Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Winter Holidays for All UUs?!

Reflections by:<
Ray Crain
Dave Weber
Jonathan Harvey
Dec 30, 2001
Palo Alto, CA

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Reflections by:Ray Crain, Worship Associate

Good morning. I'm Ray Crain, a worship associate.

Like Dylan Thomas, I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. I also can't remember ever being a theist, though I suppose I was before giving up the literal Santa Claus, making his list and checking it twice. My parents were believers from Protestant backgrounds. Yet, when I was a youngster they seldom mentioned God or Jesus, even when they stubbed their toes. Around age nine, I attended vacation Bible school a couple of summers at a fundamentalist church, where the activity I most valued was memorizing the names of the books of the Holy Bible in order. In high school, I began attending the local Methodist church, was confirmed, and joined the Methodist Youth Fellowship. The girl I dated as a high school senior once told me she felt uncomfortable reciting the Apostles' Creed weekly in church without believing it. I had been doing the same, and that was when I began to think critically of what I wanted to do for myself-of acting consistently with my own beliefs.

Perhaps I'm now a bitheist. One of my Supreme Beings is that silent Architect That Just Is of the laws of natural numbers, physics and chemistry. The other is Humankind's Collective Experience. Nonetheless, Christmas remains significant to me for evolving reasons. Whether you're Christian, Recovering Christian, or Never Christian, you may be interested to know why or to know that we share common ground.

Most significant, I think, is the celebration of a new way of thinking about the social order-of a loving God and the precursors of our explicit affirmation of the inherent dignity and worth of every person. This is the compelling part of the New Testament. If I understand the scholars, these ideas were floating around more than two millennia ago waiting for an authoritative endorsement for widespread acceptance. If you were at or near the top of the social order back then, pre-New-Testament dogmas would likely be pretty convenient. But the bulk of people doubtless experienced the Hobbesian "continued fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." For these folks, the dogmas offered little comfort, meaning or dignity. "Where is that someone to deliver us?" they seemed to ask. In modern wording, from the UU hymnal:

"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and with your captive children dwell."
"Give comfort to all exiles here, and to the aching heart bid cheer."
"Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come within as Love to dwell."

It may have been the merchants, those same people who gave us the number zero, who discovered and used the principles of cross-cultural mutual respect, trust, and reciprocity. Long before the issue of how to live out the words of the Declaration of Independence, "…all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," there was the message of love thy neighbor, show tolerance, and avoid the rush to judgment. And the Christian world has been struggling ever since with how to make it work in the midst of hijackings of the Gospel by bigots and the power-hungry.

For me, it's enough to know of a notion, such as the message of the New Testament, that it has come out of profound knowledge-distilled from Humankind's Collective Experience-but for most folks, and probably so two millennia ago, contrarian good ideas seem to require attribution of divine inspiration for the recorded message and personal sponsorship through a prophet or divine human. So, a part of the Gospel is what Joseph Campbell called "The Hero's Journey." Had Jesus not existed, he would have had to have been invented. My personal focus has more to do with the message than the messenger.

Christmas is a seasonal event strongly linked in my mind to the solstice. We're bottoming out, the days will get longer and warmer again, and next year will be a little better than this one. Each year, when the gifts are shipped or wrapped and the tree is trimmed and all falls quiet, I have my own private ritual of playing Christmas music and grieving for the nonspecific losses of the year. It usually involves a good cry while feeling connected to all who have ever listened to certain of my favorite carols. My "preferred" list includes All Through the Night, Coventry Carol, Deck the Hall with Boughs of Holly, Good King Wenceslas, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, O Thou Joyful Day, and O We Believe in Christmas. For certain hymns of affirmation and faith, I translate the theistic wording in real time while singing. The fourth verse of Longfellow's poem, I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day, (number 240 in our hymnal) works this way for me. This year, my choice in music was decidedly more secular: the Christmas Encore of The Concert for New York City, the taped video version.

