January 2005

Quest Archives

Contents

• The Tincture of Time, by Marjorie Rebmann
• New Online Course: A Chosen Faith
• Covenant Groups
• The Good, the Bad, the Indifferent, by Mark Stringer
• Thank You
• From Your Minister, by Jane Rzepka
• REsources for Living, by Lynn Ungar
• Ring Out, Wild Bells, by Clarke Wells
• Did You Know

Quest Archives

The Tincture of Time

by Marjorie Rebmann, minister, The Unitarian Church of Montpelier, Vermont

Last September I suffered some sort of seizure. When my head became a sudden firestorm, and the hearing in one of my ears diminished significantly, and I lost all feeling in the left side of my head and face and throat, I went to yet another doctor to see if he could help. He said honestly, “Even after all those tests, we don't know exactly what caused your condition. We don't know what the course of recovery will be, or what we can do to help you right now, or if your hearing loss is only temporary or not.” And then he said something which I will remember always. It comforted me in a strange and haunting way. He said, “It might be that for your recovery, you just need...the tincture of time.”

“The tincture of time.” I was sure that I had heard that expression at least once before. But it never sounded so good. It gave me hope. That's what it did. It made me conceptualize, well, time in a bottle. A tincture—yes—of time.

Now a tincture isn't just snake oil. It's something real and useful. Like tincture of iodine. A tincture is made like this: some thing—bark, or a leaf or a flower—is put into a few drops of alcohol or water and then you wait. And you wait...until all the good stuff inside the leaf or flower leaches out. You shake it up and there you have it—the tincture—a suspension of some good stuff that will cure what ails you, some useless stuff, and probably some toxic stuff, too. Tinctures are the oldest form of medicines.

I never thought of it this way, that time could be made into a healing solution just by letting things sit inside it.

I don't understand time any better than most of us. We just live in it—it's our medium—and as we move through it, our lives flow into it. I don't know what time is, except that I am accompanied every day by a crowd of people who used to be me. And every day I need to set those ghosts straight by telling them who I am today and asking them to just pipe down.

But if we could put time in a bottle, the essence of so many of our life experiences would drift, shoot, and tumble into it. The pain of separations, the distress of our bodily complaints, the imaginable and unimaginable mistakes we've made, losses we've suffered. Our mean-spiritedness of certain moments would creep in, the times we were driven by our prejudices, the times we stymied people with our stubbornness, and our woundedness, too, and all our regrets.

Into that bottle of time would flow, too, the joy of connection; the times we were giddily generous; the unexpected, unsought-after gifts which life has pressed upon us; innocent fondnesses; the strokes of fortune we welcomed with relief; blessed insights which saved us from fear and damnation; the times we healed, we helped; the times we made the correct choices.

Here's the bottle. All the vibrant colors and the fearful absences of color and all the fragrances and all the threat of ill winds flowing together in the tincture of time.

My doctor suggested, hopefully, that time is a healer, a physical healer, and a spiritual healer, a heart healer. I believed him. Time doesn't heal all wounds. The ghosts with which we walk each day see to that. But there is a holy alchemy in this tincture of time. The poisons leach out into the solution, but they don't break us anymore because they are tempered with the memory of laughter, some luck, and the very real, and rare, blessings of our days. And all the positive events are tempered, too. They are made more sacred in this ambiguous admixture of the desperate straights of life and good luck and hard work.

The tincture of time can be a good medicine, soothing, affirming, reassuring. Or it can be bad medicine. Bitter, harmful. It depends upon our attitude when we drink it in. In her remarkable book, The Joy Luck Club, one of Amy Tan's characters

says, “I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.” This character only drank the bitter tincture, and its acid wore away her spirit. The light in her eyes was gone, the features of her face obliterated by the venoms of her personal history.

Mary Catherine Bateson talks about the ways we take in the tincture of time in her book Composing a Life. She says that we can take our life histories and make many different versions of them. Many tales. The same life can be recast into a conversion story, a resurrection story, a horror story, a tragedy, a comedy of errors, a romance—all these and more. The very same life. And they are all true.

We don't ask for our afflictions. They always, as I learned abruptly, come out of left field. However, as Bateson points out, people often see their lives as a series of discontinuities, with interruptions and disappointments and losses. It's hard to piece together a story like this—it's just a string of static events. But, we can look at our lives in another way. We can see the continuity, which runs like a thread through time. We can even interpret the surprising changes in our lives as continuity. Bateson gives an example. Someone once told her, “'My life is like surfing, with one wave coming after another.” She says, “He unified his whole life with that single simile.” I would say he drank in the tincture of time. The good and the bad together, the good tempering the bad, the bad making sacred the good.

