Sermons by Reverend Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalists and Christmas
Rev. Don Beaudreault
Unitarian Universalist Church of Sarasota, FL
December 4, 2005
OPENING READING:
I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people…as if they really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.
Charles Dickens
MEDITATION READING: “little tree”
little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flowerwho found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetlyi will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don't be afraidlook the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,put up your little arms
and i'll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won't a single place dark or unhappythen when you're quite dressed
you'll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they'll stare!
oh but you'll be very proudand my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we'll dance and sing
"Noel Noel"e. e. cummings
SERMON: “Unitarian Universalists and Christmas”
There are various misconceptions or lack of knowledge about Unitarian Universalists – even among Unitarian Universalists! One of these is that we do not celebrate Christmas, which is the oddest thing, given the reality that if it were not for us, the holiday as we have come to traditionally observe it in the United States, would not be quite what it is.
There are some famous and not-so-famous names and accomplishments connected with Unitarian Universalists and Christmas that we will learn about in this sermon, a process that should fill us with a nice sense of pride.
One of the things about knowing our history is to discover that in some foundational ways we as a religious community today are not all that different from who we were in the past. That is to say, we are a creative and determined lot who have always taken a position on what we believe and how we are going to practice that belief.
Sometimes we have adopted an untried or even unpopular position, which, in time, has become a traditional or popular one.
Such is the story we shall weave together this morning, as we explore “Unitarian Universalists and Christmas.”
But let us establish the setting and the mood of our story…
Consider what it was like in America during the first two hundred years of white European settlement: most people did not celebrate Christmas. In fact, the Puritans suppressed such gaiety. In 1621, a year after the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, Governor William Bradford discovered that some of the colonists had taken the day off, which he would have none of, and he ordered them back to work. Merry Christmas!
In Massachusetts from 1659-81 it was even illegal to celebrate the day.
It was only about 150 years ago that Christmas became an official public holiday in New England.
Why this attitude? Partially, it was because the Puritans could find no biblical basis for celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25th or any other day. They knew, too, that December 25th was the approximate arrival date of the winter solstice – which for them connoted a pagan ritual.
There was another reason. Those who did attempt to celebrate the day, did so with excess – including alcohol, food, mockery, begging, and even breaking and entering – some of which had its antecedents in other cultures, but taken to good old American excess!
Perhaps such extreme adaptations of ritualistic imbibing were in opposition to the extreme suppression of any expression of holiday mirth.
We can see to what degree the merrymakers took on by pointing out the words of one Anglican cleric who wrote:
Men dishonour Christ more in the twelve days of Christmas, than in all the twelve months besides. (Hugh Latimer)
So the thought was that it was better for society to ignore the holiday, lest misrule rule the day!
In time, around the turn of the nineteenth century, church folk – particularly the Universalists began to hold church services on December 25. A Universalist community in Boston had a service in 1789.
The thinking of such spiritual celebrants was that if people were in church, they wouldn’t be carousing out in the streets.
It took the Unitarians another 11 years after the Universalists to call for a public observance of Christmas. As one writer says of our forbears:
They wished to celebrate the holiday not because God ordered them to do so but because they themselves wished to. (The Battle for Christmas, Stephen Nissenbaum, p.45)
In saying this, let us now turn to various aspects of the holiday, and how the Unitarian Universalists connected with them.
CHILDREN, CHRISTMAS TREES, GIFT-GIVING
It would be impossible to talk about Unitarian Universalists and our connection with the origins of an American-style Christmas celebration, without talking about our perspective on children.
Child-rearing back then and even today is sometimes related to theology. Unlike the Calvinists who believed that we were born in sin and damned to hellfire and brimstone upon our death if we do not repent and come to Jesus, the Unitarian Universalists spoke of a loving God who hadn’t a thought about such a definition of sin and its consequences.
Therefore, when it came to raising children, our theological ancestors refused to take up the rod. In other words, we did not and do not believe that a child’s sense of self should be broken, but that the child must be guided with love and understanding.
The great Unitarian cleric/social activist/theologian The Reverend Theodore Parker said of our approach on this matter:
Men often speak of breaking the will of a child; it seems to me they had better break the neck. The will needs regulation, not destroying. I should as soon think of breaking the legs of a horse in training him, as (of breaking) a child’s will. (Ibid, p. 203)
There were various degrees of this kind of child raising among the Unitarian Universalists – some being more permissive of a child’s actions than others.
