An adaptation of a sermon by Bill Dols.
Found in his "Just Because It Didn't Happen…: Sermons and Prayers as Story"

 

Thank you, Choir!... and flute choir and bells!

Music touches such deep places within us, but the music of Christmas is even more penetrating. I saw yesterday a clip on YouTube that one of you sent my way, and I suspect many of you have seen it as well since there have been a half million views in the past week or so. It’s a flash mob at the University of Minnesota singing a beautiful and lively version of Deck the Halls. You’d have to see it to really understand but as I sat there I found myself literally weeping.

As I relayed this to someone later in the day they said… “What was that about for you?”

I stammered and nothing meaningful came to my lips, but I knew the song, the presentation had touched something deeper, far deeper, within me than I could articulate.

 

Hang on to that thought for a moment. …because I’ll try to articulate it… feebly.

 

By all accounts, I was not a difficult child. I didn’t ask for much. I didn’t even know there was much to ask for.

One Christmas… I was seven, I think… I made a list with one item on it… a box of 64 Crayola Crayons. You remember when they first came out?... a crayon sharpener built into the box! My father was a little concerned that my crayons were not male-oriented enough… after all, I played all day long with my older sister… Barbie and Midge was our go to play-like game… "Let’s play like" …  "Let's play like…" … We said it so often we used a contraction that I haven't heard since (Maybe we made it up!) "Let's play like"… "Let's p'like…"… "Let’s plike we're Barbie and Midge."

… and since my sister was older…She was always Barbie…. I was always Midge.

…but my father was concerned that crayons might be too effeminate, though he may not have used that word… He bought me the crayons, but a BB gun as well that year.

 

Our father worked in a warehouse all of his adult life … a hourly wage earner who unloaded Kraft Foods trucks of marshmallows and mayonnaise and cheese five and a half days a week. He had Saturday afternoons off.

It was late in the day mid-week. He came home and laid down across his bed to rest. I was about five years old. I stretched out beside him.

“If I was your father,” I not so subtly casually mentioned in my five-year-old self-focused honesty, … “when I came home… I’d bring you some candy.”

 

The next day when my father came home… he brought me some candy.

 

I tell you those stories because fathers and sons have been much on my mind this week. Seems everywhere I turn, there is another story… or even more true, another life event before me.

Memories of my father… he died about five years ago… my son, Jordan, who at 25 lives with me… and your stories of your fathers… and sons… have been much on my mind.

I heard a father in court this week… a not-so-good father actually tell a judge that he would leap over mountains for his three year old son who had been in foster care for 80% of the three year old's life. The father said he would do anything to get his son back… but he had missed three mandatory domestic violence classes in the past month…. and he would not return calls to the social worker.

The father SWORE he would leap over mountains for his young son when, in truth, he was stepping out for a beer with his buddies.  

 

Anthony Neff, who has poignantly been reestablishing a relationship with his own father who exited from Anthony’s life when he was nine… Anthony Neff recommended a book to me a few weeks back…and in the book I found a sermon about fathers… about relationships really… and about the darkest night of the year.

 

I’ll get back to relationships shortly, but first… the darkness.

If you’ve been around here for a few years you remember, perhaps, that I am fascinated with the Winter Solstice and today is my chance because of the choir's cantata next week.

Not only is it when Christmas Day was originally set… (and the calendar got off a little every year until the Church set the date as an immoveable feast for December 25).

…but the solstice, as the shortest day and therefore longest night in the northern hemisphere… the Solstice has been recognized for millennia as a day of great significance. (I'm quoting Bill Dols here.):

 

Since forever, the winter solstice has marked that moment in darkness when the light is reborn, when the world tilts, a glimmer of hope happens and return of days lengthening arrives. If you have ever visited the burial mounds at New Grange north of Dublin or Stonehenge near the Salisbury plain or Chaco Canyon in the Southwest, or medicine wheels or stone circles across the planet, you have seen the mark or dagger or spiral or bull’s eye carved in the rock where the morning solstice light first strikes and the gods announce that the dead of winter is past and the god of life is returning.

 

The truth of light breaking through at the darkest hour of the longest night spans history and crosses continents. It is also as close as the sighing of a broken heart when a dream is shattered, a hope broken, a promise violated and trust breached, a marriage unraveling or dead, a body aching and diseased, and when death comes like a thief in the nigh to claim those who we love and need the most. The sacred moment is not when darkness flees or vanishes but when finally, after a long winter, the light is rekindled in the darkness and even the dimmest possibility of new life awakens.[1]

 

You noticed, I’m sure, that I made a rather quick transition from the darkness and light in the physical world to the darkness and light in our personal lives… but there is great truth here. The darkest hour of the longest night is not to be dreaded… it is a sacred turning point. It is the very reality of hope, the birth of a new physical and spiritual dawn.

 

I want to look for a moment at those perhaps too familiar words in the gospel of John’s Prologue for a moment

 

…and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness couldn’t put it out. When the darkness of the light appears, the surrounding and enveloping darkness does not consume or win out, contain or capture, subdue or swallow up the light. Nor does the light take away or eliminate the darkness. Darkness continues, but is now inhabited by light.

 

John tells us that if we want to find the light that is God we need not waste time looking in the light. If we want to find light we need to go into the darkness. The promise of stepping into the threatening darkness is that it is there that the light exists, hovers, abides and waits.[2]

 

Yes, the Solstice darkness spans history (even pre-human history) AND the darkness envelopes our human presence. "…as close as a sighing heart when a dream is shattered, a hope broken," the death of a loved one.

