Circle of the Year

As the wheel of the year turns, some things we count on every year- the chill air at night as the days grow shorter, the changing of the leaves on the trees. In these things we are connected with all the beings in our ecosystem- with the squirrels now frantically burying nuts all over my yard, the geese honking in the air, plants coming to fruition each in their own time, all preparing for what we in this northeast bio-region know will be a cold winter ahead.

Other things we can count on are peculiarly human, and link us to our human community- the bustle as families start the school year, preparing for an election in November.

The cyclical nature of the seasons give us guideposts for our journey through life, and remind us that things end and begin again. It’s normal and natural for things to grow in one season, and rest in another. It’s natural that not everything grows at once -- thank goodness, if all plants fruited at once, how would we eat the rest of the year? If all plants flowered at once, how would the bees sustain themselves?

Over hundreds and thousands of years humans have noticed these cycles, and built their lives, built their societies around them.

When we plan our year together as a congregation, we think about not only the biological cycles, but also the human ones- We know that from Thanksgiving to New Year our calendars will inevitably fill up with special activities- parties, choir concerts, shopping. We try not to plan congregational meetings during that time. So a lot of business meetings happen in October- I swear to you I was siting on the porch reading a book and some familiar fall smell made me think “almost time for TPUC.” Like the squirrels busily burying nuts, and the farmers in the busy work of fall harvest, we tend to spend this time of year preparing for the cold still months of winter when light is less and travel is unpredictable.

Faith traditions have an important role in this cycle of the year. Part of the job of a tradition is to remember. You don’t have to wait until you are driving home from work in the dark and cold anticipating the long winter ahead to plan a big community gathering, We have known for thousands of years that it was important to mark the change of seasons, and we have learned through thousands of years of trial and error what reliably feeds body and spirit in each season. The smells and sounds, the light and temperature of the seasons remind us, and all living things, what comes next in the cycle of the year as a matter of evolutionary survival. Religious traditions help us remember some practical things, like it's good to feast and share at connect with community at the beginning of winter, our traditions also remind us of the wisdom of the spirit- the seasons of the soul- of death and rebirth, struggle and hope, and our journey together as a people.

This is the pagan cycle of the year. It’s based on our solar calendar, neatly dividing the year into 8 sections based on the solstices and equinoxes, and the cross quarters between. The holidays of each quarter and cross quarter are based on the natural world around us- I see the artist who drew this saw things outside her window similar to what I see out mine around the year. The holidays notice the seasons of the earth, but also over the course of the year notice death and rebirth, growth and harvest in our own human experience, taking lessons from the natural world. You can see right now we have just crossed the Fall equinox, Mabon, this past week.


The Christian calendar also follows a regular cycle of the solar year. It’s has 2 major seasons, the season of advent, preparing for Christmas and telling the story of Jesus birth, and Lent, which prepares for Easter, telling the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The rest of the year is “ordinary time” you can see we are in that big swath of green right now. Because Christianity was standardized by the roman empire, there are many ways in which it borrows from and overlaps with the older pagan calendar, so that the Easter season overlaps with OESTARA in the pagan tradition- and kind of make one big springtime mashup of rebirth. Or, for example, Samhain and “All hollows eve, and all souls day” or “day of the dead all are about remembering the departed, though with different theological messages. It was Pope Gregory XVIII who standardized the Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar most governments in the world use today.


Here is the Jewish cycle of the year. It is a luni-solar calendar, it follows the cycles of the moon, so things move around a bit more, but it resets the first day of “Nisan” so that Passover always happens in spring, and the high holidays always happens in the fall. Today is the new moon, and so also the first night of Rosh Hashana, beginning the 10 days of awe, the most important holidays in the Jewish tradition, and followed by Sukkot, a weekly long harvest festival that starts on the full moon.

These cycles include the very old and the new. Consider the Holocaust memorial holiday added to the Jewish calendar in the 1950s.
 

Nations also keeps their own calendars. One way they mark the year is with official days off work. These holidays help us remember important parts of our nation’s history- Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day. We add or change holidays to honor new events, like the addition of MLK day in 1983,  or as a result of changes to our cultural values and priorities, like finally acknowledging Juneteenth by making it a federal holiday just last year. In 2 weeks we come to Columbus day which many celebrate as Indigenous People’s day, an active part of our struggle and effort to make our holidays align with the important things we want to remember, the story we want our calendar to tell about the history of our people and our journey together.