Consider the more “Romantic” notion. Those English Unitarians, the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the latter seriously entertained the desire to study for the Unitarian ministry but stayed with poetry), were imbued with the notion that children could do no wrong. This was the thinking, too, with some other historic Unitarians, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Orestes Bronson, father of Louisa May.
This philosophical basis for bringing up kids went like this:
…it was children who offered adults a model for emulation, and not the other way around. Children were not imperfect little adults; rather, adults were imperfect grown-up children. (Ibid, p. 205)
The child is father of the man – said Wordsworth.
And according to Emerson, the best people were those who retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.
Which brings us to the history of the Christmas tree and how we Unitarian Universalists helped to establish it as a major symbol of our American celebration.
In all probability, Christmas trees in America first appeared in the Pennsylvania German communities in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the same decade in which St. Nicholas was introduced in New York. For Christmas tree aficionados, let me add that the trees had first been a localized German custom, largely limited to the Alsatian capital of Strasbourg during the last third of the eighteenth century.
The Unitarians were the ones who first introduced the Christmas tree to the United States - in print! This occurred in 1820 when we published a German story about a Christmas tree in our literary periodical called “The Athenaeum.”
Back to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was 1798 and the Christmas season. The 26-year-old poet was vacationing in the German town of Ratzeburg, near Hamburg, when, on Christmas Eve, he saw the top of an evergreen on a table in one of the homes he visited. But what was of even more interest to him was the reality that it was the children who gave gifts to their parents, and not the other way around. Says he of the event:
…there were eight or nine children, and the eldest daughter and the mother wept aloud for joy and tenderness; and the tears ran down the face of the father, and he clasped his children so tight to his breast – it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising within him.
I was very much affected. (Ibid, p. 199)
Eleven years later (1809) this account of that Christmas Eve was published in England, and 26 years later (1824) it was published for the first time in the official journal of the Unitarian Church in America, the “Christian Register.”
Coleridge’s story was picked up in part by another Unitarian, Lydia Maria Child, a novelist and abolitionist, who was best known at the time for her cookbook, The New England Frugal Housewife. Her story was published in 1830
Then in 1835, the Unitarian, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, a well-known writer in her day, had her story “New Year’s Day” published. It has a very small reference to a Christmas tree and the presents that were attached to the tree’s branches.
It was in 1835, too, that the Rev. Charles Follen, a German immigrant, Harvard professor, and eventually the minister of our church in Lexington, MA, set up a Christmas tree. At least this is the story told by another Unitarian – the English writer, Harriet Martineau, sister of the Unitarian minister of Liverpool, James Martineau.
Legend has had it – particularly in Unitarian Universalist circles - that Follen was the man who introduced the Christmas tree to America. So much for legend!
But Harriet’s story about the occasion is a lovely one, nevertheless – one showing, again, the importance of children at this special time – in this case, the Follen’s five-year-old son, Charley and his two companions.
By the way, both Martineau and Follen, firm believers in the “Romantic” way of raising children, were strong abolitionists and suffered the consequences – Martineau by her loss of popularity in America, and Follen by his loss of a job. And furthermore, consider his sad end:
In the winter of 1839 he prematurely ended his lecture tour in New York City so that he could return for the dedication of his new parish church in Lexington. But he and so many others, including the famous Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, were killed when their steamboat sank in a storm. Follen was 43-years-old.
Now, because of his staunch desire to defeat slavery, Follen paid the price – even in death. His friend and mentor, The Reverend William Ellery Channing, that grand old man of Unitarianism (and himself quite a rebel – at least when it came to theology) could not find one Boston church (Unitarian or otherwise) willing to hold a memorial service for Follen.
That is part of our history, too!
Back to Christmas presents for a moment. Of course, the idea of gift-giving at a time of great festivity goes back to classical times, notably during the Roman saturnalia, but let us bring it up a number of centuries to 1834 and the Boston Unitarian concern that perhaps such a practice was getting more than a little bit greedy,
Said a letter printed in one of the Unitarian publications:
All the children are expecting presents, and all aunts and cousins to say nothing of near relatives, are considering what they shall bestow upon the earnest expectants….I observe that the shops are preparing themselves with all sorts of things to suit all sorts of tastes; and am amazed at the cunning skill with which the most worthless as well as most valuable articles are set forth to tempt and decoy the bewildered purchaser. (Ibid, p. 135)
OTHER CHRISTMAS CONNECTIONS
There are other ways in which we Unitarian Universalists can say that, yes, we do connect – and celebrate Christmas.
