SERMONS 

The Dream Time

I begin with a story. The Hoopa Indians taught their children that when they wake up in the morning, the first thing they must do, even before getting out of bed, is to hum their shadows home.

You see, while you sleep, your shadow takes off. You fall asleep, and your shadow celebrates—says, ah, now is my time to go off and have adventures. I can do all the things you wouldn’t allow me to do during the waking hours. And so your shadow is out of here.

You may get hints about what your shadow is up to during certain periods in your sleep, but if you are like most of us, these adventures in imagination slip away as you transition back to waking time. Sometimes you don’t quite remember your shadow’s adventures, but you get glimpses of them in waking hours and have vague feelings of having had experiences you don’t think you had in “real life.”

Have you ever said to someone, in the middle of the morning, “Pardon me, but I’m not all here yet”? This means you failed to hum your shadow home. Or have you ever had the feeling you had got out of the wrong side of the bed? Well, that too is a sign you forgot to hum your shadow home. Your shadow has a particular hum, one that only you know. And when you hum that hum, your shadow has to come home. Now it may not want to come back quite yet, so it may not immediately return and you will have to hum again. But it has to obey you, so it will come home.

When the shadow comes home, you are ready for the day. Hum your shadow home, so that you will be one again, whole and fully present. If you think you haven’t done this essential task yet today, feel free to hum your shadow home here and now.

The story about humming your shadow home is a story with lots of possibilities. You can think of it in terms of understanding how dreams provide an outlet for your imagination, how they harness those feelings you may have that somehow you know you mustn’t express during waking hours. We all suppress certain thoughts and feelings; let’s face it, we don’t share everything of ourselves with others, not even those closest to us. This is normal enough.

And it isn’t just that dream time is a receptacle for unruly thoughts and feelings that if expressed during waking hours would make life with others impossible. Dream time offers opportunities for exploration at a mysterious level that also feeds our sense of imagination and creativity.

You can also think about this, if you are given to such thought, in terms of the psychological ideas of C. G. Jung. The shadow is a key element in Jungian psychology.

Now I want to suggest that the idea of the dream time has a seasonal tie-in. We are in the season of Advent, so this is a season of anticipation… imagination… and dreams. It is a season of hope in the face of harsh reality. Hope may be “the thing with feathers,” as Emily Dickinson put it; it may be like a 21-gram hummingbird making its way through a windstorm. But it is extraordinarily powerful—and a harbinger of possibility.

You know that 21 grams is not only the weight of the hummingbird, but is also, supposedly, the weight of the soul. It is, you see, the weight the body is said to lose at the moment of death. Like your shadow, the soul takes off in that moment and heads off to adventures that we can only imagine.

But I digress. I take flight with the hummingbird. But like the shadow, I want to return to waking time.

What is the nature of this hope of which I speak? What is the nature of the dream time which is the Advent season? In this time of year we nurture dreams of peace and joy, love and hope… dreams of possibilities and expectations.

One of the interesting things about this season is the common theme shared among many religious traditions. It is of course no accident that all the traditions have celebrations during this time. It is probably the case that this scheduling was part of a competitive process; we reach the darkest time of year, and pagans note the return of the light. So Hanukkah celebrates the light as well. And Christmas celebrates the arrival in the world of a messiah to bring a new era of light to the darkness. And on and on it goes.

Rituals play an important role in our lives, yet they also can become trite and tedious, and the Christmas season, with all its organization, preparation, shopping, and planning and cooking and the requirement of getting together with family, can become stressful. Certainly it can be joyous, too, but it always tends toward busy-ness and stress. It is a time in which to show kindness. Not only kindness to others, but kindness to your self as well. Take time for yourself during this hectic season, and enjoy the season without putting too much stress on yourself.

Several points I want to emphasize today.

1. This is a season of hope. For many of you, I know, this has been a bleak season, as our war-making machine grinds on, and the situation in the world does not seem (rationally) any better for it. And the voters have endorsed a continuation of what seems only to look more and more like a disaster that will take decades to untangle. Yet it is precisely in such times that hope is most needed. It is precisely in such times that the need for dreams and imagination is greatest. It is no accident that the dove is the symbol of peace in the face of war. “The thing with feathers” goes against tanks and mortars?
   
   
2. This is a season of dedication. We dedicate ourselves to the proposition that things will get better, and that it is up to us to express that sense and commit ourselves to do what we can to make it so. How do we do that? We do it in many ways. First of all, we embody hope and live it; we do not lose heart in the face of obstacles that will always present themselves to that better world that we envision. We keep imagining the world as we wish it to be, even as we must live in the world as it is. We need not accept the world as it is, but we learn to love it anyway. And we love life, whatever the hell happens.
   
   
3. This is a season of generosity. Kim Crawford Harvie, who is the senior minister at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, told a story—it’s in the current issue of the Church of the Larger Fellowship newsletter—about a woman who began giving her husband, who hated Christmas, a different kind of gift. Each year she would put a small, white envelope in the Christmas tree with his name on it. Inside would be a note telling him of something she had done for someone else, and this was her gift to him. The first year it was a gift of wrestling equipment to a ragtag junior high school team that had lost every match to their son’s team. Her husband had felt badly that this visiting team hadn’t the equipment their son’s team had. Every year, then, his wife would give a gift to a cause or need, and that would be her gift to her Christmas-hating husband. The story doesn’t end there; her husband Mike was lost to cancer, but she continued the tradition after his death. And not only did her envelope continue to appear in the tree, but each of her three children, unbeknownst to each other, had also placed an envelope in the tree. So this spirit of generosity goes on… and grows as the years go by.

Hope… Dedication… Generosity. These are the themes for the season of Advent, and really for all the seasons of the year. Let us build a spirit of generosity in our lives and in the life of this church.

There are many opportunities for expressions of generosity in our lives. Many of us participated in the Salvation Army’s Christmas program this year, by adding needy children to our gift lists. Another at any time of year is to go through your closets and dresser drawers and fill up trash bags with clothing and bedding you don’t need to take to Goodwill. Of course there is also the Guest at Your Table program on behalf of UUSC.

And then there is the concept of tithing. Hauling stuff you no longer need to Goodwill is no big deal. Adding an extra child to your shopping list at Christmas isn’t such a difficult thing. Throwing quarters or dollars in the Guest at Your Table boxes doesn’t stress our finances. But tithing—that sounds like a challenge, and I confess that it took me many years to get to this point, and now, finally, I have committed to tithing.

That means giving ten percent of salary & housing to “good works.” Half of that ten percent goes to this congregation. The other half will be divided among a variety of what I consider important causes. That includes UUSC, Meadville-Lombard Theological School, Amnesty International, ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and some other organizations.

And tithing in this way doesn’t stop us from random acts of kindness. You can tithe and still find plenty of special occasions for extra generosity—like UUSC’s Guest at Your Table program, like the church service auction, like special Christmas giving to the Salvation Army and other programs for the poor.

This is not a big sacrifice. That is the first thing one learns when embracing the concept of generosity and hope. Tithing is a venerable idea in churches, and the churches that have traditionally followed this level of commitment to giving have not been churches of the well-off, people of wealth, but have actually been churches of the less well-off.

There’s an old line about Giving. It is not a case of giving until it hurts. It is instead a case of giving until it feels good. And I will tell you; it feels good to have made this commitment to generosity a central element of life.

This is a perfect season to cultivate generosity. We begin with the spirit of hope, deepening our commitment to work on behalf of a better world in any way that we can. It will be distinct for each, but by cultivating this spirit, making it a part of our life, we will move forward into the new year with the growing knowledge of how our own life is made better even as we give more generously to making a better world.