Much of our calendar is reinforced by consumerism- you can see when you go to the store that Independence Day is the time to buy red white and blue things, October is the time to buy candy and pumpkin spice everything, and the end of the calendar year is the time to buy EVERYTHING to boost 4th quarter profits.

We Unitarian Universalists are also a religious tradition, and have our own markers. We start our year together with our water in-gathering, and this spring we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the flower ceremony. We honor the sources of our tradition as we celebrate the longest night, and Christmas eve. We have practical and institutional things on our circle as well- and in the winter we get serious about adult RE, as we think about life’s questions in the cold contemplative season, and we have our annual meeting in June, and a break in the summer. Not every UU church does it this way, Each congregation decides for ourselves what to celebrate; we make our own circle of the year together.

 

Our UU liturgical calendar is less formal and more fluid than the predictable green and purple and white of the Christian tradition, or the ancient cycles of the Jewish tradition. This helps us be responsive what is happening in our community and in the world, but the shadow side of this power is that if we are not careful we could fall into observing only things that are easy and familiar. Because we create our liturgical calendar by planning or whim or convenience, it is also in our power to forget if we are not intentional. For example, each year during the high holidays observant Jewish people reflect on and actively practice atonement and forgiveness. Those are hard topics- and it would be easy for our congregation to go many years without practicing in these basic needs of the human spirit. In the spring our Christian siblings celebrate Easter at the end of the long season of Lent, Rebirth coming after the hardship of Good Friday.


So we come to the heart of our inquiry today- what is important for our community, rooted in your faith tradition and in our eco system, to mark over the cycle of the year? What do we need to remember and why?

I’d like to invite us all into a time of reflection now- I have provided a blank wheel for you to consider- what are important landmarks on the wheel of the year for you personally- both happy and sad, easy and hard. What do you observe most years?

Take a few moments silently to think and write…. 
Holidays you celebrated with your family as a child
Holidays you celebrate now,
Days when you remember loss
Times when you come together with your various communities
Times when you start fresh
When that feels complete, I invite you to look at your wheel, and ask, what the wheel needs for balance?

What do you hope we will observe, mark, celebrate  this year?

Finally, part of what is important as we spiral through this cycle, year after year, the changing and the stable, is that it helps us notice who we are right now, and what this very season is like. This fall will be like no other, it will have some of the same things, chill air, changing leaves, new semesters, elections. But in observing the circle of the year we notice how we are changing, and how the world is changing. Let’s take a moment now for reflection- what are you noticing about this early fall? How does it remind you of other years? And what is different and surprising?

So we create our intentions for the circle of the year, we plan and prepare, and then we noticed what it’s like to live inside that cycle. We talk about observing the holiday- and I like that way of putting it -- noticing, this season, exactly as it is, how it is for you and for your ecosystem, for your community.
I wish you all a happy fall- a fruitful harvest of our growing season.

Let us observe together this new circle of the year, deeply rooted in the past we share with our human communities and all the beings in our ecosystem. Yet each turn of the circle unique and precious.

"When love is felt, or fear is known,
When holidays and holy days and such times come,
When anniversaries arrive by calendar or consciousness,
When seasons come, as seasons do, old and known, but somehow new,
When lives are born or people die,
When something sacred’ s sensed in soil or sky,
Mark the time.
Respond with thought or prayer, or smile, or grief.
Let nothing living, life or leaf, slip between the fingers of the mind,
For all of these are holy things we will not, cannot, find again"

- Rev. Max Coots

Cherish the Time

"Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light" - Mary Oliver

 Lately, when I make a plan, I use conditional forms: “probably we will go on vacation next spring”. “Hopefully we can come to dinner on Sunday.” And when I sent out last week’s service email I announced that we would be gathering in person in 2 sanctuaries and on zoom. But that’s not what happened- the door to the Cortland church broke as the team was arriving, and no one could enter the church. [sigh] It was not the return to “normal” we were hoping for.

Even so it was lovely to be in the Athens Sanctuary and on zoom last week with so many old and new friends. And to be with you all here in all our different places this week. And, knock wood, our multi platform services will continue. But I have certainly come to understand over these past 2 ½ years that any sense of certainty in the future was misplaced. It was always true that the future was unknown, but I feel this in a really deep way these days.

In her poem "In Blackwater Woods" Mary Oliver writes,

“To live in this world you must be able to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

Oh, we have had to do so much letting go these past years. so many parts of our lives have been disrupted or lost- businesses closed, celebrations cancelled, beloved members and friends in our congregations have died, dear friends and members of our families departed.