Consider two famous Christmas musical pieces – one a hymn, the other a popular song.
The words to “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” were written by a Unitarian Minister, The Rev. Edmund H. Sears while he served our church in Wayland, MA. The hymn was first performed in that church in 1849 and appeared in our Unitarian journal, “The Christian Register” on December 29th of that year.
The hymn was written when Sears was experiencing personal melancholy that was heightened by his concern for war in Europe and our own country’s war with Mexico. His words express the image of a dark world, filled with “sin and strife”:
And man, at war with man, hears not
The love-song which they bring:
O hush the noise, ye men of strife,
And hear the angels sing.
Christian traditionalists have been critical of Sears’s hymn over the years, believing that it is quite unscriptural – saying, in fact, that there is never a mention of the baby Jesus.
Others have thought of it as an ethical song, not a hymn.
This is all rather ironic because Sears had one of the more conservative, mystical theologies of all the Unitarian ministers of his time.
One of his friends and church attendees was Lydia Maria Child with whom he shared some common beliefs concerning Swedenborgianism – a mystical Christian group that affirms there is no physical resurrection, but at the time of our deaths, we become angels or evil spirits.
After a fall from a tree in 1874, he was in constant pain for the rest of his life. Shortly before his death in 1876 he wrote these lines illustrative of his fervent belief in God:
And pain, which in the long, long hours
Keeps on night and day,
Through these fast-crumbling walls to thee
Finds a new opening way.
The other famous musical Christmas piece, “Jingle Bells” (published in 1857) was written by James Pierpont, organist and choir director of the Unitarian Church in Savannah, GA where his brother John, was the minister. Their father John, minister of the Medford, MA Unitarian Church was a strong abolitionist and temperance advocate.
One legend has it that son James was not a teetotaler and when he was a young man, stored liquor in the basement of his father’s church!
Other stories about him say that he ran away to sea when he was 14, went to California during the Gold Rush, and during the Civil War joined a Confederate cavalry regiment in Savannah - thereby making a statement in opposition to his family’s strong abolitionist views.
Now known as a Christmas classic, and one of the all-time best selling musical compositions, “Jingle Bells” was published with its original name “The “One Horse Open Sleigh” and was written for a Thanksgiving church service at the Unitarian Church in Savannah, GA. It was so well received that the children of the church sang it for the Christmas service.
This is one version of “Jingle Bells” composition. The other version has Pierpont writing the song in Medford, MA – and this story held up until 1969 when the Savannah Church claimed the distinction. At that time the mayors of both cities wrote rather testy letters back and forth, each claiming its domain as Pierpont’s place of composition. The people of Medford said – and probably still do – that James wrote the jaunty, jingly piece at the Simpson Tavern, a boarding house with the only piano in town.
Wherever it was written, let us claim it as yet another Unitarian Universalist connection with the American version of Christmas celebrating.
Pierpont went on to sire a number of songs and children. His songs included several that trumpeted the Confederate cause, but none gained fame. Nor did his children, although one of his nephews did – John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan.
Indeed, there are many other connections we Unitarian Universalists have with this Christmas season, American Style:
Think of that classic poem, “the little tree” written by that UU e. e. cummings, the son of a Unitarian minister.
Think of Nathaniel Currier, of Currier and Ives fame and of all their wonderful Christmas scenes on all those millions of holiday cards.
Think of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his stirring Christmas carol “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” – which was his comment on the horrors of the Civil War and all wars.
Think of Thomas Nast, political cartoonist whose friendly face of St. Nick has become the quintessential, populist image of that legendary figure.
Think of that convert from Episcopalianism, Clement Moore, scholar and land conservationist, who is best known for his beloved “The Night Before Christmas.”
Think of that Brit who helped create an American, indeed, a universal aspect of Christmas, Charles Dickens. Would Christmas be Christmas without his “A Christmas Carol”?
Well, of course, Christmas and the other cultural and religious holidays that occur around this time of year would still go on here and abroad – without any of these Unitarian Universalist links. But how less rich in legend, poetry, song and image it would be.
So let us with a sense of joy and not untoward pride, state to one and all:
YES, WE UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS!
CLOSING WORDS:
This is humanity, that in (our) heart and eyes has wonder; That can look upon the barren tree and see beauty; See mighty engines in the formless ore; Atom-smashers in the flash of lightning, And truth on the other side of doubt fearlessly explored.
Robert Weston