Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Big Time

Reverend Darcey Laine
December 11, 2005
Palo Alto, CA

A year is almost an unfathomable amount of time when you are 4 years old. You have vague memories of holidays, and they feel somewhat familiar as they come around, but it’s hard to keep track of exactly where things fall in the cycle, and very frustrating to imagine how long it is until next Halloween.

The cool thing about being an adult that we’ve seen enough cycles come and go, that we experience the turning of the year as a familiar and well worn path. We notice things that we revisit, and we notice new things special to this particular year. When the peaches started to become bland this fall I was sad until I remembered that apples would soon take their place. The tank tops and sundresses go back in the garage, and the wooly sweaters come out. I remember why I used to be so crazy about tea and hot cereal.

When you are an adult, you’ve seen the winter season come and go. Perhaps the holidays start to seem superficial. If you’re not celebrating the birth of Jesus, what is this all about? I think what it could be about, what I think has kept this holiday cycle going for so many centuries is a basic cultural and biological clock. Notice the busy feeling of fall as the squirrels hide their peanuts in your potted plants, notice the busy feeling as the deadlines and deliverables at work pile up. Are these so different?

As winter begins the days become shorter and shorter, and somehow the Roman calendar’s somewhat arbitrary year-end creates a kind of threshold, a cultural deadline that makes the days seem all the more scarce. We add another layer of business: the cookie making, card sending and holiday parties. This is work that could, if we let it, remind us of our connection to others. In a season of darkness and driving rain, we might have a tendency to disconnect from others, but instead we have this tradition of connection. At the same time, the increasing darkness, the time off of work gives us a chance to reconnect with ourselves, that quiet, solitary part which knows something deep and important about who we are and what we are doing.

Many cultural and religious calendars include a winter celebration of light: Solstice, Chanuka, Divali. I happen to celebrate Christmas because it is one of the yearly traditions taught to me by my family. For me, a life long Unitarian Universalist, this season is not so much about awaiting the birth of that wise Rabbi and Avatar Jesus of Nazareth, as it is about noticing how our bodies and society respond to the shorter days, the bare trees, the migration patterns of birds.

My family traditions at mid-winter draw particular attention to the connection between generations. Of all the holidays, it is at Christmas that we are most likely to make the cookies that my mother’s mother taught her to make. We pull out the “baby’s’ first Christmas” ornament with my husband’s name engraved, and place it near the one engraved for my son on a tree that reminds me of the tree I decorated as a child, that connects me to the tradition of gathering evergreen branches at this holiday which dates back centuries. The advertisers may be encouraging us to “buy, buy, buy” so it is up to our faith community to encourage us to reflect: “Where are we in the cycle of life? What do I notice this time I go around the cycle? What is new, and what returns? How have I grown and changed this time around the cycle? What am I called to do in the next?”

Every religious community I know preserves their own unique calendars of seasonal landmarks, customs and wisdom. Religious communities also notice and tend the cycle of life. When a baby is born, the community comes together. When 2 persons covenant to join their families, the community is gathered. When a life ends, we gather in support and memory. Our religious tradition grows out of an awareness that certain wisdom is useful in such moments. We don’t reinvent the wheel; we know that as we become parents, we join with the thousands of generations of humans who encounter new life. We have evolved over generations the custom of welcoming that life, of bring it to the heart of community. Such a ritual says “notice this moment! Not only you who are new parents, but all in this community.”

By being part of an intergenerational community, we catch glimpses of the long view. How can a 4-year-old know the steps and stages between preschool and adulthood unless he is surrounded by people in each of those stages? We know that little children who see teenagers do service projects or lead worship are more likely to stay in the church whey they themselves are teenagers. Being around parents of older children helps me find models for how I parent. Spending time with Elders reminds me where I am in the shape of my own journey, and helps me imagine the wise, honest, flamboyant elder I aspire to be. As hard as it is for a 4-year-old to fathom a year, it may be equally hard for adults to expand their awareness to hold a lifetime. And so we count on our religious tradition to help us fathom that expanse.

But let’s think bigger than a year, bigger than a lifetime. We live in a culture of planned obsolescence — when no on seems concerned that after you’ve owned your PDA for 2 years you can’t buy replacement parts. We live in a time when there is no motivation for most HMOs to encourage preventative care because statistics show that people change health plans every 3–5 years. We live in a time when California is served by a state legislature where freshmen chair major committees because term limits have become shorter and shorter, and there are no experienced legislators to run the committees.

So who’s going to think 7 generations past and future? I think that is our job as well. I think Religion has always offered a bigger picture than we stumble over in our day to day. When we look out 7 generations , it helps us clarify values. What do we want for our children, and their children? Knowledge? Beauty? The majesty of a blue Heron? Shall we preserve for them the experience of lighting candle to candle in a dark night, reminding them as it reminds us something about light, warmth and the spread of love from heart to heart? Can we pass on the story of Susan B Anthony which reminds us that all people have certain rights, and that one person can stand up to an unjust system?

