Reading -    News items… George Bush, (true) plus a fictional news item…

"News" by Frederick Buechner

"Getting Back to Normal"

All week I've had trouble remembering what day it is.  Because New Year's Eve and New Year's Day fell on a Tuesday and Wednesday, Thursday felt like Monday - did you experience that same confusion?  My bewilderment is in the process of subsiding. Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa, New Year's - we've completed the passage. Larry and I spent New Year's Day taking down the tree, pulling the lights out of our windows, packing away the decorations and storing away our Christmas music for yet another year. Our pantry is still decked out with extra homemade goodies, but even those will be gone soon. But bit by bit, we are getting back to routine. At least I know today is Sunday….

 For some of you the holidays may have been very difficult, and for others it was just the best.  But regardless of how it was, it's over,  and the process of getting back to normal, whatever that is, in underway.

Normal is one of those words we use advisedly.  It's one of those words, if looked at too closely, seems to lose its meaning. After holidays or vacations, weddings or parties we tend to use normal to mean - the usual ho hum …as in… sigh…."time to get back to normal, I suppose.  Lapsing into normal life after some sort of celebrated event can feel like returning to the trivial and the unimportant. So that's one view of normal.

But there's another virtually opposite view which one glance at a newspaper will make evident.  Yesterday's Globe, for example, reported that twenty-seven people who had been recently appointed to state commissions by departing Governor Jane Swift lost their jobs as soon as Mitt Romney took office; and  Kara Kennedy, (daughter of Senator Ted) submitted to lung surgery for cancer and will undergo chemotherapy; nine people were killed when a pickup slammed into a tractor trailer on Interstate 80; and three Palestinian teenagers died in attempting an attack in Jerusalem.  While last week things may have been normal for these people and their families, this week normal may be hard to imagine and something to be yearned for. 

We all experience a mixture of ups and downs, joys and sorrows, successes and failures,  in the natural course of living. It can be hard to get perspective on what's normal in our own lives. One facet of wisdom is the realization that normal in the sense of ordinary days lived by ordinary people really doesn't exist.  Point to any individual in this congregation and I would have to say the drama of your life story is too unique to be considered normal - and I mean that in the best possible way. Movies often succeed when they are able to help us with this realization. The movie Ordinary People that depicted a family's struggle to deal with a son's accidental death made just this point. Ordinary?  Normal? How can a family being  transformed in a crucible of pain be anything but extraordinary? Every one of you is extraordinary.

Larry and I watched a Video entitled Monsoon Wedding over the holidays. Filmed in India, it follows members of an "ordinary" modern extended family who gathered from all around the world to celebrate the arranged marriage of one of its daughters. Again "ordinary" here means that apart from being Indian, this family is in no striking way any different from other extended families in their lot in life, their joys, their dreams, their foibles or their sorrows.  But as the camera moves in up close and we get to know some of the individual stories we discover several compelling human dramas. When the movie ends and the wedding celebration is done, the lives of the participants we have come to know so well will go back to whatever their "normal" is- but now the viewer knows them well enough to appreciate the complexity of their everyday lives. Normal? Ordinary? The viewer walks away able to appreciate that there is no such thing….

Many significant things happen in the midst of our normal, everyday living. Values, behaviors and ideals are formed and played out. Interior lives are shaped, and relationships built. Everyday, whether we're at work or at home, something important is going on. I don't know about you, but I tend to forget that.  I have a tendency to get so caught up in the details of my life that I fail to appreciate the true movement and flow of life in the larger picture.

Writer and poet May Sarton observed that "A holiday gives one a chance to look backward and forward, to reset oneself by an inner compass."  If there's one adjustment we can make that can help us reset our compass, maybe it is to follow Frederick Buechner's advice: to value own particular news of the day,  to recognize that the small events - the chance meeting at Victory, the call of concern when someone isn't well, the laughter which brings us to tears, are the sum and substance of our lives.  Appreciating these moments, spending some time in savoring them is another way of saying our prayers.

The holiday we happen to be marking today is the beginning of a new calendar year and we will mark it with a fire communion.

          When humankind first looked into the skies and into the depths of infinity, we did not see endings and beginnings, pasts and futures.  We saw gods and spirits, the fates and the great oracles.  We saw the cycles that ruled not just the beyond but which also ruled the earth, the sea and all who made their home upon them.  Whatever lived and grew, breathed, loved and died did so at the will of the cycles of time  which carved their path upon more than our sky and land but also upon our very souls.

The lives we live will not change simply because our human calendar looks different from before.  Our lives come and go as cycles of creation.  This is the human situation.  Escape is not possible, or even desirable.  For it is within these cycles of living and dying, of creation and recreation that the influence of our unique presence lives on eternally beyond our personal human time spans.

This morning I will invite you to participate in a sacrament called a fire communion. A sacrament is an "outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." In any sacramental rite, some concrete reality, whether it be water or fire or stone or a piece of bread, is seen as a vehicle that bears a special capacity to symbolize in our lives what is radically significant, to convey "an inward and spiritual grace."  Today fire is invested with that capacity.

Our service began acknowledging humbly that we are all caught up together in the vast cycles of time.  But with our fire communion we acknowledge too, that we are creative participants, that we have our own responsibility, and our own potential and power within the cycle of time.  Although it is true that we cannot stop the year from turning, we can seek to live more fully in the year ahead.   Although we cannot change the cycles of birth and death,  we can say yes to our power to make meaningful endings and let go of  whatever harmful patterns we have and we can vow to do better.  Although we cannot change the past year or determine what the new one shall bring,  we do have the power within every moment to commit to new and better ways of being. 

Our communion will consist of two actions - a "letting go" into the past what belongs to the past, and a "renewal," a re-dedication to whatever is, for each of us, life-renewing and life-enhancing.

I will now light the two candles for our ceremony…

                                                                                                              
(To Light the Candle of Letting Go, say)

Spirit of Life be with us in our letting go.
Help us to let go of old habits, grudges and attitudes.
Let the darkness in our hearts lift with the rising of this flame
making room for healing light in the year ahead.
With this prayer we light the Candle of Letting Go.

To Light the Candle of Renewal say)
O God of infinite newness  
Awaken in us power and commitment to the good  
Help us to let in the light of life and love in the days ahead. 
With this prayer I light the Candle of Renewal.

You each received a piece of paper with your order of service. I invite you now to write a word or place a symbol on it that represents what you seek to give up, cast off, be forgiven for, or leave behind in the year ahead.   This paper is for your eyes only.  Momentarily, you will be invited to bring the paper forward and commit it to the flame on your left.  The fire will consume, not only the paper, but, if you intend it, what the paper symbolizes.

After you have burned your paper and let go of what needed to be let go, you are invited to light a candle as a symbol of your renewed dedication to the aspirations of your heart. Your flame will not only add warmth and light to our gathering, but, if you intend it, the flame may also warm and light your way through the new year, symbolizing "inward and spiritual grace."