HomeGood morning!
Some of you will have noticed that my sermon topic for this morning has changed. I will preach to the topic of Inclusion later in the year.
We are in the midst of autumn, which for me is a fascinating time of year. It is a time both of endings and of beginnings. The spring of rich blooming and growth is over, the lazy and abundant fullness of summer has ended and the dying year has entered its final phases. Trees and bushes now slowly shed their leaves, the last of the flowers bless us with their beauty and the final crops are being gathered from the fields. As the earth prepares to sleep through winter, sap flows down now into roots, animals fatten for their long slumber and we check the seal of our homes against the coming cold, caulking and putting up storm windows, preparing our own kind of winter hibernation.
Autumn is a time when, with a final burst of energy and beauty, the earth gives us glorious days. I look forward to the colors of bush and tree; though I know those colors are the last expression of fading life. It is the ending of the year.
And yet it is also the time of beginnings. Schools are long reopened, the congregational year is now well under way, and numerous cultures have already celebrated the dawning of a new year or are doing so now: Rosh Hashanah, Divali and others.
And it is a paradox that in the dying of the year the leaves around us come into their full splendor.
And so autumn always seems to me to be a time of hectic activity and yet of calm, an odd jumble of rest and stress that instead of feeling as though they punctuate and work against one another, somehow, for me, form a seamless wholeness.
We enter now, too, into the great holiday cycle of autumn to winter. This is the time of celebrating or acknowledging death and rebirth. As the earth dies around us, as the sun leaves our lives a little more each, day the light of our star dimming into early dusk, we tend to remember those people who are gone from our lives, whose presence has become more distant, and in some cases whose faces have grown dim in our memory. Whether it is our tradition to recite Kaddish at Yom Kippur, to decorate graves on Dia de los Muertes and All Souls Day, to celebrate Samhain or to challenge and mock fear and death at Halloween, we recognize the connection of this season of earth’s slumber in the darkness with the sleep in darkness of those who have passed away.
The very image of darkness raises varied feelings within me. It is in the darkness that evil lurks. In darkness is all that there is to fear, and the human tendency to huddle around the fire and avoid the depths of the forest at night is alive within me. An inability to see what actually is in any place so often brings images of what might be, and for some reason that unknown is always at least a little frightening.
And yet, there is something comforting about the darkness. It is the place of rest, the place of renewal, the place of peace and quiet. And it is in darkness that we can see things that otherwise would be missed.
One day many years ago while in Turkey, I swam in the Sea of Marmara. It was a hot day, and no one was around, or no one who would mind, so I stripped naked and went into the waters. The sun set while I was there, and in the darkening dusk I noticed that the water was full of small sparkling phosphorescences. They were tiny creatures floating and swimming in the ocean. If I lifted my arm from the water, or stood up slowly, most of them flowed off with the droplets that fell, but some remained; small glowing diamonds shining on every part of my skin.
On another night, while traveling to Seattle, we stopped the car high in the Rockies and stood under the canopy of the cosmos, looking up at stars floating in space. Coming from the New York area I had never seen stars in quite that way before. Instead of appearing as dim lights on a flat curve, these were brilliant and stood at different distances from the earth. For the first time in my life the sky was three dimensional, with some suns seeming so close that I felt I could reach out and touch the nearest, that I could perhaps scoop a portion out of the night sky, hold it in my hand and watch it flow like dark water filled with bright living things.
Without the darkness, neither those lights of the sky nor those lights of the sea would be visible. So in darkness we sometimes see farther.
Darkness also allows us to see within. The heroes of mythology enter into desert places or uncharted waters, caves or labyrinths, mazes or the underworld--all places of the unknown, places of darkness and fear--where they meet and struggle with themselves.
And having found the Golden Fleece or confronted demons or monsters--that is having overcome themselves and found growth or truth--they emerge transformed back into the light. These myths are not mere stories for entertainment; they are emotional and spiritual claims about our own lives.
Whether the darkness we face is one of search that is self chosen and entered into freely, or is one of sorrow that life thrusts upon us--the sorrow perhaps of illness or loss--the myths tell us that the darkness can be a time of spiritual growth.
Many myths and religions also tell us that there is life after death. The birth of Sol Invictus, of Mithra, of Jesus all happen in the darkest part of the year. For those of us who believe in the promise of life after death, we are reminded in these stories of the darkness of the womb from which we are born and the darkness of the tomb from which we are reborn. The promise assures that even in death we are not forgotten by the Divine.
And so as we enter this, the darkest time of the year, I do so looking forward to the rebirth of the light. I look forward to the return of the sun at the time of the solstice and after. I recognize the promise of life after death that so many of the world’s religions speak to.
For those of us who believe in them, these stories remind us that it is in the deepest time of sorrow that light begins to grow again, that hope begins to show itself, that there is life in the midst of death.
But I recognize something more. To stand at the seashore on the edge of the ocean, or at Earth’s shore on the edge of the universe, or on today’s shore at the edge of the future, to see in each the sparkling swirling gems of life and possibility that fill them, like the sparkles of joy in the eyes of friends, this is a gift given by the very darkness I so often fear. I wish to accept this time of year as the gift it is, the gift of the happenstance of the earth’s tilt, or the intended gift of divinity. This year I wish to use the gift wisely.
We are entering a time of holiday rush, and we live in a time of sometimes hectic frenzy and doing. We also live in a time war, in a time of political and emotional conflict, in a time of debates about human rights and fundamental values, and of the proper role of religion in politics.
I wish to let the darkness of this season remind me to seek peace in the midst the hectic; to seek a calm spirit in the midst of chaotic rush; to seek serenity in a time of turmoil; to seek tranquility of mind in the midst of angry debate.
I wish also to find the comfort to see the beauty of life amidst the death that lies all around me, to see, despite memories of those now gone, the color and glory of nature, of the world, and of life itself no matter how brief it may be. Indeed, I wish to cherish it all the more precisely because it is so brief.
May I live such a life that at its ending those around me praise its beauty and mourn its passing.
And may I live today in such a way that even in the midst of personal sorrow and heavy burden I see the beauty of life, of love, of community, of being here to praise the world and the cosmos.
So let it be.
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