Whenever we think long-term, we value our children, we value our grandchildren, we value the perpetuation of life itself. Environmentalists remind us that if we care about the next 7 generations, the best thing we can do to help them is to protect their environment, to make sure we are on track to have plenty of clean air and water for them to breathe and drink. I may be wrong, but I feel like the makers of Palm Pilot and I-pod are not taking the 7 generation view. So who is?

Richard Heinberg, author of “Power Down” and “The Party’s Over” is concerned that we will hit our peak of fossil fuel sometime in the next 10 years, and that by the time our grandchildren are born they will live in a radically different world than the one we now call home. He talks about “lifeboats:” centers of memory and cultural preservation that could devote themselves to preserving the best of our culture through the period of impending shift he sees written on the walls of contemporary economics. Like the monks of the middle ages, he hopes that centers of memory would preserve some of our precious ideas and wisdom. Perhaps this is part of what we, the post modern religious communities, do. We teach our children and adults about the wisdom of the transcendentalists, women’s suffragettes, the values of compassion and justice, the value of wonder and beauty so that these ideas and values will outlive us. But we are not alone in this work.

Composer Brian Eno and a few of his friends, including Danny Hillis who created Parallel Super Computers, founded the Long Now Organization to encourage an expanded sense of now. Their central project is a 10,000 year clock. The clock is not so much a necessary legacy, but a concrete means of helping people think about the logistics of imaging so far into the future. Let your imagination run for a moment. What kinds of questions would you have to ask to begin designing such a clock? What kinds of things change in 10,000 years? What remains constant? Think about geological changes, climate changes. Changes in culture and language. Think how technology might change, or energy sources. And one of the most compelling questions for me: who remembers this clock, when all who built it are gone?

At the Long Now Foundation, they tell this story: Oxford University recently replaced the gigantic oak beams in the ceiling of one of its dining halls. When the beams began to show signs of rotting, university officials were concerned that they wouldn't be able to find lumber large and strong enough to replace them. But the university's forester explained to them that, when the dinning hall was built 500 years ago, their predecessors had planted a grove of oak trees so that the university could replace the beams when the time came.

A few years ago I asked the leaders of the congregation to choose which anniversary we would celebrate in a major way. The Building dedication? Our association with the UUA? We agreed on the signing of our charter in 1947. That was 4 years off. How would we remember to have a party in 4 years? None of the calendars go out that far. Our governance terms are only 3 years. Just planning a party 4 years hence was an exercise in long term thinking. What if we use this anniversary, now only 2 years away, to help us think about our own ” long now” as a church community? What do we want this church to be 60 years hence? What values, rituals, ideas do we hope will be preserved? How would we go about the process of preservation?

Traditionally religions do this 2 ways. The first is the book. We compile all the precious wisdom and stories into a book, and we send these seeds of ourselves off with all our members and friends, making each of us the owner of this tradition. But how do we remember to look in the book? For this we need rituals and stories we know by heart. How did the foresters know what that oak grove was for? Because each time a new forester was trained they must have said “this is the oak grove to replace the beams in college hall.” They passed it on by word of mouth, in the very name of the grove. Imagine if we planted a madrone tree to replace this branch when it becomes too old to hang here. This branch is our 3rd since this church was founded — it will not last forever. A tree planted in 2007 will not be grown by the time this branch needs to be replaced. But such a tree might be big enough 60 years hence, and so we would have to say to one another “that tree is the one that will grow to replace the branch in our main hall.” We would be sure to mention it to newcomers, to our children, and to each other.

This is the part of religious education I didn’t understand when I was fresh out of seminary. I wanted our children and adults to experience the directness of their own knowing, the first hand awe and power of being alive and being in relationship. But now I see that there is something else. I see that we are also charged with passing on the few treasures of memory that are carried in mind and heart, that must be told and retold as the seasons cycle by. We would be wise to think carefully about the stories we tell, noticing what seeds they carry to the future. Which stories need to be told every year? Which need to be held by each generation?

Once a year, when the days are short and the nights are long, let us remember to say “enough” to the frantic preparation of fall and early winter. Let’s reach out to friends and family we may not have seen for a whole year. If we get depressed or discouraged when we the winter sun does not warm us as we want, as the rain sends us inside, let’s remind ourselves that the spring will be back in her own time. How will you and those who follow you remember to notice the special quiet quality of a dark winter’s night? What have you learned about the turn of fall to winter, about the dark of midwinter that you would pass on to the next generation? What have we as a society learned from our ancestors about surviving the dark barren time, and how do we preserve that knowledge for a time when we might not be able to ship peaches from across the globe so we can eat them all year round?

My hope this morning has been to give you, in this season when time seems short, an expanded sense of time. This, I believe, is one of the most ancient jobs of religion: to remind us of the big picture. By noticing the bigger frames of time, our tradition lets us know where we are in the cycle of the year and in the cycle of life. By imagining deep into the future, we clarify our values. We preserve wisdom and things of value for future generations. We open ourselves to give, and also to receive the wisdom and things of value were preserved for us by all the generations that came before. Perhaps this winter when we see the returning sun, when we see images of a newborn our sense of time will grow bigger. May the symbols of this season remind us reach out one hand to all generations which came before, and to all generations who will follow us.