AN IMPERFECT LITTLE HOLIDAY

Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Maureen Killoran
River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Bethesda, MD ~ December, 2010

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She was about eight years old, the child who created the Dear Santa letter that lives in infamy.  Twelve pages long, single spaced, with every toy and game she could possibly name.   Her dad, who happens to be a UU  minister, took the little girl into the living room, and sat her down in front of the crèche they had placed beneath the tree. 

             Dad talked about love, and hope, and courage, and how these good things are woven into the traditional stories of Christmas.  He said that our good behavior makes a difference in the rest of the world.  Feeling rather pleased with his parenting, my colleague concluded, “Think about all this.  Then write another letter, this time to the Baby Jesus.”

             The girl thought for a few minutes, and then wrote:  “Dear Jesus, I’ve thought about your story and I promise to be good for a whole week.  Please see that I get toys.” 

            Not good enough.

             “Dear Jesus, if you make sure I get all the presents I want, I’ll be good for a whole year.”

             That didn’t cut it either.

             The child pondered.  She worried.  Then she went into the living room and studied the nativity scene. 

She reached out her hand, took the figure of Mary and put it in a shoebox.  Up the stairs, into the guest room, and she hid that shoebox at the very back of the deepest closet she could find. 

             Only then did the girl write her final words, “Dear Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again . . ."             

            And you know it, the obsession with GETTING is not limited to one UU preacher’s kid.  It’s not limited to kids at all.   For those of you who care, marketers say the following items are at the top of adults’ Christmas Want Lists this year:   

ipads . . . ipods,

            e-readers

                     and, of course big-screen tv’s.

Farther down down the list you find diamonds . . . high end vacations . . . and, newly added this year, Kobe beef.  As a nation, we'll probably spend over $400 billion this season -- which in my head gets held in tension with the estimate that we could ensure clean water for everybody in the world for about $30 billion a year. 

         But on the individual level, I remember that, for every person who’s obsessed with GETTING, there are at least two others who are stressing over  GETTING IT RIGHT,  people who’ve tied themselves in knots over whether they are giving the right thing.   

            When I was a kid, a fast-paced radio ad care around every December – “Christmas comes but once a year and then it keeps you hopping . . . with what to buy for  Mother dear, Father dear . . . and where will we go shopping?”   The answer was drilled into your head:  “People’s Credit Jewelers”.    I don’t know that I ever saw one of their stores,  but even the memory of that urgent jingle boosts my heart rate. 

             Getting It Right . . . doing it right . . . buying it right . . .

             You may have heard about the man who sent dozens and dozens of holiday cards, just because he “should.”  One year, this guy dashed into Target, grabbed several boxes of cards, and without reading the message, scribbled his name on 99 to send to all the people who sent him cards the year before. 

            A day or two later, his greetings well  mailed, the man chanced upon the one remaining card.  Idly, he opened it.  And his heart dropped when he read, “I send this note to say . .  . a little gift is on the way.”

             This is a great example of what can happen when you focus on Getting It Right. Our man rushed into a process he didn’t really care about, because all his life he’d been told that sending holiday cards is something he really SHOULD do.   And once you get a SHOULD, let’s face it, GUILT is just a heartbeat away. 

             I sometimes think the whole western world has been led astray by a mistranslation – I’m talking about the passage from the Christian scriptures, Matthew (chapter  5, verse 48 for those who keep track of these things)  the passage where Jesus is alleged to have said “Be you therefore perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.”

              Generations upon generations upon generations of preachers have framed this as a “SHOULD.”   And all this from a mistranslation, because when you go back to the ancient Aramaic, many scholars believe Jesus wasn’t talking about “perfection” at all –not in the sense we understand the word today. 

             The best guess Biblical scholars can give us is that, in today’s words, what Jesus meant was, “BE YOU THEREFORE WHOLE.”   

            Perfection . . . Wholeness.  
                     They’re not the same thing. 

            We don’t hear a lot of talk about wholeness, because wholeness doesn’t sell.  It’s a subjective matter really, less about accomplishment than about personal integrity.  Less about external standards than about living your values, being the best you can be.   

            Perfection, on the other hand, is a moving target – what you achieve, what you do, what you buy, the bar keeps rising and the Martha Stewart phenomenon doesn’t help.  Even with the best of intentions, the holidays can sneak up and you can find yourself in the Perfection Trap.   

           At Tuesday’s potluck for Hanging  the Greens, for example, one busy mother told me she’d planned to squish fixing a casserole and cupcakes into her overstuffed day, only to be saved by a simple question from her partner – WHY?  (I should add that we very much enjoyed the chicken and cupcakes she bought at Giant.)

           See if even one of these fits for you: 

*           having all your gifts beautifully wrapped -- and mailed -- on time. 

*           getting every room in your house creatively decorated . . . and absolutely clean.

*           finding the one and only right gift for every person on your list.

*           baking twelve kinds of holiday cookies.

*           buying five generic gifts, in case somebody you didn’t plan for has one for you. 

*           touching base with all your – and your partner’s -- relatives.

*           writing – and sending – your Annual Christmas letter to everyone whose address has ever crossed your desk.

 

 What about on the Big Day itself:

•  Some of you may have the job of keeping peace in your family? 
•  Making sure that everyone is, if not sober, at least managed?             
•  Planning things so everybody has a good time?  