Each year, following an emotional bottoming out, and like Dylan Thomas's inner child retiring for the night, I am at peace looking to the coming of Spring. The vernal awakening yet to come signifies the triumph of a life-affirming way of thinking over a cold and dark social order. Renewal and humankind's advancement are possible through collective learning and vigilance and do not require divine guidance. Those who can remember the past and show a better way help us diminish repeating past ills.

In this incrementalism, rooted partly in Christianity, the forward steps outnumber the backward. Consider that with the help of modern communication media, journalists and others shape our perception of people on the opposite side of the globe as having real faces and real dignity and worth. Contrast this with the cartoon figures in black pajamas and, Senator McCain notwithstanding, the popular use of the racial G-word epithet during the Vietnam war. And contrast this further with the wartime racism and the roundup, under FDR's infamous Executive Order 9066, of people of Japanese descent during the forties. Profiling hasn't gone away, but it's greatly diminished over where it was earlier in the lifetimes of some of us, and its legitimacy continues to be challenged.

This year my favorite stocking stuffer was Kofi Annan's Nobel Peace Prize address. It contains many explicit affirmations of UU principles and values in contrast to the "isms" which in recent decades cut our foreign policy off from our national espoused values and the values in the Declaration of Independence.

At this stage of my life, I feel a sense of comfort with a modified view of Christmas. Darwin showed that evolution can move forward without divine intervention. I believe the same is true for history. The UU Principles and Purposes and body of knowledge helped me get to this view. The fact that so many in the world, not just UU's, are voicing similar values and concerns, prompts me to wonder, "Am I still an outsider?"

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Dave Weber

Good morning. Jonathon invited me to speak about some concerns I had expressed last winter. I'm not sure how I got included in a service by and for Worship Associates, but here I am. Although my concerns were muted this year by our change in ministry, they nonetheless deserve airing. Naturally, I apologize if anything I am about to say offends any of you. I ask that what I say be considered for what it is, a single opinion in a diverse community of opinions, one meant to stimulate thought and dialogue.

While as a group, we close ranks against the crass materialism of the season, I believe that many of us stumble into confusion on which Christmas to recognize and celebrate. Let me explain. Against a season of darkness, cold, fear and desolation, Christmas offers hope. It involves giving, not just to friends and family, but to needy strangers as well. There's tolerance and affirmation of those different from us, inherent in the wish for peace on earth and goodwill toward all. There's a celebration of family, friendship, and community. This is Dickens' Christmas Carol, where Scrooge learns that his business is humankind and a concern for the fate of the less fortunate, rather than the pursuit of wealth. It is George Bailey's realization in "It's a Wonderful Life" that compassion, family, and friends can triumph over selfish avarice. It is also a season of color and light that defies the darkness, warmth that casts out the cold, and a coming together into community to overcome the fear and desolation. The spirit of this season is reflected in Mel Torme's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", Irving Berlin's (and Bing Crosby's) "White Christmas", Perry Como's rendition of "There's No Place like Home for the Holidays", and Nat King Cole's "Chestnuts roasting on an Open Fire", along with "Silver Bells", "Deck the Halls", "We Wish You a Merry Christmas", "Jingle Bells", "The Twelve Days of Christmas", and countless other songs that joyously celebrate light, love, peace, giving, and community. As UU's, we can honor this Christmas by celebrating the giving of ourselves to others, and the work we are called to do toward social justice, toward community-building, and toward peace and goodwill for all humankind. As Jesus spoke of love, tolerance, sharing, and compassion, it is entirely appropriate that we honor his teachings at Christmas, much as we honor those of Martin Luther King in January.

Yet there is another Christmas out there which is not in concert with the beliefs of most UU's. It is the Christmas of orthodox Christians for whom religion has absolutely nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, but instead involves the divinity of Christ. These people, who accept their origins in sin and offer supplication to avoid damnation, see Jesus as a personal savior, not a historical figure. Their Christmas is a celebration of the virgin birth of a God baby, symbolized by the manger scene. This story embodies Christ's divinity through the miraculous appearance of a star in the Eastern heavens and the reverent worship of shepherds and kings, and emphasizes the separation of Jesus from humanity by the mode of his father-less birth. It is a story whose very essence seems in conflict with Unitarian Universalist principles.

