The Spreading Light

December 19, 1965
Plainfield

also: Lakeland 1978, Port Charlotte 1978

The Spreading Light

As the human family moves in slow procession from superstition to science, from magic to understanding, and from the miraculous to the natural, the Christmas-Hanukkah message suggests differing levels of perception. Even as the spreading light of knowledge has given us wider vision of privilege and responsibility, so also may deepening comprehension of the poignant joy of the winter festival season increases our awareness of the ties that bind persons to each other and to the magnificent universe in which we live and of which we are a part.

Early, pre-literate people celebrated when they were released from fear of total darkness. The lessening light of Autumn and early Winter stirred the pangs of fear. When the sun lengthened its daily visit at the Winter solstice, men and women feasted, sang and danced. The world was not dying! Clothed in enduring green, the fir and spruce had resisted the colorful death of other foliage, thus the fragrant evergreens became living symbols of hope.

The strange gods of frost and fire were not entirely unpredictable and whimsical, but seemed to be dependable. Even the early folk began to sense that the world-process was orderly. The celebrations became regular as season after season repeated the sustaining rhythms of bud, blossom, fruit, harvest, sleep – and then bud again. Even as the late December days diffused longer periods of daytime, so the light of confidence in nature began to illuminate the darker fears of humankind. The stirrings of faith began to overgrow the tremblings of fear, even as the mistletoe festooned the oak tree.

After many centuries it came to pass that the Judeo-Christian era in our culture marked the spread of more light. In Jewish homes there is now being observed the “festival of lights” - Hanukkah. In this part of our tradition the spreading light celebrates religious freedom. When Judah Maccabeus and his brothers led a revolution against their Syrian and Roman overlords, they recaptured Jerusalem only to find that there was only enough oil to feed the lamp for a day. When the Temple was purified, the legend goes, enough oil was miraculously provided for eight days. And so the worship continued as a ceremony of light, but more vitally, it was a celebration of freedom.

Although the early Christians were children of their times and were prone to believe in magic and witchcraft, nevertheless, particularly in the writings of Paul, there is an increasing affirmation of the reliability of the God in whom they believed. This was an emphasis that light was needed in a different shadowed area of the self.

The spreading light of faith in an orderly Universe stimulated a growth of confidence that the power that underlies our Universe (name it God or what you will) is somehow tied in with the best of human experience. There is a basic liberating belief implicit in the facade of fantastic fervor which still pounds and chatters at us from authoritarian churches, pleading Pentecostals and irrepressible evangelicals. It is this: the human family is worth redeeming; the condition of men and women is not hopeless! Unitarians and Universalists resonate to that foundation of faith.

The religious primitives celebrated the Winter solstice because the gods once more saved them from darkness and death.

Then Judas Maccabeus and his followers transformed that tradition of light to an annual celebration of the anniversary of religious freedom. Then the Christian extended human hopes to much of the Greek, Roman, and North African world with the Gospel which affirmed that the Supreme Being was neither whimsical nor a-moral – God was a Power having moral relations with humanity. Even more daring, the early Christians proclaimed that God incarnated himself as a little baby to redeem mankind – and many in the ancient world responded to that dramatic and winsome theology. Little wonder that our roots in early Christian doctrine and culture lead us to respond warmly to the poetry, carols and beautiful legends and myths of Christmas. We respond even when we give neither obedience nor literal belief to the doctrines illustrated by art, music, and scripture.

Is the Christian faith the limit to which the light can spread. Many would so avow. But some of us believe that the light must spread wider and deeper still.

The early peoples joyously responded to the favors of gods who preserved or destroyed at their fancy.

The Maccabeeans demonstrated that the light of the world is cast by the lamp of freedom.

The Christian Gospel sings grateful praises to God for his redeeming power in the incarnation.

But there is a more splendid, a more daring and more audacious dream! Not only are all persons worth redeeming, but also men and women are the agents of redemption. Our faith [surmise] proclaims that it is within human power to extend the light of love and justice into the shadowed parts of our individual selves and that the same light can make social realities of the astounding ideal, “peace on earth, good will to men.” Aristotle wrote (NICOMACHEAN ETHICS), “It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of our subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.” John Dewey may have intended much the same point when he wrote, “ideas are effective not as bare ideas, but as they have imaginative content and emotional appeal.”

From Ferguson, SIGNS AND SYMBOLS IN CHRISTIAN ART: “Language of sign and symbol is the outward and visible form through which is revealed the inward and visible reality that moves and directs the soul....”

The matchless beauty of the story of the holy family is a part of the spreading light. But all families are holy. Furthermore, all wanted babies are precious gifts of life, who as they grow in wisdom and stature may become redeemers. The culture-bearing carols, stories and myths embody these traits with artistic and emotional expression, giving power and lift to our lives at this season of high holiday.

Talking effectively about the deeper meanings of Christmas is nearly impossible. Brahms once said that with all his talent he could not achieve the beauty of a German folk-dance melody which every child was able to sing.

From [primitive superstition], to freedom’s light, to gospel, to one human family. This I believe is the spreading light, to goal of the light-hearted. All the glory of song and story are hints of deep humanitarian meaning. Wise men and shepherds, innkeepers, a careworn father, a weary woman, great with child – all these meet in matchless story to remind us of the superiority of a society in which all persons are equal. The festive celebrations impinge upon us, and we should be stirred by that awareness [that, if we all ate at one table, no one would be allowed to grow hungry.]

The experiences of Christmas and Hanukkah carry the impact that life is sacred; that the humblest and the proudest have equal need to belong to each other; that carol, candle and crèche open us a window through which we can see what life should be. “Peace on earth, good-will to men [and women].” But can the poetry of peace be transformed to the reality of peace? That’s the bind. Did you see the item in Friday’s paper that reported that a large firm placed a Christmas window display, “peace on earth” at Madison and 57th Street? The display featured quotations on peace from Dag Hammarskjold, Adlai Stevenson, Pope Paul VI.

The designer who received the brunt of the complaints explained, “some people interpreted the presentation as some sort of demonstration about Vietnam. So the window display was revised to eliminate such quotations as “war is the negation of peace and humanity,” and Pope Paul’s call, “War never again” was “amplified and identified.”

Is this our time? We respond to ancient wonder stories about angels singing about peace 2000 years ago, but when the meaning of peace is grappled with today, people either back away or seek to quiet things down by lambasting those who speak peace.

Can we go beyond ancient words and lilting carols? There is an old legend from Eastern Europe which may fit the reality. “A pious Russian went to a holy man and asked him to find out from God if there was going to be a war. The holy man said he would try. When he had prayed, he said that God had given him the answer: ’There will be no war, but the struggle for peace will be so furious that not one stone will be left standing on another.’” (CHRISTIAN CENTURY)

Is this not our tragic dilemma in Vietnam?

There are many, like I, who will continue to urge unrelenting efforts for peaceful negotiation and who still believe that a halt in the bombing, a cessation of escalation may provide the impetus for such confrontation across the table rather than confrontation in rice fields and villages with innocent men, women and children caught in the deadly crossfire, fire and explosion.

Albert Schweitzer (PHILOSOPHY OF CIVILIZATION) wrote, “I would be a humble pioneer of the (new) Renaissance and throw the belief in a new humanity like a torch, into our dark age.”

May our deepest Christmas concern be that light will spread, like a torch hurled into darkness, so that “peace on earth, good will to all people,” will not be only matchless poetry, but some day, political and social reality.