Your Presence is Your Gift

Today is the first of December. I haven’t even opened the first door on my Advent calendar of tea–one of many secular ways of counting down toward Christmas. And we’ve only just lit the first Advent candle on this the first Sunday of Advent–a more religious means of tracking the days until to Christmas. And I’m already grumpy.

Now, you might think that my grumpiness arises from yet another seasonal means of counting down to Christmas: shopping–begun on the traditional calendar at 12:01 this past Friday morning, and on the contemporary calendar a month ago at the stroke of midnight on October 31. But you would be wrong. Oh, I’m as annoyed as the next person at the lack of graceful, autumnal segue between Halloween and Christmas, but that’s not the primary source of my grumpiness, just now.

I’m grumpy because my Mom has announced, once again, that she doesn’t want any Christmas gifts. And my siblings insist that our generation of the family will not exchange gifts–well, my brother insists; my sister wants wiggle room in case she finds the just right token gifts. And my colleagues had an intense discussion over breakfast at our retreat a couple weeks back about the preference for experience over things. Which is all fine and good. Mom is 85 years old, able to provide for all her material needs, and determined to cull her possessions before death so as not to create work for my siblings and me when the time comes. Likewise, my siblings, their partners, and I don’t have any material needs. And who can argue, really, that a play or concert or state park pass or museum membership doesn’t blow another consumer item out of the water–no matter how novel or useful said consumer item might be? And, on top of all that, experiences or no gifts at all reduce the waste produced by wrapping paper, ribbons and bows. Win/win/win/win/win, right?

But I like presents. And it’s not about extravagance or acquisitiveness. I mean, yes, I was delighted the year two of my nephews gave me 30 pound of orange marshmallow circus peanuts in bulk, but I was also delighted the year my sister gave me an unbreakable slotted spoon–because I’d recently trod upon and shattered my old plastic one, and knowing I had both a birthday and Christmas approaching, I put one on my wishlist rather than buying a replacement myself. And my delight in the circus peanuts came more from watching my nephews' joy in surprising me with a ridiculous amount of a treat I love, than it did from the candy itself. And my delight in the slotted spoon came more from knowing my sister probably rolled her eyes and said, “well, it’s strange but it’s what she wanted” than from the spoon itself–and that particular delight is revisited every time I use the spoon.

I’m just as passionate about giving presents. Obviously I’ve never topped gift giving apex of 30 pounds of circus peanut, but I derive joy and satisfaction from the thought I put into finding or creating gifts to fit the recipient and the occasion.

All of which is prelude to saying, this isn’t going to be the sermon version of those lines you sometimes see on invitations to vow renewals or anniversary parties or 75th birthdays: "No gifts, please. Your presence is our present." You and your family and friends have to negotiate boundaries and expectations around gifts and giving. There isn’t a one size fits all right (or wrong) way. The individual decisions you make this year–gifts/no gifts, experiences only, wrapping paper/reusable and reused gift bags–these decisions alone will neither save nor destroy the planet. The way you make the decisions, however, the discussions you have within your circles about shared values and personal preferences and individual finances–these discussions, and the care and honesty, and gentleness and generosity with which you undertake them–may either strengthen bond of kinship or sow resentments, soothe already fraying nerves or boost anxiety.

So, to reiterate–no preaching or scolding or judgements from me about your gift giving preferences and practices. Nevertheless, with the marathon having commenced, by whichever calendar we mark time–the seasons of the church or the seasons of consumerism and commercialism–with thirty-days between today and January 2, when everything shifts again, with a month of busyness and expectation and going and doing ahead of us, there might be a gift for us in the Practice of Presence. A gift for us, and for all within the circles of our lives.

Our deliberate practice of presence this holiday season might be a gift to our friends in our family in the very simple sense of giving them our presence–an hour or a day of our time spent over a meal or walk, a conversation or a shared project. Giving our presence in this way is a version of giving an experience, but instead of giving theater tickets or a pass to the museum or amusement park, we give time. Our time, to loved ones who might sometimes complain that we’re too busy, always working, always volunteering, never at home or able to visit them in the places they live. This is a literal your-presence-is-our-present-gift. (So I guess this is that sermon, after all, at least in part.)

However, when I suggest that the practice of presence this holiday season might be a gift to ourselves and others, I mean something more elegant, difficult, and ultimately more precious. I mean that because we have inherent worth and dignity, we, who we are and as we are, are always a gift. We are always a blessing, simply by virtue of being. But the gift of our presence in the world in this most basic sense gets lost and hidden behind illusions, self-imposed expectations, media and marketing messages, and fears–lost and hidden from ourselves, and therefore, not always but often, unavailable to those to whom we most want to offer gifts that will bring joy, laughter, a sense of being known and loved.

