Sermons
'In the Still of the Night:'
December 23, 2001"In the Still of the Night"
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman
December 23, 2001
At the Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street, Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 WWW.UUMontclair.org
To paraphrase the introduction of the late Unitarian A. Powell Davies' famous sermon, Christmas Always Begins at Midnight:
Whenever we feel pessimistic concerning the future of humanity upon this troubled planet, we can always remember this: that with all our fears and failings, humankind has yet somehow managed to put the brightest of our festivals in the darkest part of the year. Not at mid-summer but at mid-winter, we celebrate most universally our hope and our joy."
Native American poet and philosopher White Bear puts it this way:
Now we press into the night.
Let the darkness enter as a lover enters.
Let all the night-blossoming flowers open.
We dissolve into this love willingly, moving as a prayer,
toward the One who filled us with light in the beginning.
At last we will hold anguish and laughter in one hand --
and we will hold it open.
We wait now, poised between the conclusion of Advent and the cusp of Christmas, the very end of the old year and the start of the new. What stands between them is nothing less miraculous than the birth of an infant, nothing less exacting than the longest night of the year. What is it that awaits us in the still of this night?
We are invited by the long nights to enter into the darkness. The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote, "…the ground of the soul is dark." Our souls are as deep as the universe is wide, and it is in the darkness of those depths where gods and demons come and go. And it is in that deep darkness where fountains spring forth, where seeds break through their casings, where despair can turn to hope and where strange newness emerges from common, well worn ruts.
It's out of the darkness of the womb that we each came wrenchingly into the light. Advent reminds us of that. It reminds us of what it was like waiting in the darkness for nothing less than the onset of life. It's a time of waiting in high anticipation and great expectation for that which will create us, transform us, save us and create us over again.
What better story than one about the birth of a god to remind us of our own births and of our own potential for stretching and reaching from our humanity toward our divinity? What greater darkness abounds? What larger potential for the creation of poignant expectation? What better guide for taking us into our own darkness – there to wait, to hope, to dream, to anticipate.
Back in ancient times, in the Middle East, throughout Greece and Egypt, and elsewhere, even among the native people of the Americas, stories flourished about virgin births and human-gods who lived and died and rose to live again. In Persia, the story of Zoroaster is almost identical to the story of Jesus, complete from the beginning with an archangel who announced the impending birth to an unsuspecting virgin. The story also has a journey at its start and an un-housed delivery. It has a shining star and the visits by magi. It mirrors the story of Jesus all the way to the death and resurrection at the end of the story. And Zoroaster's story predated the birth of Christ by about 300 years.
Why did such stories flourish? Why are they so central to the human experience? Perhaps it is because nature takes us into seasons of darkness, and we need to have such stories to give us faith that the light will return. Perhaps it's because darkness is a part of our own nature and we need to have hope that we can return.
And what could be more central than the birth of a child? And what could be more invitingly inclusive than for the father of the child to be representative of
the cosmos and the mother to be Holy Mother the Earth? Maybe it matters, but maybe it doesn't that the story of Jesus' birth and life, death and resurrection is the predominant one still being told today.
The story pleads for us to renew ourselves to graceful/soulful living by returning into the darkness of the night—when the nights are at there longest; to wait, as patiently as we can, while the oldness dies away and, as committedly as we can, until the moment arrives and we break through our anticipation and into the new life.
But we can't have the birth without the waiting. We know this because we were all born, and none of us before our time. Many here have given birth, and you who have know that, as the time draws near, you're nearly ready to burst with anticipation until the moment arrives.
I've had the opportunity to watch the process up close a number of times. And though I'll never have the physical experience of giving birth, I feel I have had an emotional experience somewhat related to that kind of deep poignancy in the waiting. I was a young man in my middle twenties, newly DIRorced and incredibly broken-hearted. I'd gone out west to Colorado to spend some healing time in the loving care of my brother and sister-in-law.
On many days, while they were at work, I'd drive up into the mountains and wander around for hours. I loved the mountains and found their enormous majesty to be helpful in reclaiming a perspective of the world with me in it.
