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Poetry for bulletin

"Hope" is that thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird -
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity ,
It asked a crumb - of Me.

(#254, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed., Thomas H. Johnson)

Call to Worship

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any - lifted from the no
of all nothing - human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

(e. e. cummings)

Lighting the Chalice

We light this chalice
For the renewal of faith,
The wonder of hope,
The beauty of love,
And the gift of joy.

Introduction to responsive reading

Our responsive reading this Sunday, like last Sunday, is written by Dr. Duncan E. Littlefair, colleague and mentor, who, as I said last Sunday, taught me how to celebrate Christmas in a religiously liberal context.

Responsive Reading

MINISTER: On this second Sunday of the Christmas Season, we celebrate the quality of hope, forever springing up in our hearts and minds, forever being rekindled.

CONGREGATION: There is no state more desperate than hopelessness. When people lose hope, they die. As long as we continue to hope, we find courage and strength.

MINISTER: Hope is born of faith. As long as we have faith in the eternal, faith in our better selves, we shall believe that good will win, evil will be overcome, injustice defeated.

CONGREGATION: However deep our faith, it is sometimes shaken. However strong our hopes, they are many times crushed. Life does not always conform to our wishes and desires.

MINISTER: Faith must be deepened and enlarged. Hope must be confirmed and renewed. When the candle of hope is quenched, it must be relighted.

CONGREGATION: We must find a way to protect the flickering candle of hope. Each person must find a way of confirming and renewing the hopes which sustain and inspire.

MINISTER: We find hope for ourselves when we move with those who have visions and dreams. We find new meaning for our life when we share in the courage, devotion, and dignity of others.

CONGREGATION: So we come together to celebrate the qualities of Christmas. Our faith is strengthened by the love of our friends. Our lives wing with new expectancy. The hope of Christmas brings joy to the world.

(Duncan E. Littlefair, adapted)

The Candle of Hope

Last Sunday we began the Christmas season with the lighting of the first candle in the Christmas candelabra. As you children and adults can see, there are five candles in the Christmas candelabra, each candle a different color. Each of the four Advent candles is related to the beautiful banners that are being hung this year during the Christmas season.

The first candle we light, the purple candle, is the Candle of Faith. The second candle, the green candle, is the Candle of Hope. The third candle, the blue candle, is the Candle of Love. And the fourth candle, the red one, is the Candle of Joy.

These are the four Advent candles. Each Sunday for the next three weeks, our candle lighters will light another of these candles. After all four are lit, we will know that Christmas is very near. Then on Christmas Eve we will light the final candle in the candelabra, the Christmas candle itself.

This Sunday we light the second candle of Christmas, which is the Candle of Hope.

Like faith, hope is not something physical that you can touch or see or hear or smell. Nevertheless, hope is as real as the physical things of the world, because if a person loses hope, then that person may well lose physical life itself.

Hope is as important as food and drink to our well-being. It's the light at the center of every cell. It's as if we are born from hope, for hope is the forward-pushing urge that moves in all things and from all things, propelling them onward.

There's a little saying from the Air Force Arctic Survival School. It's a saying that has to do with how long a person can survive under extreme conditions, the kind of conditions such as you might find in the very cold Arctic region. The saying goes like this; it says that one can survive:

Three weeks without food.
Three days without water.
Three minutes without oxygen.
Three seconds without hope.

Julianne Gurnee (9:15) Teslin LeMaster (11:15) will now light the second candle of the Christmas season, the Candle of Hope.

Introduction to reading

My reading this morning is from the beginning of an essay by Vaclav Havel, an essay found in a book the Early Bird Sunday Morning Book Discussion Group is currently reading titled The Impossible Will Take a Little While.

The reading is about the nature of hope. The author makes the point that the reality and realm of hope is independent of outer circumstances. Hope is an interior spiritual quality whose flame is seen to burn most brightly in difficult circumstances.

Thus hope, as Vaclav Havel will say, is not the same as optimism. Optimism has to do with an evaluation, a judgment of how things might turn out, an estimate of the direction of things.

