Maybe you’re like me and you’ve been a little surprised to find yourself in the part of the year already past Halloween, already past Thanksgiving, and now into the holiday season of Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and winter solstice and New Year’s. 

 

I have to say I’m not feeling very ready for this.  I don’t know if it’s my being busy, being swung in my regular rhythm of life so unvaryingly, or if it’s the warm weather we’ve been having, but the season has caught me by surprise.  It’s taking me a while to catch up with what the calendar is telling me.

 

And yet it doesn’t matter if I’m surprised or mildly unready for these fall celebrations, because I’m alerted to them from cues that I receive from the world around me.  The cues the world gives me cause me to act in a way that prepares me for these holidays, whether I’m intellectually ready for them or not.

 

Yes, I’ve got cues like kids clamoring about Halloween, and my mom who wants to know about my Thanksgiving plans, and the commercials on TV that tell me that the holiday gift giving season must be fast approaching.  I’ve got a calendar that says December on it, after all, and I’m planning our congregational Christmas Eve service.  But it probably won’t be until I start doing the things that I usually do around the holidays, it won’t be until I start behaving as if the holidays are really coming and this time of year is really here, that I’ll truly believe that we’re in December and I’ll truly believe that the holiday season has begun.

 

In other words, I won’t really be oriented to or located in the holidays until I begin my traditional holiday rituals.

 

And it is the power of those rituals, the deep meaning that comes from ritual in the lives of human beings, that I want to talk about today.

 

It’s an interesting time of year to take a look at the power of ritual, because in many ways we are immersed in rituals during this season whether we want to be or not – at least in this culture and geography, we are immersed in them. And it doesn’t really matter if that is our intention or rather something we didn’t really plan.

 

Many of us will celebrate at least one of the holidays that take place over the course of this month.  Hanukkah is later in the month this year, but can often be early in December.  We have the winter solstice on the 22nd, and Christmas on the 25th, as usual.  We all tend to recognize in some way that the New Year has come, even if we don’t party all night to celebrate it.  This whole month is a mix for us, a mix of the religious holidays that we may or may not celebrate but certainly can’t get away from, and the secular holidays that mark the season and the passage of time. 

 

The month has a certain feel to it, an aura of celebration and jollity, and there is a shadow side of grief and melancholy for those for whom the implied requirement of happiness seems forced or inappropriate. 

 

But whether you are for it or against it, it is certain that this month passes by with pomp and flourish.  Love it or hate it, December is noteworthy.  It’s not like, say, dismal and boring February.  December is striking, one way or another. 

 

And one of the reasons we find it so is because of the rituals that we modern day westerners have built into it.  A ritual is some sort of ceremony, religious or otherwise, consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order[1].  And there are all sorts of these ceremonies, religious and otherwise, to participate in this time of year.

 

Think about it.  Let’s start with the religious holidays and their religious rituals. 

 

Hanukkah and Kwanzaa both have specific rituals that center around the nightly lighting of candles, a gathering of family and the saying of particular prayers or blessings. 

 

The pagans of yore brought us the Yule log and the Christmas tree, actually, and neopagans welcome the shortest day of the year with ritual and fire. 

 

Christmas is introduced by four weeks of Advent, which also come with candles for each Sunday, and Christmas itself comes with strong traditions to which the practitioners are very attached, even though they vary from place to place – even from house to house.

 

Why are there so many rituals attached to religion?  Neurologists tell us that ritual is a super-important component in our human attempt to understand our world. 

 

Religion is an organized effort to make meaning out of things, to make meaning out of our lives.  In order to make this meaning, religions are chock-full of stories and lessons that tell us why what happens happens and what we can expect from the future.  We hear these ideas and stories in religious life and religion asks us to incorporate them, to make them our ideas and stories.  Religion asks us to believe them.

 

But neurologists tell us that just hearing these stories is not enough for us humans to make them really a part of our lives.  We can hear and think about ideas that explain why things happen, but for them to become real to us, we need to feel the ideas and stories, the explanations for why things happen, in our emotions and in our bodies.  Neurologists say that we humans don’t actually internalize ideas through our brains.  We internalize them by enmeshing the ideas in our emotions and in our actions. 

 

Rituals help us to do that, these neurologists say.  The function of ritual is to make ideas more real to us.

 

Rituals like prayer or dancing or chanting or other religious behaviors actually change our brain chemistry, allowing the regular ways that our brain reacts to stimuli to both be diminished in some ways and enhanced in others.  The result of these neurological changes are that our sense of distance between ourselves and others is reduced.  We have the sense, when we engage in these rituals, both of transcending the everyday, and also of joining together with those around us in a new and more complete way[2]. 

 

So, rituals are not only culturally satisfying, they are neurologically satisfying.  On their own, they help us feel a sense of community and a sense of the sacred.  But it is when they are tied to a story, a reason for the ritual, that they help us to understand that story to be true in a deeper way than can ever be achieved just through the brain.  Rituals help us “prove” the things we tell ourselves about the world and our role in it.  They help to change ideas into beliefs.

 

The neurologists who study this say that even secular rituals “turn meaningful ideas into a visceral experience.”[3] Patriotic rituals help us to embody a love of country.  A simple handshake helps us to internalize the idea that each person is important.  All rituals, religious and secular, help the human brain turn ideas into beliefs, because when we use our bodies to understand things, that helps us “prove” to ourselves that those things are real.  People need to make meaning of their lives, and they need to believe that what they’ve come to understand is really true.  And that is why you’ll see humans gravitating towards ritual even when they don’t have to do so.  Humans will create ritual on their own when an occasion or idea is important enough to them.