He let the tincture do its work. He opened himself to its healing. He understood, perhaps, what Garrison Keillor was talking about when he said, “Some luck lies in not getting what you thought you wanted, but getting what you have, which, once you have it, you may be smart enough to see is what you would have wanted had you known.”

The firestorm is gone from my head, the numbness now feels like some cosmic Novocain is wearing off, the hearing in my left ear has not so far been damaged significantly. The firestorm gave me its gifts. When we didn't know what was going to happen, my daughter Susan called and said, “Mom, all us kids will just have to learn American Sign Language.” I was very moved, as Susan and I have had so many difficulties over the years understanding each other in English!

I thank the flawed vessel of my body for holding gifts of wisdom as well as life.

I thank Mary Catherine Bateson for showing us that the story of our lives can be told in various ways, some more life-giving than others.

And I thank this wonderful doctor for giving me the medicine of hope in just the right phrase. “It might be that for your recovery you just need...the tincture of time.”

New Online Course:
A Chosen Faith

Are you interested in learning more about Unitarian Universalism? Did you know that the Church of Larger Fellowship has a self-guided online course that's designed especially for you? The course is a guided examination of Unitarian Universalism, based on the book A Chosen Faith by John Buehrens and Forrest Church and adapted to the online format by Jone Johnson Lewis from a study guide by Joan Goodwin.

Structured around the sources section of our principles and purposes statement, the course guides participants through looking at who we are and what we believe as individuals and as an association.

You can access the course at http://www.uurgl.com/learn.

If you are interested you will need a copy of the book, which is available at the Unitarian Universalist Association’s bookstore which can be found at http://www.uua.org/bookstore or 1-800-215-9076. There are also copies of the book available to CLF members through the CLF lending library. Please contact Giovanna Spadaro at gspadaro@clfuua.org or (617) 948-6150 for availability and borrowing information.

Covenant Groups

How do you build intimacy in a congregation that rarely, if ever, sees one another? How do we have the deep conversations that help us to identify and refine our core beliefs? How can we support one another through good times and bad if we have no way to know what is happening in each other’s lives?

Perhaps it is through the formation of Covenant Groups, groups of about eight people who covenant together to interact via e-mail in an intentional, caring and open way. Each Covenant Group (CG) will have a leader who will guide the group through three-week sessions, each of which will include an opening reading on the topic of that session’s theme, time for check-in, questions to which each member will respond, discussion about the questions and the responses, sharing of likes and wishes (evaluation of the session), and a closing reading. In covenanting to participate fully, members of CGs build communities where people can share deeply in a trusting environment.

Think you might be interested in joining a Covenant Group? We’re planning on starting them up in January, so contact our cyberminister for lifespan religious education, Lynn Ungar, at lungar@clfuu.org, for more information or to sign up. The number of participants will be limited by the number of trained leaders available, but we hope the program will continually expand as members of groups feel prepared to move into leadership positions.

The Good, the Bad, the Indifferent

by Mark Stringer, minister, First Unitarian Church of Des Moines, Iowa

At a party, essayist Jonathan Rauch was asked where he would place himself in the spectrum of religious thought. Rauch said he was about to own up to his long-time and unapologetic atheism, when he realized atheism was no longer a good enough description for his theological position. Not because he was no longer an atheist, you see, but because many years had passed since he really cared one way or the other. He decided a more accurate description for his religious perspective would be “apatheism,” which he defines as “a disinclination to care all that much about one’s own religion, and an even stronger disinclination to care about other people’s.” This story appears in an essay in the May 2003 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which Rauch heralds the rise of an attitude toward religion that he believes is “nothing less than a major civilizational advance.” This attitude is one to which he subscribes, along with, he contends, more and more people of all faiths in our country today.

