Light One Candle

Happy DiSolHanaKwanzmas! Merry ChrisHanaKwanzYulestice!

This time of year people of many faiths focus on community, resilience, and joy. It’s not hard to guess why all this feasting, wassailing, singing, and above all candle-lighting, came to be a part of many religious traditions in the northern hemisphere. The short days and lack of sunlight, the fallow fields, and chilly temperatures have real physiological, psychological and logistical impacts on our daily lives.

This year the words about “Good will toward all” and “This is the time of year when we focus on love” have sounded forced to my ears. It isn’t simple and easy to love everybody while we are responding to the trauma of terrorist attacks and mass shootings at places of healing (Planned Parenthood and County Facility for disabled children…), recreation (concert venue, movie theater…), and daily life (schools and malls…) We are asking questions about the mental health or emotional state or political ideologies of the shooters. We are asking questions about the availability of weapons of such devastation. And we are, or at least we should be, asking questions about how we change our culture and norms so that we hold our mentally ill neighbors, our angry family members, our hate-filled colleagues in the care they need, and prevent access to the tools of mass murder.

I had an open and vulnerable conversation with a friend the other day, where he asked, “Should we NOT have protections at our borders? Should we just let anyone in?” He was scared, for good reason. I realized that I could not ask him to welcome the stranger into his neighborhood and home until I witnessed and cared for his fear. (He is afraid of the neighbor down the street who has a confederate flag in the window, and the people the news keeps calling “Illegal Aliens”  or “Jihadists” – people with no names or faces or stories. Pagans know these faceless dangers in myth and story as the ‘bogeymen’ or ‘BabaYaga’ or ‘schwarze mann’ or ‘el ogro’ or ‘pooka’.)

Last week the Denton, Texas CUUPS chapter cancelled their Annual Solstice event after their building was severely damaged from arson. A troubled teenager thought a church was the place to express… Something. My mom always worried about me becoming a minister: working in a big city hospital where gang members might try to finish what they started after admittance to the ER. Or in a congregation that had “freedom to marry” or “black lives matter” posted on the building, where right wing bigots with guns might walk in and open fire. Or doing Spiritual Accompaniment where distressed individuals might express their fear or anger with violence. This week I read about a congregation in Indiana discerning if it is safe to gather in community while an unidentified person continues to post online hate-filled threats against whole groups of people. Violence is threaded so deeply through our culture that even our peace-keepers feel embattled, burnt out, helpless or angry and many cross the line and become perpetrators of violence themselves.

Yes, if you are awake, you know the world is not all sugarplums and bright lights right now. It is natural to feel afraid. But it is not appropriate to change what we are doing.  Members of CUUPS, Unitarian Universalists, and Pagans who live each our own version of the Rede “An it harm none…”: We are offering hope in a hopeless world. We are offering welcome in a xenophobic, intolerant world, we are offering love in a world often ruled by fear and hate.

We also can offer wisdom from myth and story. How does one cope with a boogeyman? How do you handle fearful things you cannot see?

Of course my mom worried about me. And of course, I kept showing up anyway. I am so much safer than so many other people who face violence every day. This is like the important change from rape culture to consent culture: from a world where potential victims are in charge of keeping ourselves safe by staying home  or making ourselves small, to a better world, where we all are responsible for everyone being safe from violence. The work must be done… To build the world we dream about…

The ability to sink into the darkness of this season is one of the gifts of Pagan paths. The chill, the hunger, and the loss that is so hard to live through is also a source of great gifts. I invite you to share your gifts of the season in the comments here. Whether you stay up all night to sing the sun up, gaze into the warm fire of a yule log, light a candle on your altar, meditate and chant, or plant your anger and sadness into loamy compost so that it is transformed and feeds your seeds of hope… However you celebrate solstice this year, may you light a candle in your heart to care for the worry and the fear, and let that light lead you to the work that is yours to do.