Why, you might ask is there confusion among UU's on which Christmas to celebrate? It seems pretty obvious to me. Well, to begin with, many members of our congregations are refugees from conservative Christian faiths. They have fond memories of early Christmases and desperately want to hold on to familiar holiday traditions despite a disenchantment with many of the basic beliefs that underlie them. Thus the same people who for 11 months a year avoid overuse of the "G" word and decry the use of non-inclusive gender specific language, toss away their principles in December. To please them, such carols as "We Three Kings", "People Look East", "Oh Little Town of Bethlehem", "Silent Night", and "Oh Come all ye Faithful", have been sung in this or other UU sanctuaries I have attended. Many UU congregations thus celebrate Christmas singing about virgin birth, about a star announcing the birth of a God baby in a manger, and of holy infants and saviors, claiming that it is only metaphor or simply choosing to ignore the meaning of the words. Choral music performed at this time of year is usually heavy and conservatively Christian in tone. The joyful songs that express the best of the season for me are excluded as hymns for choir or congregation.

Perhaps to please these ex-Christians, many ministers then feel the need to speak about the nativity, to try to find some way of integrating this very Christian story into Unitarian Universalism. In so doing, I feel they ignore the part of Christmas which extols the principles I embrace, and concede the meaning of the holiday to evangelical Christians. I present two examples. In Berkeley, the Rev. Barbara Hamilton-Holway honors Mary's pregnancy, arguing that Christmas is not just a celebration of Jesus' birth but one of everyone's, a giant birthday bash for all humanity in which we can participate. I have great difficulty with this adaptation. The birth of Jesus was unique, a virgin birth, to separate it from the rest of us who were born in the sin of sex. I didn't have a star to announce my birth. Did you? I had no world leaders bring gifts and bow in supplication before me. I didn't get to be the personal savior of millions. I somehow don't feel the Christian world is celebrating my birth at Christmas. Then last year at UUCPA, Ken Collier told us that that the divinity of a human Jesus, cast a godlike character on all humanity - a wonderful thought. Yet if we all share in this incarnation of godliness in Jesus, surely we all stand together with him as equals. Yet of the billion Christians who fall on their knees before the one and only son of God, how many would accept this equality? Sorry Ken, but to me the Christmas story of the virgin birth of a God baby speaks of the divine nature of one man, not of humankind. Furthermore, rather than extolling humanity as godlike, the divinity of Christ belittles humans as born in sin and in need of salvation. So in sermons such as these, UU ministers invariably fail to integrate the orthodox Christian Christmas story into Unitarian Universalism for this is an impossible task. They're celebrating the wrong Christmas! However I'm sure many ex-Christian UU's go home from these sermons fulfilled, feeling that they can celebrate their beloved Christmas as they recall it from their childhood memories despite their beliefs.

Coming from a Jewish background, I don't have those memories. Having been a Humanist since I was old enough to think, I cannot overlook my principles by singing words that I do not believe or buying into desperate attempts to integrate the nativity into UU beliefs. I was overjoyed this year that this Christian aspect of Christmas was reduced in our Sunday services thanks to Kurt and Darcey. In past years at UUCPA, and at other churches, it has permeated the month of December. As a non-Christian, I either had to abandon the church at this time of year or feel alienated in a place I had come to feel was my home. I am not alone in this feeling. Many of our newest members come from non-churched backgrounds also lacking in traditional Christian traditions. Many of our members have spoken to me of being turned off by the preponderance of theism in December sermons and music. Several (including a choir member) are unhappy with the conservative Christian themes in our choral music. Many acknowledge feeling excluded from the church at this time of year. Have you noticed that large segments of the church disappear in December? While I agree that it would certainly be inappropriate for us to ignore Christmas, what is needed is a refocusing, a shift in favor of the Christmas traditions I mentioned earlier, whose elements are in agreement with UU beliefs; one which explicitly excludes as irrelevant the story of the birth of the God baby. We could honor the best aspects of the holiday and then make manifest our celebration by adjourning as a group to feed the homeless or carry gifts to the needy. Now that would be a Christmas service to remember!