He explains in the article that apatheism concerns not what one believes, but how one believes it; therefore, apatheists can be atheists or agnostics. Perhaps even more importantly, and the real triumph of apatheism in Rauch’s view, is that they can be believers, too. The major qualifying factor that makes someone an apatheist, then, is not her belief system per se, but her attitude about her belief system, and about belief systems in general. Apatheists are comfortable viewing religion as a personal preference and they do not get caught up in the details of different perceptions of God, or a lack thereof. Apatheists are not anti-religion; they just don’t care enough about it to want to insert themselves in the religious lives of others. As I understand the concept, apatheists would end up at one end of a continuum of religious attitudes, the other end of which would hold evangelical fundamentalists of many stripes, those people who not only follow the cut-and-dried answers of their rigid belief systems, whether they be Christian or Islamic or even atheistic, but who expect others to agree with them or suffer the consequences (hell, jihad, or intellectual insignificance, as the case may be).

On the surface, apatheism sounds like a good idea, and compared to the rigidity of fundamentalism, it is definitely a cultural improvement. Certainly, most of us would agree that, throughout recorded history, enormous amounts of damage have been done by humans wound too tightly in their own religious zeal. An increase in the number of people who are committed to more relaxed religiosity, who do not see it as their religious duty to separate the saved from the unsaved, the sheep from the goats, the pure and holy heterosexuals from the wicked and evil homosexuals, just to name one currently pertinent example, can’t be anything but good, right? The rise of apatheism, then, could be seen as a welcome indication that more and more people are not taking religion so seriously. Frankly, in a world where those holding fanatical religious views can put entire countries on the defensive, it’s about time.

So, on the one hand, I appreciate Rauch’s celebration of the apatheists out there, folks like himself who can see that their perspectives are inherently limited…and that others can have equally valid “nonviolent, non-coercive” theological viewpoints. After all, no matter what form our perception of the divine might take, and whatever way we may choose to describe it, there is far more mystery than certainty when it comes to God.

The world would be a better place if people were more at ease with religious difference. I should clarify here what I mean by “at ease.” I don’t mean tolerance, which in its most common usage has an air of teeth-clenched condescension about it. When we say we will tolerate someone, I think we are implying that we will put up with him even though we still think he is beneath us or not as in touch with the truth as we believe ourselves to be. Tolerance, in my opinion, is inherently closed off, not curious about difference, and therefore has more in common with the fundamentalist pole of religious attitudes than with the apatheist pole. The ease I’m talking about comes from a sense of humility—a sense of humility that encourages us to attempt to develop mutual respect for and understanding of another’s beliefs—even if we must agree to disagree.

On the other hand, however, the more consideration I give to this idea of apatheism, the more concerned I become.

Before I go much further, you should know that I really identify with the apatheists, so the critique of apatheism I will offer in this sermon is as much a critique of myself as it is of anyone else. At many times in my life I would have identified easily as an apatheist, had I known the term. My parents, whether they intended to or not, raised me as one. At the weekly services in the Methodist and Presbyterian churches of my youth, I stood beside my mother, who took communion and recited the creeds, and my father who not only didn’t recite the creeds, but also oftentimes didn’t even sing the hymns. As a result, from an early age, I learned that different belief systems could coincide—even get along—and that it didn’t make much difference what I or anyone else believed about God.

It’s no surprise then, when I turned 18, that I did what many of my peers did, and probably some of you, too: I avoided religion all together, thereby fully embracing what I now know was my apatheism. I didn’t walk away from organized religion angry at the church, or angry with God…how could I be angry when I wasn’t even sure what I believed? I walked away because I didn’t care one way or the other, and my youthful religious apathy fit me just fine. As a side note, you may find it interesting to know that, according to a recent study, at least a third of Americans share a similar relaxed attitude toward religion, as evidenced by their declaration that they never go to church or synagogue. Most of these people say they believe in God, however differently they perceive Him, Her or It; essentially, they just don’t care enough to want to go to church. By my count, that’s a lot of apatheists!

When I first discovered Unitarian Universalism, I confess I was mostly drawn by what I perceived to be its institutional apatheism (though I wouldn’t have used that term at the time). The initial information I received about UUism assured me that my individual journey and my “free and responsible search for truth and meaning” would be respected, wherever that journey might lead. It was clear that UUs would do their best to leave room for those of different religious perspectives—even those who have trouble with the notion of religion at all—believing that, as we are wont to say, the questions are more important than the answers.

I delighted in the idea that I could gather with others to celebrate life and consider its limitless mysteries without having to subscribe to someone else’s vision of the divine. Understand, I didn’t mind hearing what other people thought about God; I just didn’t want to be expected to believe the same things they did about something that was inherently too much of a mystery to fully comprehend. The good news was that in a UU setting, I didn’t have to. I knew there were general principles that most people in the church claimed to affirm and promote; after all, I could read them in the front pages of the hymnal and on the little wallet cards I picked up on the visitor table. But these struck me, at first anyway, as innocuous truisms that were not all that difficult to accept.

