Twelfth Night / Christmas Day 12

Twelfth night. The final presents were wrapped and given. The final installment of celebrating the dark, mysterious, joyous rumbling of the earth’s return to the sun from the trough of deepest winter. What comes next in the calendar? Epiphany, January 6, if you’re a churchie – the arrival of the Three Kings to the Jesus scene.

All week I’ve been working on this sermon, the theme of which is “Let us speak about the deepest things right away.” or “The Work that is Play: Sunday Gatherings.” What I was talking about was believing that Sundays should be great. They deserve much more commitment of time and energy.

Sundays should bring us to tears of longing and sadness (I started crying this morning when NPR played the whistling theme song for the TV show Lassie – exactly!), should cause us to change our lives, resign our jobs for nobler ones, take flamboyant vows, tell the truth after fearing it for decades. Sunday should be monumental, profound, ecstatic, so empowering you’d think of it as the best meal in the week. If you were an alcoholic it would be your once a week happy hour. You’d no sooner miss it than free fireworks on New Years.

Which I missed. I was writing my sermon even then. As well as when Marin and Teo went to New Years Day dinner at friends. And all day Thursday, when Teo was at daycare. And all day Saturday, when Marin and Teo did errands, and other things. Midday Saturday, I drove over to the fellowship to help get the Order of Service together with the lay leader and the administrator. On the way home, I remembered about and in the next two hours read “Deep Play,” a book by Diane Ackerman, which gave me some new perspectives. I was at it until midnight, “Twelfth Night.”

Then, at 5 on Sunday morning, I passed a text on to Marin (who also couldn’t sleep, she for being so pregnant), because it was so overworked that I couldn’t see it anymore. She read through it, and we decided one of my framing ideas wasn’t helpful. Pulling it was a little like intentionally crashing a lumbering airplane, and then going through the wreckage for durable parts to build a new one. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to polish the result. So, when I was giving the talk later in the morning, I was flying by the seat of my pants.

I couldn’t have written anything on my blog on Twelfth Night, Saturday, if I’d wanted. I was too panicked that I wouldn’t get down what I wanted to say, for knowing too much, for feeling too strongly about it. Feeling strongly is bad for writing talks.

Writing takes a lot of life force. Do I want to go back there, become a full time Unitarian pastor someplace? I must admit, it’s one of the few “flow” experiences that I have in my life, where I forget to eat, forget time’s passing, just keep going for hours and hours.

It’s always been a challenge to write sermons. For many years decades ago I would begin a cigarette habit every Saturday night, and try to break it every Monday morning. Smoking while writing was the best! The weekly quitting was the worst!

At Fairbanks Lutheran I always read enthusiastically and joyfully from dawn to midnight Saturdays, hoping for a breakthrough, but generally the writing came (after sleeping a little and re-caffeinating) from 3 am Sunday until 7:30. This for an 8 am debut. A portion of these sermons were winged, and I don’t mean empyrean, I mean impromptu & extemporaneous, delivered while pouring the oil of deep peace upon waters seething with terror.

I think it should be easier to preach to Unitarians, since you don’t have to finesse any theology to say what you really believe. Though every venue has its challenges.