Like the sun and earth our relationships with one another are fraught in this cosmic battle… an intermingly of light and darkness, battles of two spheres, two realities, two persons interacting… lovers leaning upon and away from each other, thoughtless or thoughtful deeds in the height of the day casting shadows far into the twilight…

We are as planets, orbiting each other, sometimes eclipsing each other’s view, a push and pull and on each other even while we, individually, turn and lean and sway ourselves.  It is not just the Winter Solstice that our Christmas Spirits tap into, not suns and earths alone, but sons and fathers… and the tilting of our inner selves.

 

…and that it is what the sounds of Christmas touch… a light within us not only illuminates the darkest recesses of our hearts, but offers hope there… meaning, connection.

 

So in the book by Bill Dols that Anthony recommended, Dols is referencing a story from Moss Hart’s autobiography (Hart, famous American playwright).  

In doing so Dols is reflecting on his own relationship with his father.

Says Dols:

 

My dad and I danced around a great deal of darkness, inflicted darkness upon one another, sometimes without even knowing it, sometimes knowing it, and there were those occasions when we might have been light to one another in that darkness and we chose not to be.

 

But I’m not sure my relationship with my father was much different from what happens between any of us and the people who matter most to us, parents and lovers and children and spouses and friends. It included ordinary kinds of hurts and bruises, abuses and betrayals, the stingy kind of loving we experience because we are afraid or angry or don’t know how or simply don’t want to fail and feel foolish again.

 

And Dols includes a story in Moss Hart’s autobiography, “Act One,” in which he recalls a childhood Christmas Eve. Hart, the renowned Broadway director and playwright, grew up in New York in poverty, left school for work at the age of eight, and was raised mostly by a grandfather and aunt who lived for a period in a family with a mostly silent and distant mother and father. (I've shortened the story a bit.)

 

Christmas was out of the question. We were barely staying alive. On Christmas Eve my father was very silent during the evening meal. Then he surprised and startled me by turning to me and saying, “Let’s take a walk.” He had never suggested such a thing before, and moreover it was a very cold winter’s night. I was even more surprised when he said as we left the house, “Let’s go down to a Hundred Forty-Ninth Street and Westchester Avenue.” My heart leapt within me. That was the section where all the big stores were, where at Christmastime open pushcarts full of toys stood packed end to end for blocks at a stretch. I joyously concluded that this walk could mean only one thing. He was going to buy me a Christmas present.

 

On the walk down I was beside myself with delight and an inner relief. It had been a bad year for me, that year of my aunt’s going, and I wanted a Christmas present terribly—not a present merely, but a symbol, a token of some sort. I needed some sign from my father or mother that they knew what I was going through and cared for me as much as my aunt and my grandfather did. I am sure they were giving me such mute signs as they could, but I did not see them. The idea that my father had managed a Christmas present for me in spite of everything filled me with a sudden peace and lightness of heart I had not known in months.

 

We hurried on, our heads bent against the wind, to the cluster of lights ahead that was a Hundred Forty-Ninth Street and Westchester Avenue, and those lights seemed to me to be the brightest lights I had ever seen. Tugging at my father’s coat, I started down the line of pushcarts. There were all kinds of things that I wanted, but since nothing had been said by my father about buying a present, I would merely pause before a pushcart to say, with as much control as I could muster, “Look at that chemistry set!” or, “There’s a stamp album!” or, “Look at the printing press!” Each time my father would pause and ask the pushcart man the price. Then without a word we would move on to the next pushcart. I looked up and saw that we were nearing the end of the line. Only two or three pushcarts remained. My father looked up, too, and I heard him jingle some coins in his pocket. In a flash I knew it all. He had gotten together about seventh-five cents to buy me a Christmas present, and he hadn’t dared say so in case there was nothing to be had for so small a sum.

 

As I looked up at him I saw a look of despair and disappointment in his eyes that brought me closer to him than I had ever been in my life. I wanted to throw my arms around him and say, “It doesn’t matter…I understand…this is better than a chemistry set or a print press…I love you.” But instead we stood shivering beside each other for a moment—then turned away from the last two pushcarts and started silently home. I don’t know why the words remained choked up within me. I didn’t even take his hand on the home nor did he take mine. We were not on that basis. Nor did I ever tell him how close to him I felt that night—that for a little while the concrete wall between father and son had crumbled away and I knew that we were two lonely people struggling to reach out to each other.

 

 

We’ve all been there. The darkest hour of the longest night with the hope of a new beginning…if, if we seize it…if we seize the possibility of the illumination.

 

For some of us, the darkest hour can stay dark for a while or even longer. The longest night can stretch into hours, days, weeks, months and for some of us, like Moss Hart, into years. I don’t know if that’s because we don’t trust the light or did once a long time ago and nothing changes or we simply hide it under a bushel or put it under the bed because it's too good to be true. Or maybe we would rather live with a distant hope or even dead dream rather than embrace, gamble, risk the darkness. Moss Hart finally did that years later on another Christmas when he and his wife visited his ninety one year old father in Florida. He writes:

On Christmas Eve we sat in his living room, and while my wife chatted with his nurse and companion, I saw on a sofa across the room with my father, showing him the pictures of his two grandchildren. Suddenly I felt his hand slip into mine. It was the first time in our lives that either of us had ever touched the other. No words were spoken and I went right on turning the pages of the picture album, but my hand remained over his. A few years before I might have withdrawn mine after a moment or two, but now my hand remained; nor did I tell him what I was thinking and feeling. The moment was enough. It had taken forty years for the gulf that separated us to close.

 

 

 

…and do we have to wait any longer?

 

Ask yourself that question as you end this year and prepare for another. Close one chapter of your life and begin a new one. Forget making silly resolutions you’ll never keep. Rather look at your world, at your relationships, look around your dining room table or office, this church or even in the mirror and ponder the threat of darkness in which the promise of light awaits. Then consider the awesome and even awful possibility of doing something about it.[5]

 

Merry Christmas.

Amen.

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