 Friends, whether you’re up to your ankles or up to your neck, you are in the PERFECTION TRAP if even one of these things rings true for you.  

             But c’mon.  That’s what the holidays are about, aren’t they? Chestnuts roasting on an open fire?  Yuletide carols being sung by a choir?      Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe help to make the spirits bright                          . . . Or not.  

             In his book, The Battle for Christmas historian Stephen Nissenbaum says that, for Americans, Christmas has always been “a time to splurge,” a period of celebration and release that carries on “until the hard freeze of winter and . . . the constraints of ordinary existence, set in again.”  (1996, p. 139)

            A time to splurge . . . perhaps on special food, or clothing, or maybe you’re hoping for the $15,000 diamond ring I saw at Costco . . . or, on a smaller scale, the $50 candle Oprah recommends.  

 Christmas is a time to splurge, which by definition means “spending money in an extravagant or wasteful way.”   This is the old “revolution of rising expectations,” where even in these hard times, today’s extravagance becomes tomorrow’s norm. 

            And yet, if you ask people to share their cherished holiday memories, they seldom talk about “The Year of the Perfect Gifts.”   Rather, what stick in the heart are the irreplaceable HUMAN moments.  Moments that have nothing to do with Perfection and everything to do with the possibility of being Whole. 

           For example, my friend Jennifer once asked her 10-year-old what she wanted for Christmas.  She expected to hear a list of “things”, but Jennifer was stunned by her daughter’s sole reply, “I want some games that everybody in the family can play.” 

           That was a moment that had nothing to do with Perfection and everything to do with the possibility of being Whole. 

            Peter and I once met a 5-year-old who had this Wholeness thing down cold.  We were at a holiday party, sitting at the kids’ table as we often do, cutting out little hearts or stars or some such thing.  

Trying for a conversation, Peter asked the classic adult question, “So, have you been good?”  The girl didn’t miss a beat as she calmly replied, “I’ve been good enough.” 

             Ah, the wisdom of Wholeness.   “I’ve been good enough.”

 It can be done, you see.  And while it may be true that it takes a little child to lead us, we grownups aren’t totally lost.  We can choose to step aside from the Perfection Trap, and still stay connected to the underlying Reasons For The Season. 

             . . . oops, “there, she’s done it.”  

             That’s a whole ‘nother area, because these days, when people say “the reason for the season,” the Christian Right militantly insists they can mean Only One Thing.  

Jesus.

             Now, please don’t get me wrong.  I have great respect – GREAT respect -- for Jesus, the prophet, the rabbi, the wisdom carrier.  The teachings of Jesus have shaped my life.  They influence every aspect of western society.  It’s not his fault that men made dogma out of his words,  glued them onto ecclesiastical structures,  co-opted the teachings and the stories, and called people heretics if they dared to disagree! 

             I think the legends of Jesus’ birth are lovely –– and the traditions we’ve hung on them weave threads from whole libraries of folklore from the ancient near east.  Christmas trees come from ancient pagans.    So do mistletoe and Yule logs and garlands of greenery . . .  Stars show up in the birth legends of many famous teachers and the early Christian fathers weren’t exactly original when they grabbed hold of the legend of the virgin birth.   

           What we know as “Christmas” has been cobbled from ancient legends and creative theologizing . . . but I say to you that The Reasons For the Season address more profound needs.  Deep in the human psyche (that’s you and me) . . . deep inside, we long for the light, long for the turn of sun and warm, whether literally or in metaphor.   Cynical as we may rightly be about the promise of “peace on earth,” world peace still remains most profound hope, the most cherished of all lost causes, if you will. The mystical explanation for the birth of a child. . . the lights that burn beyond all logical rationale . . . the hope that allowed our ancestors to extinguish their hearth fires, trusting that light would arise from the midst of dark. 

           I’m talking about archetypes of protection.

            I’m talking about the existential yearning for our species’ survival.

            I’m talking about the possibility of hope in a world that has ever seemed on the verge of dark. 

             Oh, we’ve strung it with the tinsel of myriad theologies, gilded it with longings, obscured it with credit cards and gift wrap and rising expectations.   We’ve made the complex simple and the simple complex, and still the yearning persists.  Still the need.   

             It’s not about Getting It Right – we know that.

            It’s not about anything that even approximates being Perfect. 

             My friends, at the heart of what’s called “the holiday season” is a gift you don’t need money to buy.  It’s a gift you don’t need to have been good in order to receive. 

             Deep inside what we know as “the holidays” rests the precious bundle of psychic possibility called “Hope.” 

             I challenge you, whether you consider yourself humanist or atheist, pagan or  Christian or Jewish; whether you follow some other theology or choose to carry no theological label at all, I challenge you to step beyond the cultural demands and the theological barriers of “the holiday season.” 

 Let yourself touch the deeper meanings, the archetypes that both structure and open possibilities for our lives.    Hear, through the filter of your own beliefs and values, these words written by a wise monk over 500 years ago: 

             “ There is nothing I can give you which you have not.  But there is much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.  No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven!    No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present.  Take peace!   The gloom of the world is but a shadow.  Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see. And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!

           “ Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering,  that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.  Courage then to claim it; that is all!  But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims together,  wending through unknown country home.  (Fra Giovanni Giocondo, c. 1500)

           Merry Christmas.  Happy Holidays.  Shalom.  Blessed Be.

 

© M. Killoran, Bethesda, MD, 2010