Solstice, Pagan, Christianese / Advent Day 20

Solstice. The enormous machinery of our corner of the universe rolls, slowly, ponderously, into an immense pause. The shoulders of the earth have leaned as far back from the beckoning of the sun as they can without snapping the spine of astrophysics.

The temperatures have walked down the basement steps. Low minus-forties come up on my mobile thermometer, collecting data out the closed sunroof of the 95 Subaru as I streak across town to get the mail. More like "creak" across town. Emerging from the warm garage, the car undergoes a stiffening, the brakes, the steering, the springs, everything enters an instant ice-age, as motor-vehicle arthritis invades the car’s previous suppleness.

I feel like I’m a pagan on a Christian cruise. All the food, the sights, the evening caberets are in Christianese. And I have a little "christian/pagan" dictionary that I’m using to figure out what the natives are talking about whenever we put in to port.

I listen last night to St. Olaf doing their annual Christmas concert. Choral music at it’s liquid, stirring, gorgeous best. I was thinking, if I were a kid raised in a secular family, and suddenly, in college, I happened upon a hall filled with singing of this beauty and challenge, from a group of young people working intently together, all on the theme of the birth of the long-promised miraculous child, I would be unable to resist wanting to join up. Make poetry happen in my life too.

But maybe soon we’ll have a poetics of creation. We’ll have bracing stories that explicate the exquisite bending of the water-strider knees. We’ll hear sweet, lovely four-part harmonies singing the myusterious power of molten rock squeezing through cracks in the earth. We’ll see dancers and drummers incarnating the ecstasy of the sun creeping up on the far horizon of the shortest day of the year.

For now, on this cruise, everyone’s writing, composing, talking, humming, and performing in Christianese, at least within earshot. It’s a bully camouflage for the rank earning-and-spending that most of us really, on a daily basis, seem to be placing our lives on the altar of. Autnentic Pagans, like authentic Christians, decry the loss of faith – faith in the earth and its wonder, for one, faith in the teachings of Jesus to transform us, for the other.

But I do wish there were more Paul Winter Consorts honoring today’s Stonehenge moment – we’ve reached the midpoint of the the tunnel of darkness, and we’re seeing light at the other end. Doesn’t the Earth need Pagan Doctrine more than it needs more Christian Doctrine?

A Moveable Pew / Advent Day 16

One of my first impressions of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Fairbanks my first service, December of 2004, was that I belonged there. It was simple, actually. Every Sunday people light candles and talk about their lives, struggles, people they love, and so on, and place the candles into sand. It was the closest thing I’d seen (which I myself as a pastor hadn’t started) to Taize prayer around the Cross, a simple but moving meditative service from a religious community in France.

The only worship artifact banished with me from Fairbanks Lutheran had to do with Taize worship. It was a set of four boxes on wheels which Jerry Zelmer made and Al Holmberg filled with a pickup-truck load of sand. The boxes could be set in a square, creating between them the shape of a cross for Lent, or placed in a circle for Advent. Turn off the lights. Put in the background the Cello Suites of J.S. Bach. Initially, there are four candles lit, and people are invited to the center of the circled pews to sit or kneel beside the sand, and to light a candle. Let the flame, the heat, the longing, the hope, seep into your soul. I miss these times to sit together in the dim, stirring candlelight.

Yesterday we stayed after the UUFF service to plan the Solstice Celebration, which is coming next week. Again, I received confirmation that I belong in this tradition. First, we’re working with real things, darkness, light, directions, candles, creating a liminal space by words and actions. Second, I get to be the lead drummer of four during chants. Third, and maybe most interesting, without any controversey or church council meetings, we moved the "pews," we circled the seating. From rows to two concentric circles.

No biggie? Well, it’s what Fairbanks Lutheran is reported to have disliked most about my worship style – that I wanted to change the "normal" pew orientation in Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. I set the Fairbanks ecumenical movement back 40 years by moving pews.

Speaking of real things, I’m trying to figure out how to mimic one undeniable strength of Christian worship – that the stories of the book (the Bible) are oriented to the solar calendar. Jana reminded me yesterday that the Christians stole the calendar from the pagans, that all the animists already had ceremonies oriented to the changing year. Christians infiltrated the Saturnalia with the birth of Jesus, and continued to celebrate yearly the pagan spring festival of rebirth with the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

In a community which has consciously chosen to live out something different from the many available religious traditions that we are coming out of, or going in to, we tend to have services with a lot of words and ideas. That’s a relief to many, for whom rote and highly charged actions (like holy communion) or the reciting together of creeds or prayers became intrusive or even intolerable.

But watching Jana put together a rehearsal for what was as elemental and sensual as the best that good religion has to offer, I was thinking, there’s a lot of potential here.

At the end of the service next week – after waiting in darkness, calling the circle, north, south, east, west, lighting candles, chanting chants, telling stories about Raven and Hummingbird bringing back the light to the earth – someone will hit the "play" button, and we’ll walk out of the sanctuary into the 11:30 am dawn holding sparklers while the Beatles sing "Here Comes the Sun."