When I pulled a 36 year old meditation manual off my shelf this week, looking for this morning’s reading by Jane Ranney Rzepka, I didn’t remember that it included specific mention of the winter holidays, and more specifically still, how they are celebrated in many Unitarian Universalist churches.

Antoine de Saint-Exupe´, the French aviator and writer best known for the The Little Prince, wrote, “The theoretician believes in logic[,] and believes that he despises dream, intuition, and poetry. He does not recognize that these three fairies have only disguised themselves in order to dazzle him….He does not know that he owes his greatest discoveries to them.”

We’ve got the whole world in our hands.

And we’ve had it in our hands, to some extent, all these 300,000 years since our species evolved into existence upon the earth. I don’t know enough biology or natural history to say definitively, but it seems to me we might say that homo sapiens appearance was the beginning of a trophic cascade that continues still today.

Let us sing the new world in this is how it all begins*

Really, Carrie Newcomer, composer and lyricist of this morning’s anthem, preached the only sermon necessary for a Coming of Age Sunday service with those two phrases:

Let us sing the new world in/this is how it all begins.