Sermon copyright (c) 2024 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below may have typographical errors, missing words, etc., because I didn’t have time to make any corrections.
Readings
The first reading was an excerpt from the long poem titled “Shapechangers in Winter” by Margaret Atwood (not available online due to copyright restrictions).
The second reading was a short poem by Unitarian Universalist poet Annie Finch titled “Winter Solstice Chant” (available online here).
Sermon: “Winter Solstice”
Beginning about fifty years ago, an unknown number of religious progressives began drifting away from traditions like Christianity, Judaism, and secular humanism to embrace Paganism. Paganism is an umbrella term that includes a variety of traditions, but probably the best known of the Pagan traditions is Wicca. People who follow the Wiccan tradition usually observe eight main seasonal celebrations — I say “usually,” because Wicca is extremely decentralized and people decide on their own how to practice Wicca. But the eight usual Wiccan celebrations include solstices, equinoxes, and the four days roughly equidistant from solstices and equinoxes; and each of these has its own name, so that for example the winter solstice celebration is called Yule, or Yuletide.
Back in the 1990s, I had a friend who was a Pagan and a Unitarian Universalist minister. In my recollection, she was a feminist who was inspired by Wiccan theologies that placed more emphasis on the divine feminine than on the divine masculine. And my recollection is that she was one of the Pagans who paid great attention to aesthetics, with carefully decorated worship spaces, with special aesthetically pleasing clothing, with compelling music, with incense, and so on — aesthetics that engaged the intellect, the senses, and the emotions in deep and meaningful ways.
When she finished qualifying as a Unitarian Universalist minister, several of us were curious where she would find a position as a minister. There are many Unitarian Universalist congregations that are definitively humanist, and it was hard to imagine a goddess-worshipping Pagan as their minister. There are even more Unitarian Universalist congregations that engage the head far more than the heart, and it was hard to imagine those congregations valuing the aesthetic skills of our frined.
We were a bit surprised when she was hired as the assistant minister of King’s Chapel in Boston. How would a Pagan minister fit into a Christian Unitarian Universalist congregation? But she pointed out that King’s Chapel is really good at ritual; they use a poetic prayer book; and they have a beautiful building and music, and aesthetically pleasing rituals. We wondered how her Pagan theology would mesh with King’s Chapel’s Christian theology, but she pointed out they were progressive Christians who were feminist and LGBTQ-friendly and oriented towards making the world a better place.
I’ve been thinking about this friend of mine this month. Here in the northern hemisphere, late December seems to call out for ritual and for beauty. I think of our Christmas Eve candlelight service here in our Meetinghouse, with lots of candles, lovely music, and the same beautiful readings every year. That kind of beauty and ritual is both comforting and enlivening in the darkest time of the year. What we do here on Christmas Eve is not so different from Pagan winter solstice celebrations. The ritual is different, of course, but there are candles and lovely music and beauty. In the overall feeling, you can see a family resemblance there.
Part of the reason that there’s a family resemblance there is because both Christianity and Paganism are syncretic religions. From what I can observe, nearly all religions are syncretic. Every religion incorporates elements from the cultures in which they are embedded. Here in this country, we tend to associate Christmas with certain kind of music — Handel’s Hallelujah chorus; the carol “Go Tell It on the Mountains”; songs like “White Christmas.” Handel’s Messiah is European art music based on Western Christian traditions. “Go Tell It on the Mountains” has roots in African American traditions including both Christianity and traditional African beliefs and values. “White Christmas” is a pop song written by a Jewish composer.
We here in the United States tend to take this for granted, and we assume that everyone who celebrates Christmas sings the same songs. But Christmas is always influenced by the surrounding culture. For example, consider Maori Christmas songs. New Zealand is in the southern hemisphere, and one Maori Christmas song goes out of the way to disavow the connection of winter and Christmas: “Not on a snowy night / By star or candlelight / Nor by an angel band…” (1) In another example, Christmas in Ethiopia is associated with a traditional game that’s a bit like field hockey. A classic Ethiopian Christmas song says: “We are so glad Christmas is here. We can all play the Christmas game. When we do, everyone is equal….” (2) Ethiopia is close to the equator, with little variation in the length of days, with the result that Ethiopian Christmas songs don’t mention cold or snow or evergreens or shortened days.
Here in the northern hemisphere, however, Christmas does come at the darkest, coldest time of the year. As a result, in both Europe and North America Christmas has come to be associated with the winter solstice — with the longest night; with candlelight and starlight; with rituals to bring back the light and make the days grow long once again. Not surprisingly, we have incorporated a number of non-Christian customs into Christmas. And for us, this has become part of the magic and wonder of Christmas time.
One of the magical aspects of Christmas time that I especially enjoy is the singing of Christmas carols. Although we think of Christmas carols as being Christian, the reality is more complicated. It appears that Christmas caroling also has roots in the ancient custom of wassailing. Wassail is an alcoholic drink made out of apples. To go wassailing meant to go from door to door singing wassail songs, and at each house where you sang you’d get a glass of wassail to drink, and even gifts of coins. Thus Christmas caroling draws upon both Christianity, and ancient customs relating to the winter solstice.
