Your Choice
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. I remembered only The Choice: risk some unpleasantness for the reward or stay safe from slime and intolerable music and annoying animals but also miss the fun. I am going to talk about that choice in regard to the winter holidays–so rediscovering that’s what that piece is really about was an unexpected bonus. Still, my heart is leading me along a sort of parallel path–not about the choices Megan and Rebecca and I make about holiday symbols and stories, music and rituals to include in our services, and your choice about whether to bring yourself to church for the services or stay home if they aren’t the decisions you’d make about the same things. Rather, my heart is leading me to consider the choice we all face about whether or not to invite the spiritual gifts of this season (or any season, really) into our lives, our hearts.
Last week I read the words of Fra Giovanni, who invited us to take joy, and take peace. This month, starting today, our religious education, covenant group and worship Soul Matters theme invites us to Choose Hope. The implication behind those imperative statements (take, choose) is that the only thing keeping us from experiencing those gifts (peace, joy, hope) is our inability to perceive that they are right here, now, available for our taking. Fra Giovanni even spells it out:
"There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much, very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take. ….No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instant…The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy."
He goes on to say:
"Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power. Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it to you."
It sounds so simple. They’re scattered all around us for the taking–loving family, stunning vistas, exquisite melodies, sublime flavors, jokes between friends, neighbors committed to building real, resilient community. So take joy. Take peace. Choose hope. This week, however, I’m conscious of all the times that the scarcity or abundance of hope or joy or peace, the visibility or hiddenness of those qualities in all their guises, isn’t the challenge facing us. Because sometimes, often, the obstacle to experiencing those states, those emotions, those gifts is our refusal, reluctance or inability to do the taking, do the choosing–even if we do see them right there before us in our daily lives.
Sometimes we’re unable to choose hope, to take joy or peace, or any of the gifts of this season because of Seasonal Affective Disorder or undiagnosed or inadequately treated depression or other mental health condition. If you recognize this in yourself, now is the time to consult your primary care provider, seek out a support group, or find a therapist. Not right away but over time, with consistent treatment, your ability to grab hold of the gifts you can see but can’t grasp will increase–throughout the year, not just in these over-laden-with-expectation holidays.
Other times we’re reluctant to take the spiritual gifts offered to us by the universe and by tradition in this season for reasons very much like the one Rev. Rzepka pointed out: we’d rather sulk than embrace imperfection.
Bah humbug to the commercialism of Christmas! Bah humbug to the Christian co-optation of ancient pre-Christian celebrations of the solstice! Bah humbug to Unitarian Universalism’s unfortunate habit (albeit now fading) of elevating Hanukkah into a major holiday competing with Christmas! I’ll leave it all on the table, including the hope, joy and peace of the season, rather than sacrifice my moral superiority and integrity.
In this case, well, it is our choice. We can stay in the car or holed up at home refusing all invitations. But we’re liable to find ourselves a bit wistful (or worse, crabbier than ever), when the family returns to the car full of tales of the delights of holidays lights and cookie exchanges and caroling, when we see and hear the cheer in faces and voices of friends as they tell us about warm and laugh filled family gatherings that were, on the whole, worth the hassle and the awkward moments, the annoying cousin and not quite to our liking meal.
Often, however, I think we fail to choose hope, to take joy or peace, neither because of the state of our mental health, nor because of a more or less surface level commitment to being Scrooge. More often our commitment to being clearsighted, clearheaded realists, savvy observers of history and current affairs, gets in the way of our choosing the gifts of joy, peace and hope, this time of year, or the gifts of new beginnings in January, or resurrection and rebirth in spring.
Grasping joy for our spirits seems like turning our back to the state of our country in 2025–ignoring the hatred spewed, the greed and and division sowed by the President of the United States, dismissing the obvious partisan bias of the Supreme Court, and disregarding the unqualified cabinet members endangering our health and safety, and the weak and cowardly Congress members failing to provide oversight. Taking joy seems like turning our back on the devastating firehose of trickle down effects of all these things.
Claiming peace for our hearts seems like pretending we don’t know about Russia’s war on Ukraine, the fragile cease fire in Gaza and the scores of armed conflicts even now taking lives and destroying towns and countries around the globe every single day; like we don’t know that femicide and trans hate and racism are every bit as deadly as declared conflicts; like we don’t know that dehumanization always erodes peace. Taking peace seems like pretending true peace isn’t actually very, very rare.
Embracing hope with our souls seems like we haven’t noticed the fear of our immigrant neighbors, the despair of community members who can’t afford groceries much less Christmas gifts, the weariness of people who can’t find jobs, the constant fear of living while black, brown, trans. Choosing hope seems at best to betray naivety about the entrenched nature of these realities, at worst to indicate hard-heartedness toward the life condition of anyone other than ourselves.
Our sometimes individual, sometimes collective desire to avoid any appearance of being deliberately disconnected from reality is understandable. We live in reality and, while these days we’re not enjoying it very much, we know that pretending it is otherwise neither changes reality nor improves our lot within it. The thing is, however, when we stubbornly refuse peace, joy or hope in the name of realism, we’re deluding ourselves about the nature of those spiritual gifts.
Hope’s not about ignoring or dismissing or looking away from the pain and destruction of the world. It isn’t about pretending there are easy or obvious solutions to all that needs to be repaired, reconfigured, or knocked down and created anew. And it certainly isn’t about a sure fire guarantee that everything will be all right.
Hope is about holding in our hearts the possibility that the final chapter is not written, even if it’s a tenuous hold on a fragile belief. And further, because the future is as yet unwritten, hope is also about knowing that while none of us is not called to do it alone, each of us nevertheless is called to play a vital role in stopping the ongoing harm to communities, peoples, and our planet, and contributing to healing the brokenness of the world. Choosing hope doesn’t mean we don’t see the mess, it only means we don’t have to, (and don’t get to) throw up our hands at the mess and succumb to it.
In the end, choosing hope doesn’t reconcile a community divided; taking joy doesn’t heal a nation’s wounds; taking peace doesn’t rid the globe of war. Choosing them, taking them, empowers us to do the jobs ourselves–and who else is there,anyway? As Annie Dillard wrote in Holy the Firm:
"Who shall ascend to the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead – as if innocence had ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is no one but us. There never has been."
The choice to choose hope, take joy, take peace, reaching for and grabbing hold of these spiritual gifts of this season, taking them into our hearts and allowing them to enliven our bodies–it’s a solemn responsibility and a holy blessing. May we take it up and use it well and wisely. Amen.