 

You can especially see this quest for ritual in the month of December, can’t you?  Because December sees us human beings ritualizing so many things that have nothing at all to do with the holidays that they are supposedly linked to.

 

Most particularly, there are all those December rituals that are ensnared in what I would call the secular-Christmas net.  You know the secular-Christmas net.  It’s all those Christmassy sorts of things that we Americans tend to do that don’t have anything at all to do with the baby Jesus or with Christianity in general, but have more to do with the cultural traditions that have arisen in December.  They are rituals, loosely affiliated with the Christmas holiday, that we modern westerners have created to recognize the time of year.

 

These rituals include such things as sending holiday cards.  They include the giving of gifts.  They include making cookies and other foods, and drinking hot cider and eggnog and other particular drinks.  There is a lot of decorating of our living spaces, especially using greenery.  There is the notion of “snuggling up next to a warm fire.” There are more parties than at other times of the year.  There is a whole playbook of songs that are supposedly for Christmas but have nothing to do with the religion.  Rather, they are about winter, and good cheer, and being with family and friends. 

 

Why are there so many of these secular observances of this season?  Why is it that people who aren’t particularly Christian put so much effort into creating traditions that veer away from the religious roots of the holiday? 

 

I believe that there is something about this season that makes us grativate towards rituals we need badly, because there is something about this season that makes it a good time to try to understand the world in which we live.

 

For us here in the northern climes, I would say it is the onset of winter and darkness that leads us to want to reassure ourselves that we are okay in the world, that we are safe, that we are surrounded with love and support and that the sun will return.

 

A perfect example of a secular ritualization of December is the holiday theme this year at Starbucks.  Say what you will about corporate holiday messaging, but Starbucks has learned how to create a really compelling secular treatment for December.  Their seasonal décor is winter-related, with evergreen trees that hint at a Christmas celebration.  But the slogan this year is “Let’s Merry!”, and the idea is to celebrate happiness and cheer, winter and warm yummy drinks.  There is not one word related to Christmas or any other religious observance.  Nevertheless, the Starbucks campaign does encourage us to ritualize – to stay warm and well fed, to surround ourselves with friends, to do the things that make us comfortable and happy.  And that is appealing because of our human desire this time of year to create rituals that make us feel safe and loved.

 

As much as I might resist comparing Unitarian Universalism to Starbucks, I’d say we are in a similar marketing position when it comes to this season.  We UUs also want to celebrate a season in a way that is meaningful and welcoming to everyone.  Our Christian roots keep us tied in a way to the Christmas tradition, but our open and welcoming theology wants to make a place for everyone to join in, a place to meet everyone’s need to feel safe and loved this season. 

 

Both Unitarian Universalism and Starbucks have a desire to create rituals that help you to know you’re warm and safe, but Starbucks wants your ritual to lead you to drink their coffee.  Unitarian Universalism, as a religion, ought to create December rituals that help you to make meaning out of your life, rituals to foster a sense of calm and safety in a seasonally dangerous time, rituals to help you remember what matters most in a month where we seem to naturally turn towards reflection and contemplation.

 

If ritual helps us humans turn ideas into embodied reality, and we are already so inclined to do this ritual work in December, and we are involved in a Universalist religion that wants to be welcoming to everyone, then what rituals would you recommend that we UUs encourage in this holiday season? 

 

To answer this question, you’d first want to ask yourself what story it is that you’d like people to really understand.  You’d want to ask yourself what you want folks to come to know and believe in a way that makes it more than just an idea, that makes it become True, with a capital T.

 

I believe the Unitarian Universalist story of this season is that love always exists, always prevails, even when we can’t see it, even when times are bleak and dark, even when we are cold and don’t know how to be warm again.  I believe the UU story for this season is that love exists for us whether we see any evidence of it or not in our own lives or in our own hearts.  Love cannot be extinguished.  Love never dies.  That, to me, is the foundational Unitarian Universalist story.

 

If you agree that this is the story, the set of ideas, that Unitarian Universalism is well placed to tell, and if you agree that ritual provides human beings with a way to change ideas into beliefs, then I ask again:  what holiday rituals would you suggest to make these ideas into something True?  And how could you reclaim some of your traditional rituals, either the cultural ones or the religious ones, and make them more real because they are underscored with this UU message of unrelenting love?

 

Would you be sure to have a holiday party to spend time with those you enjoy the most?

 

Would you give someone you love a gift, to show them that you notice them, you appreciate them and you hope they are happy?

 

Would you make special food that sustains you and those around you?

 

Would you light a fire in the fireplace to remind yourself that warmth is always present even in the darkest of days?  Would you bring evergreens indoors to remember that spring is on its way, a promise that cannot be broken?

 

Would you light candles on each of eight nights and tell your family the story of a brave people who fought against a powerful and cruel regime, and succeeded against all odds?

 

Would you tell the story of a baby born poor and powerless in a stable, who showed the world what love can do?

 

Our poem earlier told us that any deliberate leap into chaos, small or large,

with an intent to make order, matters.  Aristotle once wrote that “we are what we repeatedly do.”[4]  Neurologists tell us that religious ritual exists “to turn spiritual stories into spiritual experience; to turn something in which you believe into something you can feel.”[5]  Given all of this, which aspect of Unitarian Universalist beliefs at this time of year would you like to see ritualized?  And which aspects of what you believe about the December holidays deserve the depth of observance that a ritual can provide?

 

Pick a story you believe in this holiday season, and make it real with a ritual.  In a season marked by busyness and consumption, but with an everpresent undercurrent of depth and reflection, making a time for ritual is a great way to be sure that your December is a meaningful, sustaining time of year.

 

May it be so for you and for yours.  Amen.