We can see this same process at work in other rituals and traditions of this time of year. Santa Claus started out as the Christian Saint Nicholas, went to Holland where he became Sinterklaas, a skinny person whose saint’s day was December 5. Sinterklaas came to North American, put on weight, changed his name to Santa Claus, and became associated with Christmas. (3) Santa was given reindeer by Washington Irving in the early nineteenth century. In 1939, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer appeared in a department store promotional booklet, and then got popularized by a Jewish songwriter. Today Santa leaves presents under an evergreen tree, a symbol of ancient Paganism.
This mixing of — and invention of — cultural and religious traditions continues in our own day. Some American Jewish households have a Hannukah tree. Some American Hindu households put up a Christmas tree as a way of exposing their children to different cultural traditions. (4) Secular capitalism is another cultural influence: since 2005, for example, the “elf on the shelf” marketing juggernaut has become an integral part of Christmas. (5)
Today’s Christian fundamentalists and latter-day Puritans tell us that Christmas should be a purely Christan holiday — where they get to decide what “purely Christian” means — and that we should never allow elements of winter solstice celebrations to sully their purified Christmas. And today’s atheist fundamentalists tell us that we should have a perfectly pure secular society, where all religious holidays should only be celebrated behind closed doors.
These efforts to purify religion, to purify people’s thoughts and feelings, to purify people’s preferred rituals — these efforts mostly fail. Purification might work for a short time but human society keeps on growing and changing. In seventeenth century Massachusetts, the Puritans made Christmas illegal, in part to eradicate the custom of wassailing. But that effort at purification ultimately failed, as new Christmas and Yuletide customs evolved.
The old Puritans and today’s fundamentalists tend towards religious literalism. But we need not be religious literalists. We can experience religion as cultural production not unlike theatre and literature and music, where deeper meaning is communicated not literally but through metaphor. Thus, those of us who are not religious literalists do not have to believe in the truth or falsity of some Christian Christmas dogma. Instead, we can become alive to a wide range of metaphor and meaning.
For me, this is part of the attraction of observing the winter solstice. At this time of year, I seem to crave those things that make me feel connected with the cycles of the non-human world. At this darkest time of year, we think about the metaphors that go along with darkness, with the absence of light. In her book Dreaming the Dark, Pagan thealogian Starhawk talks about the many meanings of darkness: There is the darkness that represents “all we are afraid of, all that we don’t want to see — fear, anger, sex, grief, death, the unknown.” But, says Starhawk, there is also the kind of darkness she calls the “turning dark,” representing movement and change. And, says Starhawk, there is also the “velvet dark…[representing] touch, joy, mortality”; and the “birth-giving dark: seeds are planted underground, the womb is dark, and life forms anew in hidden place.” (6) Starhawk finds these many meaning in a metaphorical understanding of darkness.
And all these images and metaphors are present in the idea of the winter solstice: The dark that goes along with fear and grief and anger. The darkness that is not a color but is the absence of light. The dark that represents the turning of the year, the point at which the days grow longer once again. The dark that gives birth, as the growing sunlight will eventually bring springtime and new life (and perhaps this includes stories like the Christmas story, a story that centers around a new child who is born in the dark of the night). And the velvet darkness, the darkness that soothes and touches and brings joy. All these images can become part of a metaphorical interpretation of this time of year.
Nor do we need to identify a single simple literal meaning of complex metaphors. We don’t have to fit metaphors into a scientific world view. Sometimes a metaphor is just a metaphor; and sometimes we don’t even have to make rational sense out of a metaphor.
With that thought in mind, I’ll end with this poem by Mary Oliver:
Notes
(1) Translation from the New Zealand Folk*Song website, lyrics for “Te Harinui by Willow Macky, 1957” https://folksong.org.nz/nzchristmas/te_harinui.html accessed 16 Dec 2024.
(2) Translation from the description to the Youtube video “Munit and z Lovebugs – Asina Genaye (Ethiopian Christmas Song)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoAPXsUaXN8 accessed 21 Dec 2024.
(3) Ivan Natividad, “For the Dutch, Santa Is Tall and Skinny. What Happened to Him in America?” University of California at Berkeley Research, December 21, 2023 https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/news/dutch-santa-tall-and-skinny-what-happened-him-america accessed 21 Dec. 2024
(4) Syama Allard, Religion News Service, “How American Hindus spend Christmas,” December 23, 2022 https://religionnews.com/2022/12/23/how-american-hindus-spend-christmas/ accessed 20 Dec. 2024
(5) Kelsey McKinney, Vox website, “The Elf on the Shelf is the greatest fraud ever pulled on children,” Dec 15, 2016
https://www.vox.com/2014/12/10/7361911/elf-on-the-shelf accessed 21 Dec. 2024
(6) Starhawk, “Prologue,” Dreaming the Dark, 15th anniversary edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982/1997)