Peg Duthie - Patterns

This is the "script" of the sermon I delivered at my church the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2001, plus and minus the usual ad-libs and emendations that happen in front of a live mike.

I have a confession to make to y'all this morning, but I'm not quite sure what form the confession should take. I'm pretty sure that some of you are going to be utterly horrified when I tell you I started my Christmas shopping the day after Halloween. I have been informed in no uncertain terms by the Ghost of Christmas Perspective that I have been reading far too much Martha Stewart, and that one is not supposed to start Christmas shopping any earlier than the day after Thanksgiving.

That's my holiday confession, version one. Version two is where I tell you that even though I bought my holiday cards many, many weeks ago, I haven't managed to remember where I stashed them. The current plan is to go home this afternoon, find them, and get going pronto on the ones for overseas and for Hanukkah, since those need to be in the mail within the next two weeks. For everybody else, postmarked by Christmas Eve? good enough! Where certain friends are concerned, I can even give myself an extension until January 6., Those would be the ones with an extremely casual relationship with the calendar year. First day of Christmas? Twelfth day of Christmas? Same difference.

I'm calling these comments my "confessions" because whether you find them amusing or appalling (or both) is probably going to depend on the patterns you expect to characterize your holiday season. For instance, I have friends for whom premature Christmas shopping isnt an option, it's a necessity. They've explained that they have to get their shopping done by Thanksgiving, because they' have so many obligations waiting for them in December that they'll barely have time to breathe, never mind braving the malls. Some of them have family and friends who aren't as flexible or as forgiving as mine when it comes to the delivery of cards and presents. They can't afford to be late with any of it, because the emotional penalties for breaking with tradition - that is, expectations - would be so severe.

The holiday season is dangerous. It's a time of heightened expectations and intensified emotions, and it's thus the time of year I witness various people going berserk under the weight of the obligations created by this atmosphere, regardless of their religious orientation or lack thereof. Many of us here juggle multiple religious traditions, and I can testify that some of the most anti-theistic people I know observe their strictly secular rituals with maniacal fervor.

Patterns aren't bad by definition: it's natural to gravitate towards tradition and ritual - they offer stability and continuity -- and community: when you participate in the rituals of a tradition, it becomes an act of belonging, whether it's recognizing the shape of a Sunday morning service, or always having luminarias in your driveway, knowing that your grandmother will always, always fry the latkes in chicken schmaltz and never ever with veggie spray.

At the same time, the patterns we didn't choose can have us feeling trapped or overwhelmed or just plain ornery. We may end up resenting them or breaking with them completely out of sheer frustration. Every year, I hear at least one or two people declare, "I gave up sending cards this year because I couldn't cope with it all." Every year I hear of people agonizing over the relative who tells them, "Don't get me anything, because reciprocating is a hassle I do not want to deal with."

I have to admit that announcements like these make me twitch. Being neither Christian nor Jewish nor pagan, I don't have a central, calendar event to commemorate, so for me, the holidays are entirely about sustaining and strengthening my connections, and cards and presents are a crucial component of that. When someone doesn't want to be a part of that pattern, it's very hard for me not to read it as a personal rejection. It usually isn't personal at all, but because this pattern matters so very much to me, it takes a serious, conscious effort on my part to understand why someone would want to be left out of it.

There are valid reasons why people don't want to participate in card and gift exchanges. If the historical events of December do matter to you, the plethora of social temptations can indeed detract from the religious focus you wish to maintain. I know people who see holidays as a collective exercise in hypocrisy - it bothers them intensely that such a fuss is made over activities that should really be on our lists and in our PalmPilots all year long. And still more people feel the holidays have been hijacked by Hallmark and the department stores. These are all legitimate reasons for people to reject or limit their participation in the card and gift exchanges. Even if I don't agree with their conclusions, I have to respect the thought and conviction they put into their choices.

What is more problematic, of course, is running up against patterns that aren't the result of mindful consideration, and more often than not the sources of such conflict are the people closest to us. To quote from the second hymn we sang this morning,

"When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
we cannot choose what we are free to love?"

I suspect that, when they first encounter these words, a number of people conclude, "this is nonsense. Of course we're free to love whoever we want." I'm impressed by Auden's precision, however: when he says we cannot choose what we are free to love, I think he's right. To some degree, we do have a say in how we choose to love, and to whom we demonstrate it, but we don't have complete control of what we love, because we don't live in a vacumn. To quote the hymn further, we are created with and from the world, and that means we have ancestors and relatives, and the friends of our relatives, and the relatives of our friends, and when you're connected with that many people, some of them are going to harder to love than others. What's worse, some of them will genuinely believe that, in loving you, pushing your buttons is their duty: some of my relatives are masters of the rude and inappropriate "helpful remark" ("you'd be prettier if you lost weight" and "when are you going to get a real job?" ) I happen to find this form of love more than a little aggravating, particularly when I'm trying to relax and to enjoy a holiday gathering, but it's been pointed out to me many times - and it's true - that it's still a form of love: if I wasn't theirs, they wouldn't care. And it works both ways: if you ask my mother, she'll tell you she didn't choose a daughter who rides motorcycles. If you ask my mother-in-law, she'll tell you she didn't choose for her son's wife to Unitarian Universalist. (We'll leave the parallels between riding motorcycles and being a UU for another time.)

What we love doesn't always make sense and isn't always reciprocated and we don't get to choose how it appears to us - or how it changes. Going back to holiday cards, I'm always struck by the number of names I skip when I go through my address book at this time of year: people who've passed away, people I've dropped and people who've dropped me. Sometimes I don't know why the connection's broken, other than knowing that our roles somehow changed enough that we're no longer in the same movie, to borrow Rabbi Kushner's metaphor. That said, every year there are new people in the address book, and new surprises in my mailbox, with new friends expanding their lists and old friends who decide to adopt or resume the tradition of postal cheer. Ultimately, I treasure the holidays because they promise both constancy and change: it's comforting to be a part of other people's traditions, and it's exciting to weave new friends and new patterns into my life's design.

Being a typical UU, I can't actually tell you what should matter to you during the holidays. That's between you and your god, or gods, and/or your family, and/or what you love. There's always talk at this time of year about "the true meaning of Christmas" - speaking for myself, I tend to be fairly wary of that phrase, being non-Christian, unapologetically materialistic, and chronically mistrustful of universal definitions. But as a Unitarian Universalist, "the free and responsible search for truth and meaning" is one of my abiding principles and pastimes. As such, I can indeed insist to you that it's important to take time for yourself to understand and sort out which traditions matter to you and why - and, perhaps even more important, to understand and sort out the traditions that bother you.

As my final confession of the morning, I'll tell you that I still view The Holidays with both delight and dread - no amount of analysis will ever alter the fact that there will be more that I want to do than time to do it, there will be chores I cannot delegate and conflicts I cannot escape. But I will also tell you that being aware of the patterns that I obey and the patterns that I choose helps me to grasp what the season truly means to me, and helps me welcome both the obligations and opportunities that come with it. So if you find yourself besieged by the season, I beseech you to look. If you're already sure of your role and their reasons -go for it!. For each and every one of you, I wish you a season filled with as much sanity and meaning as you dare to accept. Thank you for letting me share my thoughts with you this morning. Blessed be.


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