I am drinking coffee out of my special Christmas mug, unpacked at this time of year and put back in storage after a few weeks—along with lights, ornaments, wrapping paper and other Christmas things. These connect me to the traditions of Christmas that have been part of my life since childhood: gathering with family, taking time off work and school for games and meals and giving presents.
 
I call myself a secular Christian or a cultural Christian because I was raised with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: traditions coinciding with the religious holidays of Christianity, but whose meaning was all about family togetherness and very little about religious belief.
 
At some point I rejected the mainstream religious notion that Jesus died and was born again, and the notion of being saved somehow by or through Jesus. However, I later embraced the figure of Jesus as a teacher and a healer, as a prophet who preached radical love. In honor of Christmas, I uplift the message of that Jesus that I believe in: that everyone is worthy, rich or poor; outcast or noble; that we should love one another.
 
Merry Christmas. If this is a holiday with meaning for you – deep religious meaning or the equally important meaning of family tradition – I hope you enjoy it. If Christmas is completely outside of your religious identity, I hope you enjoy the quiet of a day when almost everything is closed. And may we all be blessed by the message of love and hope that is at the core of  the Christmas story: a baby born in difficult times giving hope to his family and to others.
 
Prayer
May every child born be blessed and honored as special, as the child of God, as a holy being sent to bring hope, love and peace. May each of us see ourselves in that child, represented in the Christian tradition by the baby Jesus.
 
May we be wise enough to see universal wisdom and truth in the stories and holidays of many religious traditions – those we were born into, and those we learn about later in life.
 
May Christmas be a day of peace, love and joy for the whole world with no exceptions.
 
Amen.
 
Rev. Andrew Frantz

In our worship service last Sunday, the focus was on stillness as a spiritual practice. Stillness is the theme for the month of December; akin to stillness is the dark and cold that are part of this month, and akin to stillness is silence.
 
I shared a poem on Sunday by Rev. Mark Belletini called “Ode to Silence.” I am moved here to share another of his poems that also talks about silence, and this one is called “Via Negativa.”
 
Via Negativa
Mark Belletini
 
Not the silence of a child finally asleep in a crib--
not the silence of pear blossoms falling--
not the silence of singers after the song--
not the silence of embarrassed strangers--
not the silence of streets when gunshot stops--
not the silence of rage--
not the red-faced silence of frustration--
not the silence of the exhausted--
not the silence of the gardener gardening alone--
but this:
the silence of those who have been together
and do not need to hide their aloneness with words,
the silence of lovers
who have come to a place of quiet comfort,
the silence of a newborn at breast,
the silence of an overflowing human heart
under the stars at night,
the silence of friends holding still
 in a long and tender embrace.
 
(from the collection Sonata for Voice and Silence by Mark Belletini, published in 2008 by Skinner House Books in Boston)
 
I love this poem for its images and for its celebration of silence – the right kinds of silence. Yes, there is awkward silence and angry silence, but there is loving silence and sacred silence. Sometimes we are uncomfortable with silence, and I think we need to take the time to figure out if the silence is a good silence or a negative silence.
 
As a classroom teacher, I learned that there were good and bad silences in the classroom also. There is the productive silence when everyone is working individually. After the teacher asks a question, the silence can be the negative silence of boredom or of being afraid to speak; or the productive silence of students thinking about the question before anyone offers an answer. This is the silence that a good teacher cultivates and values.
 
In this time of growing darkness and coldness, in this time of continued isolation from loved ones and fear of sickness, we might experience a silence of emptiness, lifelessness, despair. May that negative silence be countered by music, or by a phone call to a loved one. And we might experience a silence of introspection, of prayer, of peacefulness. May this sacred silence hold us and give us room to grow.
 
Prayer
Divine spirit of light and of darkness, of noise and of silence, be with us now.
 
May we be present in this time of Hanukkah, of Winter Solstice and Yule, of quiet and dark, to the generative silence. May we embrace sacred silence and find wisdom and peace within.
 
Shalom. A salaam alaikem.
 
Rev. Andrew Frantz