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Jonathan Harvey

Good morning. My name is Jonathan Harvey with today's 3rd UU perspective on Christmas.

I was raised in an ultra-liberal Protestant church. I went to elementary school in Dallas, Texas, where Northaven Methodist stood out like a sore thumb being viewed by many citizens of that church of left-wing heretical trouble-makers. Our minister was accused in the Dallas Morning News of being a Communist at least once. We were mainly interested in social justice, an occasional bit of spirituality, and not once was I asked if I was saved. A similar Methodist church in my high school years in Philadelphia was not as distinctive. After all New England, New York, and Eastern Pennsylvania have high concentrations of liberal religious types even outside UUism. My public school was two-thirds Jewish, almost all Reform Jews (which is one of the most liberal branches) and there was a freedom of religious discussion in my high school found in few public schools in America. Lit classes were taught on the Bible and other religious literature and most interesting many Jewish students were comfortable with taking part in the schools minimal Christmas celebrations of tree decorating and singing carols. Perhaps when Jews are 68 per cent of the school student body, one is less likely to feel marginalized by the observance of Christmas and it becomes more of an exercise in religious tourism.

This was also the late 1960s and early 1970s. In those days, traditional Christians were still not too involved in politics regarding it as vain and worldly, as the Supreme Court had not yet rubber-stamped abortion freedom in Roe v. Wade and gay rights was just getting started. In the 60s and early 70s there were two prominent politically activist Christian organizations. One was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference which was anti-racism and closely associated with Martin Luther King. The other was Clergy and Laity Concerned trying to stop the madness of the Vietnam War. Liberal Christians have always been a numeric minority, but they were the most politically visible religious group of that era. No one had heard of the Moral Majority or the Christian Coalition or family values with their strident agendas of being anti-gay, anti-Darwin, and anti-sex, not to mention anti-Harry Potter. In those days when the media, Time or Life wanted a "Christian" perspective on politics they usually turned to Reinhold Neibuhr a Yale theology professor who had run for public office in the 30s on the socialist ticket and had been very active organizing labor unions against Henry Ford. Sure, Senator Joe McCarthy and William F. Buckley and Pat Buchanan were all devout Catholics, but it was the liberals wearing Christianity on their sleeves.

In my early adulthood I switched to Episcopalian because although I'm not big on dogma I do like ritual and they were the only group with a ritual to dogma ratio greater than 1. In fact it's in the 100s. Robin Williams said Episcopalians were "Catholic light" same ceremonies, half the guilt. It was more like none of the guilt or dogma. It's been suggested the main difference between a conservative Episcopalian and a Catholic is the 1st uses birth control, and the main difference between a liberal Episcopalian and a Unitarian is that the first doesn't mind singing hymns whose words he does not believe.

There was a certain style of conservative Christianity mostly British that loosely appealed to me. JRR Tolkien the author of "Lord of the Rings" was fairly conservative Roman Catholic in spite of his repeated insistence that paganism was good. I liked his piety. He seemed to represent a country gentleman's common sense against the dehumanizing and madder aspects of modern urban living. By contrast, Jerry Falwell represented a country hillbilly's ignorance against the civilizing and liberating aspects of modern urban living.