More intriguing to me was the list of the sources from which Unitarian Universalists claimed to draw: the wisdom of different cultures and religions, science, ethics, literature, philosophy, and so on. I also appreciated the open acknowledgement of the religious pluralism of our world. In fact, in my first UU church, the Community Church of New York, banners featuring symbols of the world’s great religions were prominently displayed in the sanctuary, and the first Sunday School curriculum I helped teach, not long after I joined, was “Faith Across the Street,” the program in which children and their adult teachers visit the worship services of other religious institutions. This visiting other churches stuff was incredible to me, almost too good to be true.

From the start, I had the impression that the entire Unitarian Universalist movement was based in the understanding that each member could choose his own religious path as he felt internally compelled to do so, without coercion or even strong persuasion from fellow members or ministers. Therefore, other than the fact that people actually were encouraged to come to church each week, the UU approach to religion seemed to be an apatheist’s dream. I fit right in.

Over the years, however, I learned that the living tradition of Unitarian Universalism, a tradition over 200 years in the making, is about far more than apatheism. In fact, the most important figures in our denomination’s history were people who were anything but disinclined to care about religion (either their own or the religion of others). Indeed, these people invested themselves enough in their religious perspectives to be able to act on them—to challenge themselves to participate in the world according to their beliefs.

They translated their Unitarian and/or Universalist faith into something that was much greater than a simple place-holder—much greater than zero. From the anti-Calvinist preachers of universal salvation, John Murray and Hosea Ballou, to the Transcendentalist cultural and literary icon Ralph Waldo Emerson; from the devoted abolitionists Theodore Parker and Octavius Brooks Frothingham to early feminists like Margaret Fuller and leaders of the women’s suffrage movement such as Olympia Brown; from A. Powell Davies, who spoke out against the witch hunts of the McCarthy era, to James Reeb, who was killed while marching for civil rights in Selma, Alabama in the 1960s, Unitarians and Universalists throughout history have not shied away from unpopular positions that question or challenge the status quo. This is the legacy with which we have been left. And this legacy goes far beyond what I perceive to be the easy indifference of apatheism. It is a legacy that reminds us that our UU churches are more than just holding tanks for individual differences; they are places of inspiration that exist to remind us that it matters what we believe and how we live out those beliefs in the world.

As I have pondered the concept of apatheism I’ve come to see that I’ve moved away from it as a descriptor for my own beliefs because I now realize that there is too much at stake to be indifferent about matters of religion.

I recognize that I can’t be an apatheist because, while I don’t wish to deny your individual perceptions of the god you may follow, I do care and am affected by what you think the god you may follow feels about me, my friends and companions, and this earth we share.

I need to be something more than indifferent, for example, if your god is telling you to discriminate against, withhold civil rights from, or persecute people simply based on their gender or sexual orientation, class, race, or politics.

I need to be something more than indifferent if your god requires you to support wide-ranging censorship or the disregard of scientific fact in favor of creationism.

I need to be something more than indifferent if your god requires you to support unfair distribution of
income or privilege.

Or if your god sanctions misuse of the planet or doesn’t question a lack of environmental responsibility.

Or if your god is calling upon you to take up a crusade or holy war against another people, whether the facts support this crusade or not.

My ever-evolving Unitarian Universalist faith has helped me see that in all of these cases, and many more, I need to be something more than indifferent, something more than apatheistic. That is the gift and the challenge of this liberal religious faith we share—a faith that sees divine intervention not as something that comes from without, but from within. A faith that, as Gordon McKeeman claims, “requires discovering what we believe about who we are, where we are, and what we’re trying to do and be” and that “involves reviving those convictions every day in the face of people and events that derogate and devalue all that we believe.” A faith that may enable us to start from zero, but that asks more of us than we might have ever imagined when we first wandered into a UU church.

So now that you are here, what is this faith asking of you?

And what are you willing to give in return? After all, “zero is important. But by itself it doesn’t add up to very much.”

Thank You

On behalf of the Fundraising Committee, the CLF Board and the whole congregation, I thank you.

Thanks to all those who have renewed your pledge so that we can plan for the staff and programs for 2005.

Thanks to all of you who have pledged to the CLF for the first time. You have made it possible to maintain our staff and programming for next year, since regular costs, as you know, go up.