So a person might be optimistic or pessimistic with regard to a particular thing and its direction and outcome, but such a judgment has nothing to do with hope, for hope is a quality of spirit, independent of circumstances, which has its own fuel for forward propulsion.

The title of this essay, written in 1987, is "An Orientation of the Heart." Vaclav Havel, its author, is the former president of the Czech Republic. He wrote this piece three years before the fall of the Communist dictatorship in that land at a time when things looked anything but hopeful in terms of an optimistic estimate of the way things were moving.

Reading

The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more unpropitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper that hope is. Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. In short, I think that the deepest and most important form of hope, the only one that can keep us above water and urge us to good works, and the only true source of the breathtaking dimension of the human spirit and its efforts, is something we get, as it were, from "elsewhere." It is also this hope, above all, which gives us the strength to live and continually to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.

"WORDS OF HOPE"

Faith as a quality at the center of Being

Last Sunday, on the first Sunday of the Christmas season, I spoke about the quality of faith in our lives. I suggested that faith is a quality at the very center of things. There is that which is faithful at the center of our personal being, at the center of the universe, at the center of all being.

Further, I suggested that this quality of faith is deeper than our everyday, ego-oriented personality that sometimes has faith and other times doesn't. I said that our daily faith derives from this more essential, interior core of faithfulness and is a response to it.

When we lack faith in life, as we sometimes do, that lack of faith or that loss of faith ought not to be interpreted as a withdrawal of the faithfulness of life and being, but rather might be better understood as a sign that we have withdrawn from the center of life, and that if only we can find a way to open ourselves again, we will be able to re-establish a connection with that deeper center of Being that is always faithful and that will sustain us spiritually whatever the weather.

I used a little poem by the Welsh poet, David Whyte, who now lives in the community of Langley on Whidbey Island, as an illustration of this type of faithfulness. In his poem, titled simply "Faith", the poet speaks of the waning moon that faithfully rises each night even though each night it is losing a little of its light until finally it has no light at all.

What would it be like, the poet wonders, if he could have the kind of faith that the waning moon exhibits, a faith that could go forward and rise faithfully in times of decrease as well as in times of increase? What would it be like, he wonders, if he could be faithful in times of loss as well as in times of gain, in times of failure as well as in times of success?

Night after night by observing the waning moon the poet becomes aware of the faithfulness at the heart of Being, and out of this discovery he is able again to open himself to faith. As an expression of that opening to faith, he wrote the lovely little poem of which I spoke last Sunday:

I want to write about faith,
     about the way the moon rises
          over cold snow, night after night,

faithful even as it fades from fullness,
     slowly becoming that last curving and impossible
          slither of light before the final darkness.

But I have no faith myself,
     I refuse it the smallest entry.

Let this then, my small poem,
     like a new moon, slender and barely open,
          be the first prayer that opens me to faith.

Hope as a quality at the center of Being

This Sunday I want to say essentially the same thing about hope as I said last Sunday about faith. I want to say that hope, too, is a quality at the very core of things. Hope is, as it were, hard-wired into things. It's at the center of Being, a quality ground into the very cells of living creatures and of all that is.

It is this hope, coming out of the center of our personal being and out of center of Being-itself, that attaches itself to particular persons, projects, and possibilities.

But when those particular hopes fade, as they will - all particular and individual things being transitory in nature - it doesn't mean that hope itself is lost, only that the temporary expression of that particular hope has faded.

Hope itself, however, is still there. It has always been there. It will always be there.

It may seem a little odd to speak in this manner - to say that hope is a quality ground into the nature of things. But here is how I think of it:

When Being, when What Is, evolves creatures like ourselves with self-consciousness, with the capacity to reflect on what life and being is, then "hope" is one of the qualities we naturally speak of.

When we reflect on the reality of things and our life, we may be struck by the strangeness of the fact that anything exists at all. We may ask the question, "Why is there something, why not nothing?"

There's no solid answer that can be given to this perennial question - except perhaps a response of wonder and amazement, the wonder and the amazement that anything is at all, that Being is, that we are.

Something is! Reality is! Being is! And whether you think of Being as primarily material in nature, or primarily spiritual in nature, or somehow a combination of the two, or something simply too mysterious to talk about at all; nevertheless, Being is!

