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.

Last week I spoke about how in more or less normal times, when our months and weeks are filled with days that sometimes move from joy to joy to joy and that sometimes move from no good events to terrible, horrible events, to very bad events, in more or less normal times we can train ourselves to fine tune our attention to the joys.

If I have a day of petty and not so petty problems, set-backs, and annoyances, and a chance to tell them all to my friend Emily (who preached here at our installation service in October), Emily listens with great empathy. And then she says, “I’m sorry some days are like that. Even in Australia.”

As I begin preaching I invite you to imagine meme after meme scrolling across 21st-century, high-tech, integrated video screens here in the sanctuary:

*Black text from Lutheran pastor, memoirist and public theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber on rainbow colored background: Yearly reminder: there is no resolution that, if kept, will make you more worthy of love. You, as your actual self not as some made up ideal, is already worthy.

In a poem, we sometimes read on Christmas Eve, Carl Sandburg asks

Shall we look up now at stars in Winter

And call them always sweeter friends

Because this story of a Mother and a Child

Never is told with the stars left out?

I started this month with its Soul Matters theme of The Gift of Liberating Love, three weeks ago, talking about how that gift, which I understand to be the gift of Universalism, is that it releases us from the fear of what might happen to us after death.

“All kinds of people, round that table.”

And one of them is you. One of them is me. One of them is each of us. So I’m channeling my inner flight attendant this morning, to urge you to Be sure to secure your own [oxygen] mask before assisting others.

There is a bit of spiritual advice that is attributed to St. Francis de Sales: everyone should pray for half an hour a day, unless they are reeaallyy busy. In that case they should pray for an hour a day. It is also said that Martin Luther prayed two hours a day unless he was too busy; then he prayed three hours a day.

At a party the evening of my ordination a four year old friend stood by my side helping me unwrap gifts. We’d undo the wrapping paper and he would exclaim, “It’s a box!”. We’d open the box to see what was inside (the adults would ooo and ahh their surprise and approval). Then we’d move on to unwrap the next package. Again he would exclaim, “It’s a box!”

This may sound like a bold or perhaps peculiar statement to make on Animal Blessing Sunday, but here goes: I don’t watch cute cat videos. Or cute puppy videos. Or avidly devour feel-good stories about animals saving lives or predicting the outcomes of elections or traveling thousands of miles to be reunited with their families

Our opening hymn is one that was carried over from the old blue Hymns for the Celebration of Life in our new–now 30 year old–gray Singing the Living Tradition. I’ve sung it most of my life, and it lives in my brain and in my heart.