Thanks to all those who were able to increase their contribution for next year. You have enabled us not only to maintain what we have been doing but also to extend what we do in important new directions.

If you have not yet made a pledge to our church this year, but intend to, please do so now. We count on everyone to participate and we still have not raised all that we need to complete our plans for this year. Thanks in advance for doing what you can.

Brad Greeley
Chair, Fundraising Committee

From Your Minister

by Jane Rzepka, minister, Church of the Larger Fellowship

Joama wants a better future. Who doesn’t? Like so many of us, she believes that if she takes the right action, she can hedge her bets against up-coming misery.

Of course, just what constitutes “the right action” varies considerably: The Penobscot Indians say they are trying to build a better future not by prostration, but by means of nutritional programs that undermine drug and alcohol use. In England, the Children’s Society works against child poverty and social exclusion in order to build a better future. I read that a group in Eritrea dreams of a better future based on an animal-feeding program that includes halophytes, plants that grow in salt water. New Zealand’s Retirement Commissioner claims that a better future can be had by means of financial planning (“and, she says, maybe a little boogie boarding at Waihi Beach”).

I am familiar with working toward a better future myself—by recycling cardboard boxes, keeping my insurance policy up-to-date, paying my pledge, voting for the good guys, flossing my teeth—that kind of thing. I hope it’ll help.

But not until I saw the small groups of Tibetans who wore protective mitts or strapped protective blocks of wood to their hands, people rising and falling with every three footsteps, did I feel I’d really witnessed the driving power of human concern for the future. In the face of an existence where things so often don’t go well, it is reasonable to respond with drastic action.

But is that what we all assume? That things won’t go well? We get pretty busy preparing for the worst.

Here’s the thing: Once in awhile, the future works out just fine. It just does. Not because of the nutritional programs or the spiritual discipline, not because of the boogie boards or halophytes, and not because of all that cardboard tied with twine. Some would credit a benevolent universe, others would see the hand of God—I’d call it great good luck. As the Welsh poet Sheenagh Pugh put it (and I wish the language were inclusive. . .):

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscatel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

A two-year-old Tibetan girl, wearing a pink hat, kept an eye on her mother as mom prostrated, walked three steps, prostrated again, mile after mile, day after day. For a few minutes, I watched the little girl as her mother worked so hard to build a better future. As the mother bent, kneeled, and lay flat, touching her calloused forehead to the ground, the girl and her hat skipped around her. Round and round. Romping, really. She was just a little kid, and from the looks of her, she was completely clueless that things might go from bad to worse. Mom knew. But, as the poet says, “Sometimes things don’t go, after all, from bad to worse.” Just for the moment, I sided with the child. In this new year, may it happen, sometimes, for you.

REsources for Living

by Lynn Ungar, cyberminister for lifespan religious education, Church of the Larger Fellowship

(In an effort to bring kids more fully into our religious life, this column is designed to be kid-friendly. Older kids may want to read it themselves, or families with younger children might want to read it out loud together.)

When you’re playing a game, do you ever ask for a “do-over”? I’m pretty sure that grown-ups and kids alike have times when we’d like a chance to undo our silly mistakes or get around the situations that made us mess up. This human need for a second chance is so great that religions and cultures around the world have set aside particular times of year as bringing a fresh start—a new year. There’s the Chinese New Year, the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashana, the Iranian holiday No Ruz, the Vietnamese celebration of Tet, and many, many others. (You might even want to look on the Internet to find out about some of the many ways people around the world celebrate the new year. Or check out the RE section of the CLF website: When-and How-Do You Celebrate New Year’s (6-10 yrs,
Gr. 1-5), or Rosh Hashanah (14-18 yrs, Gr. 9-12)

In many countries around the world, January 1st marks the New Year. People celebrate with parties and staying up ‘til midnight on New Year’s Eve to make a bunch of noise to welcome the new year. There are fireworks in some places, and in New York City there’s a big glittery ball that drops down from on high, and lots of people sing a kind of confusing Scottish song about remembering (or forgetting) old friends. It’s fun, but most people would say that it isn’t really an expression of their religion.