Last week, which was also last month and also last season, we heard the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay insist that times of hardship and peril are not times to fast because “fortitude/Takes muscle; and needs food.” In a similar vein, this morning we heard from three poets whose words carry a message about what the world, and our loved ones, and we ourselves, need from us–all the time, really, but perhaps especially in difficult times or frantic harried times, or times like this month that might be both.

14th century Persian poet Hafiz says “Now is the season to know/That everything you do/Is Sacred.” Now, not when you get your relationships all figured out. Now, not when you’ve undertaken the just right course of action in response to the 2024 election. Now, not when you’ve got everything perfectly organized for a perfect Christmas. Now is the season to know that everything you do (and are) is sacred–being party to relationships that are shaky or rebuilding or fledgling or even dying; being a bit panicky and a lot overwhelmed wondering how best to protect the vulnerable and keep disaster at bay; scrambling to achieve your vision for the holidays and falling short spectacularly or a little bit, or compromising and negotiating competing visions for the holidays–everything you do is sacred.

Not only that, I’ll go a bit beyond Hafiz to declare, everything you are is sacred. As such, to practice being present–as your authentic, quirky self–now, in the midst of it all, is a gift to the world, to your loved ones, to your community, because sacredness in any form, even in the form of you, is always a gift and never more so than when it is unhidden, undisguised, and therefore easily accessible. And–this is important–to practice being present, now in this season, in everything you do, will be a gift to you because denying your sacred, quirky authentic self, or keeping it hidden or buried beneath respectability or layers of shoulds, is a lot of exhausting, demoralizing work. Now is the season to practice (none of us will approach perfection) being present to you and as yourself.

American poet William Stafford echoes Hafiz over a span of six centuries, more or less: “Will you ever bring a better gift for the world/than the breathing respect that you carry/wherever you go right now?”

And the Scottish Modernist poet Nan Shepherd puts a very fine and explicit point on the sentiment: “We are love’s body, or we are undone.” Her poem Real Presence isn’t a Christmas or Advent poem, but in that final line seems to be an apt answer to the 19th century English poet Christina Rosseti who penned:

Love came down at Christmas,

Love all lovely, Love divine;

Love was born at Christmas;

Star and angels gave the sign.

As Unitarian Universalists most of us don’t believe that Jesus, who wasn’t born in December anyway, was God incarnate, or even the child of God any more than any one of us might be said to be a child of God. Many of us don’t believe in God at all. So, if we’re not suspending our disbelief and embracing the Nativity as a metaphor for the season (which I'll be advocating for next week), it’s a stretch for us to believe that “Love was born at Christmas.” But we probably mostly do agree, even if we don’t use these exact words, that “we are love’s body or we are undone”.

We, not Jesus (not only Jesus), are love incarnate. Love was born when we were born. The work some might describe as God’s–healing, holding, tending, repairing, upending, transforming lives, communities, systems, the planet–this work, God’s work, Love’s work is our work–because we are here on this earth at this time in history with these bodies and minds and hearts. And if we don’t do it, the work isn’t done, and then we are all undone.

The world, our loved ones and we ourselves need us to practice being present as Love at loose and at work in creation. Because we are ailing, our communities are ailing, our planet home is ailing. And because the utter disconnect between what society, through marketers and tellers of false histories, would have us believe about this season and what we know to be happening to our communities, to our bodies, to our hearts in this season--this disconnect would drive us to lose our minds if we didn’t practice being present–as our wondrous, sacred, quirky selves, breathing respect wherever we go, as love’s very body.

And not losing our minds in the good Wendell Berry “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” sense–

“As soon as the generals and the politicos/can predict the motions of your mind,/lose it.”

No, in a good year, holiday expectations and relentless marketing of influencer trends and made-up traditions and ever more expensive gift ideas and the tricky dance of negotiating it all in blended family, or witnessing it all from places of loneliness or isolation or while overworked and underpaid–in a good year this month ahead of us put us in danger of losing not just our minds but our spirits, our tenuous-at-best sense of ourselves as the quirky, sacred, wondrous embodiment of Love–just as and who we already are. That’s in a good year, and this is not a good year–this year that dashed hopes or reinforced lived experiences of injustice, racism, misogyny, hatred of queer and trans bodies, souls and existence–this is not a good year by any stretch of the imagination.

So whatever you and yours do about gifts in the more traditional sense, may you remember that you yourself–exhausted, frightened, uncertain, joyful, expectant or anxious, quirky but breathing respect–are already and always a gift. And simply by practicing your own sacred presence, you’re losing the mind the politicos and generals and marketers can read, and rediscovering the mind and the soul that are the body of love, to the end that neither you nor we are undone. Amen.