Lighting Candles

LIGHTING CANDLES
A Hanukkah Reflection

A Sermon by

James Ishmael Ford

2 December 2007
First Unitarian Society
West Newton, Massachusetts

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What are we, any of us, but strangers and sojourners forlornly wandering through the nighttime, until we draw together and find the meaning of our lives in one another, dissolving our fears in each other’s courage, making music together, and lighting torches to guide us through the dark? We belong together. Love is what we need. To love and to be loved.

A. Powell Davies

I know after the first half dozen or so times I found myself addressing the subject of Hanukkah from a Unitarian Universalist pulpit, I felt I pretty much exhausted the obvious things to say about it. I suspect even after that I still returned for a while at least to the same themes more or less, but perhaps, hopefully, from a slightly different angle, and maybe once in a while from a deeper place. While perhaps not the best analogy for today, as they say, even a blind pig digs up a truffle once in a while.

Then, maybe ten years into this cycle of regular return to the ancient themes of Hanukkah I felt things did begin to shift a bit for me. It took a bit of free association, of allowing images to detach from their historical moorings, and allowing my imagination to float free. As a consequence I found myself opening to different points, new lessons. The best of it, the reason I mention it here, was how sometimes this process proved to be useful for me as I tried to understand my life. I hope this might prove true for you, as well, as I very briefly retell the old story and then let parts float free, taking us on a journey of discovery, a voyage of inquiry into our individual hearts.

The rule of thumb here was to look for something different. It was like trying, just once in a while, to hear hoof beats in the distance and to think maybe not horses, maybe zebras. Now, some of the newer perspectives were actually fairly obvious, but I’d missed them in rehearsing the more apparent aspects of the tradition. Which for those among us not familiar with it is the story of the Maccabean revolt against Seleucid rule over the ancient Jewish homeland a little less than two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. At the heart of it a miracle story of there not being enough oil to light candles for the necessary time to purify the desecrated temple, and yet somehow the candles continued to burn for all necessary eight days. Increasingly some of the points I’ve come to find most useful had only tangential connections to that story.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m quite fond of the story as it is, perhaps particularly because it is so complicated. For instance rabbinical Judaism appears never to have been particularly happy with this festival, or for that matter with the Maccabeans themselves. The reasons appear to be multiple, but not least because the Maccabean revolt was not just against outsiders but also a civil war, what could be characterized as a fundamentalist revolt against a more liberal and tolerant Jewish leadership.

One thing is certain, the books recounting the exploits of the Maccabees were never included in the Jewish canon, and ironically survived at least in part largely because of their inclusion in the Septuagint, the early Christian Greek language Bible. The books of the Macabees survive to this day as part of the canon for the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Although, parenthetically, not in the Protestant Bible because Reformation scholars followed Jewish precedent in choosing their so-called Old Testament.

Hanukkah survived as a very minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, becoming important in America mainly because of its proximity to Christmas and how it could comfortably be observed as an alternative for people living in a culture so dominated by that other great religion of the Abrahamic inheritance.

The question for me became what if I looked very closely at just one little part of the story? What if I didn’t concern myself with the Maccabees or the eight days or the finer theological points. What if I just thought about the candles?

A burning candle. Its one of those images used as a metaphor to all sorts of different purposes, and seems to have versions in all cultures, at least those that have candles. Which, as it turns out, covers a lot of cultures. Sometimes these metaphoric references come as a warning. “Like a candle in the wind.” Or, “burning the candle at both ends.” There are also admonitions that hint at the power of a candle, such as that passage which occurs in all the synoptic gospels; where Jesus says one doesn’t light a candle and then hide it under a bushel. Or, and I find it related, that lovely Chinese proverb how “it’s better to light a candle than curse the dark.”

While rummaging around the web I also found a metaphoric use for a burning candle attributed to the Buddha. One I hadn’t seen before. Yes, there is another where the Buddha uses the image of a candle lighting another to explain the doctrine of rebirth. Which I have to admit I’ve never fully grasped. This one particularly caught me. “There isn’t enough darkness in all the world to snuff out the light of one little candle.” I’m especially taken with that one as I think of the Hanukkah miracle of the candles. And even though I’m not sure it really came from the Buddha, I am moved by its message. “There isn’t enough darkness in all the world to snuff out the light of one little candle.”