There is, however, one New Year’s tradition that matches up very well with Unitarian Universalism. January 1st can be a time to make New Year’s resolutions. A resolution is a commitment that you put your heart and mind to—usually a commitment about something you want to change. Every year UUs from around the world gather at our General Assembly to worship, learn and make decisions for the whole Unitarian Universalist Association. One important part of GA is when delegates, who are chosen by their congregations to have a vote, pass resolutions that are statements about problems in the wider world that we think we need to change, like global warming or the way people are treated in prison. (To learn more about current GA resolutions, look on-line at www.uua.org/csw, or to find out all the resolutions we’ve passed throughout our history, go to www.uua.org/actions.)

But resolutions don’t have to be about huge world-wide issues. New Year’s resolutions are often about changes people want to make in their own personal lives. People resolve to make changes that are good for their bodies, like packing fruit in their lunches instead of cupcakes. Or they resolve to make changes that are good for their families, like sitting down for meals together more often. Or they resolve to make changes that are good for the whole planet, like drinking out of a thermos or water bottle instead of throw-away juice containers.

Here’s one way of coming up with New Year’s resolutions: Think about the past year. What has gone really great? What has been really disappointing? What made you really happy or really mad? What have you done that you’re really proud of? What were the worst couple of choices that you made? What were the surprises, and what are you still waiting to have happen?

By yourself or with your family or a group of friends or your UU community, draw some of these things on a piece of paper. (If you have a group, you might need a really big sheet of paper!) You can use markers or crayons or rubber stamps, or make a collage with pictures cut out from old magazines.

Then, looking at your artwork, choose one or two things that make you think about what you might want to change in your life. Sometimes the things we want to change involve fixing problems. Maybe, for instance, too many days last year were wrecked by fighting with a friend or a sibling. If so, you might want to resolve to learn some ways of talking and listening that help everyone feel heard. Other times the things we want to change involve bringing more of the activities we love into our lives. Maybe you discovered something great this year, like backpacking or gymnastics, and you want to resolve to spend more time at it. Or perhaps what you notice is what isn’t in your artwork that you wish were there. For myself, I’ve decided that one change I’m going to make for the coming year is to take a tap dancing class. I’ve been watching my 6-year-old daughter’s dance classes for years, and I’ve decided there’s no reason that she should have all the fun.

So, when you’ve decided what you’d like to change in your life for the coming year, create a drawing or a collage of what you hope to see happen.

Now, here’s the important part. You need to find a place to post your resolution picture where you’ll be able to see it. Refrigerators work well, or with your parents’ permission you can put it up on your bedroom wall or on your bed or in the bathroom or maybe on the inside of a locker or cubby at school. That way it can be a reminder of your intentions and an inspiration to build the life you really want to have.

Unitarian Universalists have long believed that people have a built-in need to learn and grow and change for the better. So when you create your New Year’s resolutions, you are truly creating a Unitarian Universalist religious ritual.

So here’s to the New Year, and to all of our wonderful changes!

Ring Out, Wild Bells

by Clarke Wells, minister emeritus, Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Lakeland, Florida

If I were forced to name my dozen or so favorite hymns, among them would be Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells.” I can handle that hymn every week and in any season. Several lines are memorable, but the phrase, “Ring out the grief that saps the mind”—these words have adhered to my soul since I first sang them at daily vespers in theological school long ago. They are as close and dear as any words I know.

Mircea Eliade reminds us that religions over the world transmit liturgically the insight about worlds grown weary and tired, that need to die, expire, so that they may be born again. The accumulation of old grief and woe would overwhelm us completely were it not for the possibility of new beginnings. Tennyson’s “Ring out” carries a strong counterpoint pun: Wring out. The year is dying, let it die, mop it up, wring it out. Unless a seed fall and die, we read in the gospels, it cannot live.

There’s something heavy and magnificent and profound about the ringing of bells at New Year’s time. We are not talking, of course, about the squeaks and little whistles given out as favors at boozy New Year parties. No. No. No. We’re talking primordial stuff: “Ring out, wild bells, to the wild, wild sky, the flying clouds, the frosty light: the year is dying in the night; ring out, wild bells, and let it die.”

Ring out, wring out, the things we need to let go of—feuds and falsehoods, slander and spite, old hurts
and fears, and the thousand mistakes that we are heir to. Ring them out, let them go, let them die. This is
the hymn’s great exhortation, its exclamation, its declaration, its plea, its hope, its prayer.

At New Year’s only the profoundest music—plangent, oceanic, devastating—can give voice to such a bold time. Ring out, wild bells.

Did You Know

...that CLF has a lending library of UU books, meditation manuals, UU history books and videotapes available for members in the U.S. and Canada? Go to www.clfuu.org and click on Resources.