On one such outing I suddenly found myself on an overhang at the head of a ridge. It was magnificent and it took my breath away – literally. I could see over, what looked like, hundreds of square miles of wooded valleys that lay below the timberline and snow-capped purple crags above it. Crowning the whole scene was a crystalline azure sky that stretched out into infinity.
There I was, surrounded by the most powerful beauty imaginable, and I began to ache from it. I wanted more than anything to turn to the one I loved, to hold that person in my arms and say, "Isn't this amazing? Isn't this incredible? Can you believe that we are here seeing this?" Witnessing that kind of beauty alone was nearly more than I could bear.
And it was in that moment that I knew one day there might be someone that I could hold and love and with whom I could behold even terrible beauty. But that person wasn't there yet. I was alone. I had to wait, and it was a poignant, ache filled waiting that I had to bear.
It was a very long night that followed. And somewhere in the time to come—in the still of that night—my new life was born. There were times though, that I thought it would never come.
The 19th/20th Century, German poet Rilke writes:
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
That fence in the world
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me
I have faith in nights.
The night does provide us with a great energy. And it gives us the time and space, bestows on us the milieu in which to be created, transformed, saved and created again. We may ache for that which is yet to be. We may ache to share the awesome beauty we see in it. So, may we have faith in the night that the child will be born, that we will be reborn.
We are now at the very darkest day, the longest night of a dark year. What waits in us to be born this season? Is it hope or faith? Is it courage? Is it conviction that waits to be born this time? Is it the conviction that we've learned something from the losses we've incurred and the ones we still anticipate? Is it a conviction that the world needs to be made more whole and that it is up to us to make it that way?
Isn't it there, in the longing and the waiting, in the darkness and the anticipation, where our commitments to the yet unborn are fashioned and take root? Wasn't that the message of the first Christmas, when the word was made flesh? What was the word—to do unto others as we would have them do unto us, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love Godness or goodness, and to give our lives for the sake of Life/Love itself?
What is waiting to be born this year? What is waiting to be reborn—re-created? Is it not the hope that we, ourselves, will reach from within our humanity toward our divinity with a hope and faith, a courage and conviction that we will do our part in promoting—in whatever way that we can—the possibilities of peace on earth, good will to all, not in theory but in flesh and action?
We do live in a world filled with utter beauty. And we long to be connected with all that is part of it. Our lives cry out, as in the longing minor tones of O, Come, O, Come, Emanuel. And we know that if Emanuel is to come, its birth must be through us. And we know that if Emanuel is to come we must be the midwives ourselves. And we must do our work of midwiving in the darkness.
Miester Eckhart wrote:
This word is a hidden word
and comes in the darkness of the night.
To enter this darkness put away
all voices and sounds
all images and likenesses.
For no image has ever reached into the soul's foundation
Where God herself
with her own being is effective.
We each have our personal darkness that we must meet alone. We all have our collective darkness that we must encounter as a people. In both, we must put away the voices and sounds, the images and likenesses so that we might reach deep into the holiness, into the soul's very foundation of effectiveness, so that the rebirth this year might be the one that breaks us free.
But for now, we must wait in aching anticipation, perhaps, to ready ourselves as best we can. Now is the time for fashioning our commitments in preparation for the birth. So that we may be ready to face and embrace the awesome beauty and one another in it. Let us sit together here in the longing of this still of the night. Let us, "…make a little song in praise of bringing forth."
Now we press into the night.
Let the darkness enter as a lover enters.
Let all the night-blossoming flowers open.
We dissolve into this love willingly, moving as a prayer,
toward the One who filled us with light in the beginning.
At last we will hold anguish and laughter in one hand -->
and we will hold it open.
However dark the world gets, however dark our times, it is in the darkness that we have always shown our greatest creativity and hope. Because this is so, in the time we have left, let us prepare ourselves for the birth. For even in our waiting, the germ of the seed is already swelling, and we will need to ready ourselves for the coming celebration.
May we be the ones to clear the way.