As theologian Paul Tillich has said, Being continually overcomes non-being; Being continually conquers non-being.

"Urge and urge and urge,/ Always the procreant urge of the world," says Walt Whitman in his signature poem, "Song of Myself."

Hope as the song of life

That "Song of Myself" that Whitman is singing is not just a personal song; it is a song of Being-itself; it is a song of the nature of Being.

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world

That impulse, that urge, is at the heart of Being. It is the song that never ends. It is the melody line that is forever carried forward.

Now, we may not always hear that melody line. We may not always be attentive to it. But it is my faith, and it is my observation, that this impulse, this song, is always present, and that it manifests itself in us as the quality of hope. The quality of hope is:

that quality that continually pushes forward,
that always looks for new possibility,
that always attaches itself to the future;
that quality that can look into the face of its own death and into the loss of all that it has previously held to and hoped for, and still go on.

Thus, I want to say today, recognizing that I am anthropomorphizing a bit, recognizing that I am expressing these things in human terms and human language, I want to say that of its very nature Being is "hopeful."

"Hope" is part of the stuff of Being; it is built into the very fiber of all that is.

"Hope" is in the cells of our bodies; it is in the molecules of stars and stones.

The stars and stones are not perhaps especially aware of how much hope they carry in their molecules, but when those same molecules come together for a time in sentient creatures like ourselves - remember we are star-stuff - then we become aware of the quality of hope in things, the "urge and urge and urge" that irrepressibly presses forward.

So hope has to do with the unoriginated, universal, infinite, eternal, forward-pushing, irrepressible urge at the heart of Being. That is the song that is being sung.

This is the song that poet Emily Dickinson heard. In the poem printed at the top of your Order of Service today, Emily Dickinson speaks of hope as a little interior songbird perched in the soul - at the center of one's individual being - a songbird that asks nothing of us and that never quits its singing.

"Hope" is that thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird -
That kept so many warm -

I've heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of Me.

(#254, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed., Thomas H. Johnson)

I have seen a video-tape in which the modern American poet Adrienne Rich described Emily Dickinson as being a person who explored states of psychological extremity perhaps more than any other poet. Thus, when Emily Dickinson speaks of being "in the Gale," or "in the chillest land," or "on the strangest Sea;" you can believe she's been there.

So I find it instructive and hopeful when she says that even in the midst of these states of extremity, she still finds that little bird of hope, singing its heart out, asking nothing, not even a crumb, but singing its tune even without words.

We are the ones who put words to hope, creating even the word "hope" itself.

We add words to the wordless tune that is at the root of all things, the irrepressible urge that we call "hope" that is built-in to Being-itself.

We can draw sustenance and strength for ourselves from the knowledge of this reality. For when individual hopes are dashed, this doesn't mean that hope-itself is gone.

For it was that earnest interior hope, arising from the center of Being, that attached itself to particular persons, places, ideas, ideals, and dreams in the first place. And it is largely through this deep hope that these things are caused to blossom and flower.

We rejoice in the strength and beauty of all the persons and possibilities that have come to flower through the nurturance and sustaining power of hope.

But when these transitory things fade, as they will and must, and when we are cut to the quick by their loss, the river of hope beneath these objects and upon which they float, still moves onward and forward. To the extent that we can release ourselves to that underlying river of hope, we too will be carried along, this day and forevermore. For:

"Hope" is that thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -

Benediction

We are of all time past and our aspiration is that of all time to come.
Our hope is as ancient as eating and breathing and the rising of the sun.
Our hope is as new as the first leaves, as young as the baby not yet born.
Remember to be patient, holding to our faith and our hope.

(Ken Patton)

Extinguishing the Chalice

We extinguish this chalice
But not the light of truth,
The warmth of community,
Or the fire of commitment.
These we carry in our hearts
Until we are together again.

(NOTE: This is a manuscript version of the sermon preached by The Reverend Bruce A. Bode at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on the second Sunday of the Christmas Season, December 5, 2004. The spoken sermon, available on audio cassette and CD at the Fellowship, may differ slightly in phrasing and detail from this manuscript version.)