In the early 80s at the age of 28, I moved to Ohio, where I encountered every conceivable use of Christianity to rationalize every conceivable form of bigotry and prejudice against Jews, gays, and blacks, and found virtually every church in town demanded one check one's brains at the door with little guarantee about whatever surgery was to be performed on it while they had in custody. I was soon saying "So this is why Mark Twain was an atheist". In short order, I joined the Unitarian church, identified for a few years as a UU Christian, finally threw in the towel on that and I am now more or less loosely a Buddhist and religious humanist. Still, I greet Christmas with great enthusiasm.

When I first heard that there were members of this congregation uncomfortable with the celebration of Christmas, I was bewildered. Aren't we honoring wisdom in all religions including Christianity? In the 1960s, the Roman Catholic church officially proclaimed there was wisdom and goodness in all the major world religions and encourage Catholics to affirm what was good in Buddhism, Islam, Judaism etc. There was a running joke in those days that the difference between a Catholic and Unitarian was the Catholic thought there was some partial truth in all religions except the only completely true religion was Christianity. A UU thought there was some partial truth in all religions except the only completely false religion was Christianity.

And Christmas of all things. When the Puritans took over England briefly about 250 years ago, they tried to abolish the celebration of Christmas because they felt it was the most overtly pagan of all the Christian holidays. Now we have UU's who don't want to celebrate it because its the most Christian of all the church holidays. Like the mulatto child of an interracial couple it can't fit into either circle.

Christmas to me had been from Day 1 a lot more than the birth of Jesus. It was Scrooge's conversion, the Nutcracker, Santa's elves and the animals Christmas from that most pagan of all children's classics Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows". And let's not forget National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. It was a stretch for me to see Christmas as anything but a time of supreme joy.

There is much evidence to suggest that when a religion is meaningful in one's youth, even when one ceases to believe the dogmas it is still a source of meaning and orientation as the entire enterprise of Reconstructionist Judaism testifies.

Then I pressed David for his objections, and I began to see how Christmas might look different. First of all, David was raised Jewish in the same area of Ohio where I had developed a deep disdain for the prevailing Christian atmosphere, and which unlike my Philadelphia neighborhood was heavily anti-Semitic. David observed, I think correctly, that our church has rarely observed Christmas in a way that celebrates religious humanism, but instead we wallow in nostalgia for more innocent days and sing Christmas carols some of whose words go utterly against the grain of UU theology with lines like "Come let us adore him". I admit to having never really paid attention to the words of Christmas songs, though I do have my own favorites. And I realized that many of the appealing aspects of Christmas to me may seem obvious to me, but not to others. And so perhaps we need to think harder about what constitutes a specifically Unitarian Christmas other than a regression to childhood nostalgia. I understand a lot of effort was put into that this past Christmas Eve which I bailed out on to visit my cousins.

I'll put in my own two cents on why Christmas is still meaningful to me. I'll open with a quote from that great advocate of scientific skepticism Martin Gardner:

The Bible is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Christmas story, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

First of all., I like the reading that Joseph Campbell has had of the Christmas story. His reading is probably closer to what Christians believed a thousand years ago than today. The Virgin Birth is a sort of fresh start a new beginning a break with a dead past. In the Bible, there is no linkage at all between the Virgin Birth and the divinity of Jesus, nor between the Virgin Birth and any suggestion that sexuality is bad. It is a myth in the tradition of earlier myths about the virgin birth of Hercules, various Egyptian heroes and so forth. Joseph Campbell sees the virgin birth as symbolic, calling it "the birth of spiritual [hu]man out of animal [hu]man," and "the birth of compassion." He links the birth of Christ to the birth of Buddha, who was said to have been born out of his mother's side (C, p. 174-5). Campbell goes on to state, "Heroes and demigods are born that way, as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation. This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center" rather than from selfish motivation (C, p. 176).

The Christmas story may be like one of these Rorshach inkblot tests where what you see in it says more about you than about the picture. And how you grew up seeing it may be hard to shake.

