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From Holiday Madness to Gladness: Creating Sacred Space (& Time)

A Sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
November 14, 1999

Here are the words of UU minister David Cole, from Celebrating Christmas: An Anthology of UU Ministers' Writings on this Holiday Season:

Antoine De Saint-Exupery wrote in The Little Prince: "It is the time you have wasted on your rose that makes your rose so important." It is especially important at Christmas time to learn to waste time. As I watched shoppers at the Mall on Saturday, I did not see a single happy face. Harried and hurried, everyone seemed preoccupied, irritated, or bored. Christmas can only be joyful if we slow down and waste some time. It is the time you have wasted crafting a scarf, stuffing a toy, writing a note to a close friend, reading, meditating, or thinking that makes Christmas come alive....

Walk, do not run, to the nearest Christmas! Wait and learn patience. Kick at pebbles, watch stars, notice all the quiet unimportant yet essential things that happen around you. These can be your ritual of waiting for Christmas. Christmas can be a renewal of a hope, a miracle of joy, but only if we waste some time making it a spiritually beautiful event. (p. 128)

There are many beautiful readings about Christmas and the other winter solstice holidays in this book. Some condemn the hustle and bustle of the season while others lift up what is good and right in it. It is true that there is a sort of madness that begins with the cleaning up of the Thanksgiving dishes and ends only when the last gift has been returned to the store for exchange in the after-Christmas sales. Traffic mushrooms along with our expectations of what we think we can or must accomplish in the course of a few short weeks. Internal conflicts arise as well, as we witness once more the truth of extreme abundance vs. extreme scarcity: the opulence of the mall and the paucity of the street corner.

Faced with such conflicts and high expectations, it is no wonder that "madness" becomes the appropriate term. We look for something to blame. Many place it on the merchants and advertisers who market Christmas. Some put it on Christmas itself and the traditions we have inherited and try so hard to uphold. But can we really place the blame there? Is it the fault of Christmas and merchants that we feel harried? Or is it that in the midst of this madness, we notice how close to the margins we truly live?

I would wager that David Cole's reflection on the importance of wasting time comes out of that recognition of how close to the margins we live. The city is a busy place and so is the twentieth (and soon twenty-first) century. We fill our lives in general with things to do, places to go, people to see. Busy-ness is valued. There's an interesting word. In trying to write "busy-ness" and not write it as "business," I noticed the relationship of the words: one's business is one's busy-ness, which makes sense considering our heritage of the Protestant work ethic, an ethic that has kept much of the good people of these United States busy for the last few hundred years. We value doing over being, to our detriment. So we fill our days with things to do, and when holidays come, there is little time to waste.

Rather than blame the madness on the merchants and Christmas, we ought to be blaming ourselves and our inability or unwillingness to find or keep our balance and to create or retain our boundaries. We live so close to the edge as it is, and I'm not just talking about those of us working full time and caring for children; enough people who have retired have mentioned to me that they have never been so busy in their lives as they are now. It's how we fill up our days, and what we expect out of them, and whether we leave a little room to waste time. We create our own boundaries of time and expectation and when we allow those boundaries to be breached, as they often are during holiday preparations, we get stressed. There is only so much we can do in a minute. If we allow our expectations to mushroom out of proportion to the time we have available, failure will be the result, and Christmas will become a time of rushing and regretting, rather than pausing and reflecting.

Besides blaming merchants, Christmas traditions, or ourselves, blame for the madness can also be placed on the fact that we live in cities, and as I said before, cities are busy places. Two important factors of living in cities is that there is more abundance of goods and more people. There are so many people, in fact, that supplying us all with food and merchandise gives the appearance of abundance, whether you have money or not. Such abundance of people is most obvious at rush hour, a time we hate because it wastes our time as the arteries of the city get clogged. I mean, that can't be good. Our lungs get clogged at that time, too, with the exhaust of everyone's cars out on the street at the same time. When something like Christmas comes along (and I must ask, is there anything else like Christmas time in our lives?) the abundance of people becomes blatantly apparent as we all come out of our havens at once to try to meet our expectations of the holiday season. The abundance of city goods spills out of the stores, and the abundance of people fills the parking lots to overflowing, and we are shocked and dismayed. What could have caused such a frenzy? We just aren't aware in daily life of the thousands who live in those boxes we pass on the way to work or play.