But on this day, this joyful day when we are finally gathered together again in this moment, in this hour, I ask us to take up the practice in Oliver’s poem that comes before letting go, the other things she suggests we must do to live in this world:

“to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it;”

Hopefully we will have many other hours together, just like this one, but let us not take that for granted. We have been hungry for so long for things to get “back to normal” and I offer that this moment, today, is something like the normal we have been so hungry for -- the ordinary blessings we often took for granted until that strange week in March of 2020 when normal was not possible.

Hopefully part of what we have learned over these past 2 ½ years is to cherish those things we used to call normal, to cherish this time, right now, even though it’s still a bit odd and full of technical glitches, to appreciate it and cherish it just as it is.

It’s not easy, is it, to love this life, knowing it is temporary? Oliver names a fundamental paradox that I have struggled with over the years- How can we enjoy what is wonderful and beautiful knowing it will come to an end? In ordinary times It’s easy to put knowledge of our impermanence aside, to act as if there is plenty of time, as if things will always be this boring, ordinary way. On the other hand, when our impermanence is right up in our face like it has been lately, it’s easy to detach, to disengage, so that we wont’ be hurt by endings and departures. It is not easy to love what is mortal, and it is not easy to let go.

The story of the tiger and the strawberry can be found in many versions and variations over centuries and different parts of the world. It is often said that Zen teacher DT Suzuki told this story in this brief version:

“A man walking alone in the wild suddenly finds himself chased by a tiger. he starts to run but soon arrives at the edge of a cliff. with no way out, he jumps and, luckily, manages to grasp a vine. the abyss yawns under him, the tiger threatens him from above. two mice, one white, one black, appear from a crevice and start gnawing at the vine. as the vine grows thinner and thinner, the man notices a plump fresh strawberry. he plucks it. how delicious it tastes!” [i]

Like any good parable or Koan, there are many possible interpretations. Right now I am inspired to ask- can we be clear enough, brave enough, present enough, to pluck the strawberries right in front of us, despite the yawning abyss and hungry tigers? Maybe…

seizing a juniper berry

This year, instead of worrying about our future, or striving to “get back to normal” I encourage us to cherish our time together, exactly as it is. To cherish the unique beauty of each member and friend and visitor, to cherish that feeling of connection and warmth we seek when we come together. We have just welcomed brand new members into both the Athens and Cortland congregations, and they joined us not because of who we used to be, but because they found something valuable, something worth cherishing as they experienced this weird in between time with us. How can we make this a special and inspiring time for them, and honor the fresh newness of their time with us?

At the same time, I know that even now a number of our dear friends are are making plans move so they can be closer to family. Just knowing about such plans invites us into a kind of in between time, preparing in spirit and heart for the anticipated separation. Transition times are uncomfortable, and we can often race to the finish, race to the “new normal” we hope is ahead. But these past 2 years have taught me that there is no promise of normal somewhere in the future, there is only now in this very fluid, quixotic life. Can we challenge ourselves to taste this moment, this precious time together like a juicy red strawberry?

Kurt Vonnegut writes:

“… I had a good uncle, my late Uncle Alex. He was my father's kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life-insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well- read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."
So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, "if this isn't nice, I don't know what is."  [Vonnegut A Man Without a Country" p. 132]

If that story about tigers and strawberries feels a bit too high stakes, Uncle Alex’s spiritual practice feels quite achievable. I have adopted this practice myself in recent years. Just noticing and naming those ordinary moments that feel, well, nice. I remember the first time I tried it -- I was visiting my sister after a long time apart. There was the usual hubbub of traveling and arriving and the noise of our teens and preparations of dinner, and we found ourselves standing outside – just a quiet ordinary moment in the temperate night air, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” I offered and she started- “what is?” she asked. “Just this moment of finally being together- a quiet moment under the stars” She paused and looked around. That was all, no tigers, no fireworks, just a noticing and arriving in a moment we had waited for so long, and that was all too quickly over.

Who knows what the future will bring? Probably some joyful things, probably some hard things. New people will come into our lives, people we care for will depart. There is, in truth, no such thing as permanence in our mortal world, so let us cherish this time, this unique, unrepeatable time. This is a challenging spiritual practice- it is not easy to love what is mortal, it is not easy to let it go when the time comes. That is one reason we gather in community: to remember how precious life is, even and especially the ordinary moments, and to savor it together. Let us cherish the time.




[i] https://moritherapy.org/article/zen-strawberry-story/