself, for others, and just because there was something that she had lost and almost forgotten.  Like the young woman wise and brave enough to seek the truth in all its fullness.

We are, by and large, used to the notion that we have private suffering.  Family conflict, loss – the stuff I ran through earlier – even that our bodies age or even fail us and our lives are changed because of that.  Yet I have also been haunted by a conversation I had this summer with a man that I met from India – in fact, it was he who gave me this leaf.  Anyway, we were taking part in a discussion group one night in August and the group was exploring – asking why was there this or that evil?  Conflict? Violence in schools? Why was it so hard to better things?  And the Indian gentleman asked -- why is it that you Americans are so surprised and shaken by this? and why are you obsessed by comfort?  And other questions of this nature. And I raised my hand – eager to talk – as usual and I said – I have a guess – that it is because we are powerful Americans, we are charmed by our things, and lulled into an illusion of safety – we are buffered – particularly those of us able to afford to attend the retreat in the first place.  Some Americans may even believe that our fates are separate from the fates of others.  Weeks later, after September 11 we have this luxury no more – we can see that human fates and sufferings are linked.  Light candle We are not unlike the man Siddhartha Gautama – the prince whose father raised him in luxury so that he thought that all was wealth and health and youth and playfulness and who, then, discovered within the village by his palace, the realities of aging, sickness, and death – the reality of suffering.  Therefore, he left his home – overwhelmed by the suffering that he saw.  Like the story of Hanukkah, this may be one you have heard before but it bears repeating – for he followed many spiritual paths, he gave up all possessions but the bowl for which he would beg for rice.  And after some years – on a day – celebrated yesterday, called Bodhi Day, while seated under a tree – a tree just such as this leaf came from – now called a Bodhi tree -- a tree of awakening – he did awaken – he found a spiritual home – seated deep within him.  It was not a moment when unearthly miracles happened – it is was time of learning – of illumination – enlightenment.  Light candle It was not a moment like a flash – it was the outcome of years of thought, no-thought, of meditation, of breathing in and remembering the body and the breath and breathing out and remembering the body, the breath and the world.  It was the day in which the Buddha – the awakened one – realized the four Noble truths and the eight fold path.  But this is not going to turn into a lesson on Buddhism for beginners – we are always beginners – if we are lucky and wise – anyway.  But the four Noble truths are important – particularly now – the first is that the world is deep in suffering. The second is that the cause of suffering is craving or greed and because, ultimately, things change and pass away.  The third truth is that there is a path out of this suffering, a release that is positive.  And the fourth noble truth is that the path out of suffering is one of practice – of living a life – not of asceticism -- of starvation and self-inflicted suffering – but of the middle way – the practice of the virtue of balance – whose fulcrum is in the still center, the bright seed, the steady flame of peace and compassion in every person.  Not flamingly dramatic – for sure.  Certainly no instant cure for – anything – but a healing process – a mindful process – a process that reconnects us with a human world, a suffering world, with our own suffering – and at time insufferable families.  With a calm and steady flame that can warm and center us.

Let me make this perfectly clear – oooooh I didn’t much like the way that sounded.  I am simply suggesting that wherever you are these holidays – which ever ones you celebrate, that you take time to seek out that place within yourself that you may know as home – deeper than any external home.  Back out of the over crowded room, take a short walk, or a long one, spend some time in silence and apart if you need to.  But let your breath – deep and filling your chest – lead you inward to that place.  I realize that to some of you this may sound odd – out of your orbit or custom.  But perhaps you can just think of it as counting to ten and catching your breath. Or gathering your wits about you.  But there is yet that wise and peaceful place in you.  It may be as a thicket like that around any sleeping beauty, overgrown and neglected as the grounds about that firehouse in New York or worse – but it is no less noble a place.  Or it may be clear and easy to find, to touch, and to rest in.  Yet, it is a holy place – a shrine – just as I said earlier.  Earlier this year I brought back a bell like this one but smaller.  And when I would chime it I would remember the words of Thay Thich Nhat Hanh – the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk who had lived through the Vietnam War and been exiled for his opposition.  I remember his gentle voice and words – the voice of a wise elder who has lived in exile from his home for many years ring bell – listen, listen the sound of the bell is calling me back to my true home.  Not heaven, not a Currier and Ives print, not even for him Vietnam – but that home within every human heart – the heart, core sparks, the fire that endures. Light candle. 

But this place, too, is a home – impermanent as human homes are – but a home to a steady stream of light as one of our Unitarian Historians called it.  A home to daring and wise minds and compassionate human hearts.  I read two articles in this Saturdays’ paper that attacked – in a wave of terrible ignorance – the movement that has come to be called humanism.  I will and have spent more than one Sunday – speaking of this noble truth, as well, but it must be said – I must say it – that this church and this Unitarian Universalist faith have long supported and embraced humanism among our other sources of wisdom and inspiration – rational humanism, religious humanism, Christian and Jewish humanism, Buddhist and earth centered humanism.  It was humanism that liberated the Bible so that even small minded people could read it in a language they could understand, humanism that gave people the right to take sacraments and or  reject them, it was humanism that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights more than fifty years ago.  Humanism is nothing more than the faith that we hold within us a celestial inheritance – as the Rev. William Ellery Channing called it – a glory and nothing less than the faith that we can call ourselves and exhort other to embody that inheritance.  None of us is perfect – even our greatest daring can lead us into habits and cranky patterns but… 

If you look on the back cover of your order of service you will see our principles

It is out of that still center, the bright seed, the steady flame of peace and compassion in every person that those principles evolved over many years and were voted on in our association.  So – as your thread your way through the holidays carry also this flame with you – our chalice – that has spoken the truth in the darkest places and will dare to continue to.  Let no church nor family dim that light within you – that portion of our chalice you carry forth into the world.  By its light you will find your way back here to this place.  By your own light you are the light of this faith built with reason.  You are beloved and worthy – embraced by the very web of life, affirmed by the keenest of reason, and the deepest compassion and you are encouraged to grow by – every person gathered in a Unitarian Universalist Church this early winter morning.

Let me offer to you the words of the Buddha

Be ye lamps unto yourselves

Be your own confidence

Hold to the truth within the spark

As to the only lamp.