And, of course, there is that aspect of miracle. It’s not possible to consider candles at least as inspired by the Hanukkah story without that word miracle hanging in there somewhere. Of course, miracles can be rough going for many of us here. Not all of us, but enough to pause for a moment and reflect on that as well. We haven’t done a survey recently but I would hazard to guess we have quite a bit few people who are not comfortable with assertions of events that claim to disrupt the normative laws of physics. There are more here than one finds in most religious communities; or, at least, more who are willing to say so…

For those of us not inclined to miracles as disruptions of those laws of physics, and I admit I count among them, I suggest taking a deep breath and setting aside for just this moment whether miracles as some form of divine intervention in history is a true thing in an objective sense. I believe there is more here than that one bare use allows. What about those moments we’re occasionally blessed with that absolutely blow away everything we thought of as the way things are supposed to be? What about miracles as metaphors for that chance we all have to change, to be something more than we have been. Is that crazy? Maybe. But I hope we can invite that crazy, to be just a little crazy and allow a new response to that old encounter with our lives.

Look for zebras, just for a moment, just in the context of contemplating this old story and see what lessons this can allow us to pull out of it for our lives today.
Somehow I feel that miracle starts, at least it can start, with one person who is a candle for us. That’s certainly the thought that kept popping up for me as I reflected on the Hanukkah story and let the various images associated with it to float in my imagination. Perhaps our own candle, yours or mine, was lit from someone else’s. Perhaps you can think of such a miraculous candle in your life. Or, if you’re particularly fortunate, maybe you can think of several. For me when I think of that single candle burning bright, when I think of miraculous candles, how I can change what seems written in stone, discovering the birth of hope, I immediately think of my grandmother Bolene.

I’ve spoken of her before and how important she was, is to me. Bolene had a very hard life. She had little formal education, and worked for many years as a maid. Her husband was a wastrel. She never owned a home. Her retirement was a very small Social Security check which would not have been enough but for living with her daughters. And yet she persevered, through it all she persevered. Think Ma Joad in the Grapes of Wrath. Pretty much it was she who kept the family going as the men, her husband and son-in-law bounced from one disaster to another. Somehow in all of this, in some very real ways; she thrived. And because she thrived, I saw I could, too. She was the spiritual anchor of our small family, by the common assent of all those who knew her, she was a prayer warrior who knew God intimately.

In the year I was in bed with rheumatic fever she was there tending to me and praying up miracles of healing. And there was something else. In our hardscrabble fundamentalist religion where the preachers told us that Catholics weren’t Christian, she told me they were. And I believed her. She provided the first hint that the words of men in dark suits standing in their pulpits were not necessarily true, and yet that didn’t mean there wasn’t truth to find. She gave me two lessons here. First, love has no boundaries. And second, think for yourself.

Now she wasn’t a Universalist. Nor was she a rationalist. But she did witness how that love, which she found in Christ, wasn’t containable by any denomination, not even her beloved fundamentalist Baptist church. And, she knew her informed conscience would be sufficient to guide her through life. Through much suffering I would follow those two things as burning lights.

Is that one candle? Is that two? I’m pretty sure my whole religious life flowed from those lessons. I think I need to say one candle, Bolene. I cannot say how much I owe that burning flame.

And, I think of how that flame passed from one candle to another. How my grandmother’s light kindled something in me. I think of how we light our candles of joy and sorrow. Some light their candle from the central flaming chalice some light theirs off of another candle in the bowl. However, in that process, one by one, a glorious blaze of possibility presents itself. Candles become torches guiding us through the dark night.

Perhaps someone in your life has been that candle for you. Perhaps today as we reflect on the miracle of candles, we might be just a little crazy and think of those who were candles for us. Perhaps we might think how we have become candles for others.

Perhaps there is a great forest of candles burning. And if we allow ourselves to be just a little crazy, today we might notice.

And be grateful.

Amen.