Raven Speaking, Dante Leading / Advent Day 23

In the candlelit darkness of our drum-beat-heart-beating UU fellowship, Raven arose and told the people sitting in circle yesterday (Sunday) morning the story about how he had met in council with all the animals discussing the encroaching, endless darkness. And how he had succeeded in entering the lodge of the sky, by transforming himself into a spruce needle which the daughter of the chief drinks, and later gives birth to, as Raven Boy! Miracle! Raven Boy opens the three nested, glowing boxes in the corner of the lodge of the sky, transfigures himself back, and flies through the open roofed lodge with the glowing sun in his impervious talons.

The UU service worked. Not the least of all because we drummed for a half hour at the beginning of the service while people arrived late to the circle and chairs had to be found. And still we ended early. Nice to have some meditation time in the circle of the gathered people, in the gentle darkness of the Alaska dawn.

Marin had the observation that the UU’s probably won’t use the same story next year, which is probably true, Jana and I already discussed other wonderful folk stories we could use to illustrate the return of the light.

Maybe that’s where the Unitarians go wrong. Instead of having a yearlong cycle of beloved, recurring stories, we keep ranging out and sampling other people’s stories. Are we failing to attend to the repetition which would make the stories our own?

Last night, after Marin and I had queued up in our DVD player "the Lives of Others," a movie about the Stasi in East Germany, when we heard bumping in the bedrooms below. Matteo, back (after a month sleeping upstairs) downstairs in the guest bedroom to sleep, wasn’t. I went down, annoyed, to take a look, but chilled out as soon as I lay down beside him, arm around him, telling a story about Pooh characters throwing Christopher Robin a birthday party.

Then I launched into the story of Santa Claus, which might be his first exposure to that great American myth. He listened closely. "Where North Pole is?" he asked in his lilting, new-to-language little voice.

Then, sleep not coming anytime soon, I launched into a cultural piece de resistance, the Nativity Story. Mary, Joseph, traveling on a donkey, to a town with no hotel rooms, having a baby like Mama’s going to have a baby, then Angels singing ‘Glory Halleluah," and shepherds ("what’s a shepherd?") watching their sheep to protect them from wolves, and kings riding camels (Teo knows about camels) with gifts of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, all duly explained.

He still wasn’t about to sleep, and ended up ejected from the guest bed back into his crib, and the movie went by the wayside. The 45 minute wait had driven Marin to bed before I got done.

But the stories I told, are stories that Matteo is going to hear, each and evey year, for better or worse, until he stops wanting stories or I lose my way in life. And I wish he’d hear the same Raven story at UUFF every year as well, since it’s what cultural identity comes from.

Stories guide us into who we are, they are Virgil to our confused and lost Dante (Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto 1), showing us the opening into the real world of meaning, a mysterious, difficult, darkling passage no one can find on their own.