So it is not just our personal lives that get out of balance at this time of year; it is also the life of the entire city that gets out of balance. Perhaps the only other thing that can compare with it would be a state of emergency, except there is nothing threatened, unless you count our peace of mind, which is a good thing to count. People are out; the reality of city abundance is before us; and we can accept or resist that truth. Either way, it affects us, and stress rises like early morning mist, or more like early morning smog this time of year.

So what can we do about it? Those who blame the merchants try to boycott the buying frenzy. Those who blame Christmas traditions try to change them. That is partly the origin of Kwanzaa, the decades-old African-American holiday during the days following Christmas where heritage is valued and deliberately focused upon in family ritual. Those who blame the abundance factor of city living consider ways to move back to the country (back might even mean a metaphorical "back" if one has never lived in rural areas; the concept of "back" certainly resides in society's collective psyche).

But those of us who recognize our own complicity in the madness and blame ourselves, our tendency to succumb to high expectation in not-enough-time, can try to regain the balance which was loosely ours in the first place, and shore up our crumbling boundaries. To do that, we need to know what it is we're seeking, like the shepherds and the star. What is it that we're reaching for? Why are we doing all this stuff we shove under the label of Christmas in the first place?

There's a line in the carol we sang today called "In the Lonely Midnight," a line which really spoke to me this year. It goes, "listen, O ye weary, to the angels song, unto you the tidings of great joy belong." I saw the shepherds staring at the star in the dark of midnight, tired and cold, hearing a song of beauty and peace, and then I saw a horde of shoppers just like me, standing in the mall late at night, exhausted and sore, looking up and suddenly hearing a song of glad tidings of great joy, and I asked myself, "what would that message be?" What would be the angel's song to the masses of harried, but hoping, humanity?

The other part of that line was just as important. It starts out with "In the lonely midnight, on the wintry hill." The image is one of sacred time and space. The wintry hill is barren and cold, the place of least abundance, when the trees, if there are any trees, are bare and the grass is dead and brown. The lonely midnight, too, is the place of least distraction, when all are asleep and the world is silent and we are by ourselves, with ourselves, looking out on the world which lies before us in the starlight. Such an image of sacred time and space is an important message. It was in such a place at such a time that the angels appeared with their tidings of great joy.

I doubt that harried shoppers in a mall could even hear an angel's song if one were to sing. We can hardly hear our own hearts beating.

You know, we need to waste some time.

We need to waste some time and create some sacred space so we can hear the song of the angels.

We need to waste some time, as David Cole said, making Christmas "a spiritually beautiful event." The word "spirituality" in itself means "breath." If you are looking for more spirituality, take a breath. Take a pause. Take a moment of time. It is a sacred space of being, a sacred time of being. Spiritual practices focus on that moment of breath or even the space between the breaths when nothing apparent is happening, and yet, everything is happening. Spirituality is about allowing the distractions of our harried lives to flow off from us, leaving the core of what is important barren to our view as the wintry hill is barren in the quiet of midnight.

Take a breath. Waste a little time. Kick a pebble. Watch a star. Watch the full moon this Wednesday, the brightest moon in one hundred and thirty-five years! Do as David Cole advised and "notice all the quiet unimportant yet essential things that happen around you." And maybe you will hear something amazing, like the cry of a baby in the dead of night; like the joyful shout of a needy child who has received a gift; like an angel's song of hope in the midst of darkness; or just simply a reminder that love is really what it's all about.

May all that you do this Christmas be done in love: the presents searched for and bought; the money shared; the tiny giving we hesitate to do because it seems so tiny and the need so overwhelming--do it anyway with love. And may you hear the angel's song for which you seek, a song of peace and goodwill and love.

Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! Happy Kwanzaa!  Go in peace.

Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson