A Christmas Truce

On this day in 1914 at the front between the German and British armies in Ypres some German troops lit up some trees with candles and began to sing Stille Nacht and other carols. The British responded in kind.

An informal truce began.

Apparently this truce occurred along the line between various forces

The high commands were not happy, and the next year ordered artillery bombardments on Christmas Eve. Nonetheless similar events took place again, although on a much smaller scale.

One of my favorite thinkers is Sue Blackmore. In her most recent blog entry she muses over whether atheists should observe Christmas and sing the Christmas carols and hymns. She cited Christopher Dawkins assertion that as a cultural Christian the season belongs to him, as well, and that he, absolutely, and with gusto, sings the hymns and enjoys the season.

On Sunday we had a Christmas pageant, faithful in spirit to the accounts found in Luke and Matthew, although it was just as faithful to the current of solstice celebration that underlies the holiday. It was our holiday, a Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant.

And it isn’t just because Unitarians claimed Christmas which had been suppressed as a pagan celebration by the knowing Puritans as a New England holiday. Although we did…

Christmas is about the turning from the longest night and the reclamation of light.

That’s the ancient solstice holiday.

It is about the turning of the heart.

That is the universal message.

Christmas is about that possibility of change, and hope birthing in the darkest night.

Of course it calls for truces.

It is a call to end the war within our hearts.

And so tonight at the First Unitarian Church, we too, will be declaring that truce. Some old songs will be sung, in their terrible masculine by preference and Christian triumpalist language lifted from an old Methodist hymnal and printed into the order of service instead of out of our gray hymnal, which I generally really like, but which makes a hash of the Christian songs.

We’ll also be reading from the Gospels of Luke and Matthew in the King James version, slightly modified according to our sensibilities. Along with, of course, some other texts that hold up the grander humanism of the season.

The truce, to work, demands both sides be honored.

All sides honored…

Good stuff, I think…

Merry Christmas, friends!

And may the silence of the night enter all hearts…