The psychologist Carl Jung spoke of Christianity having a kind of split personality, sometimes advocating a humanitarian, life-affirming and compassionate ethic, other times advocating a morbid, authoritarian, and even sado-masochistic ethic. A more recent author said that taken as a whole the God of the Bible seems to be seriously manic-depressive. I've seen both sides. And I think there are different parts of the Bible that can support either of these perspectives. As our past minister Ken Collier put it once, the Bible is a remarkable mixture of beauty and barbarism. If one grew up experiencing mainly the latter, Christmas can be a tough sell.

Very little of Campbell's reading of Christmas can be found in evangelical sermons today though it can be found in many ancient mystics. Ken Collier used to talk about reading the Bible in the first person seeing Christmas as celebrating all new births. David told me he didn't buy that because that's not what the other churches believed. David was surprised when I pointed out to him that an old saying in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is "God became man to show man how to become like God" and indeed in traditional Eastern churches the birth of divinity in every one of us is considered part of the Christmas celebration. Again, a lost part of an ancient heritage that should be accessible to UU's but isn't.

Many historians believe that much of the Christian attitudes offensive to modern liberals took deep popular root in the 13th and 14th century. During this era, we saw vastly increased hostility to Jews and gays, increasing authoritarianism and dogmatism in the Papacy, the rise of the Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft trials, the church teaching that Purgatory was just like hell except you'll get out, the development of indulgences, and a new emphasis on the notion that without the official sacraments of the church your salvation was doubtful. In the 12th century, medieval Europe had a flourishing Jewish subculture and also a flourishing & visible gay subculture. If you were gay or Jewish you were a bit of an outsider but your livelihood was safe. 200 years later that time was a distant memory, and Christianity had become a far more obsessed with sin, guilt and fear of divine wrath then in earlier eras. We may have to mine deep to appreciate the riches of Christian mythology as Joseph Campbell has done, and not all UU's are convinced it is worth the effort.

My favorite reading of Christmas comes from a modern Christian writer, G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton observes two things. The first is that there is no room at the inn, and so Jesus is born in a manger. Thus God identifies with the destitute and the down-and-out. Today he might be born in Hotel de Zink. Stanford chaplain Jim Burklo has compared the homelessness of Jesus to the homelessness of the person who is attracted to aspects of Christianity, but can no longer believe the dogmas. He suggests that authentic faith can be born outside of the creeds just as Jesus was born outside the confines of the inn. (I prefer the term spirituality to the term faith which I think is tainted, but the point is taken.) Chesterton's 2nd observation is that people from opposite extremes of class and income observe the birth. The Magi also known as the 3 Kings are from the wealthiest class, and shepherds were of course the lowliest profession of the day. Not unlike having your child's birth observed by a few members of the Kennedy family and handful of truck drivers. I grant that the Magi are only in Matthew's Gospel and the shepherds only in Luke's Gospel, but let's focus on the myth as it evolved. Chesterton refers to the Christmas scene with this line "Where God is homeless and where all men are at home". This remains for me, the most meaningful reading of the Christmas story.

Jim Burklo before explaining why he feels he must reject the creeds and dogmas of Christianity writes "Christianity is the language of my soul. The music, the myths, the symbols, and the rituals of the church are food for my heart, giving me rich poetic and artistic forms to express my deepest and best self." As a sort of expatriate Christian having given my own citizenship in that country for dual citizenship in Buddhaville and UUland, I still know what he means.

There's been a lot of talk about a culture war for the soul of America. There's also a less visible one for the soul of Christianity between Christian humanists and Christian fundamentalists as recounted in books like "Stealing Jesus" and Burklo's "Open Christianity". Some UU's and humanists feel strongly that Christianity ought to be abandoned in toto by progressive-minded people and that it is beyond salvage. I myself encourage UU support of one side of that smaller culture war.

As agnostic as I am, I echo these words of Martin Buber. "God is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I will not abandon it."

A few days ago I discovered a new book of essays by Joseph Campbell. It's an anthology of stuff he wrote just on Christian mythology and nothing else. I wish I had learned of it earlier. I could have given it to Dave for Christmas.