We are in that time of year when some of the most primal elements of existence are uppermost in mind: light and darkness. Radiance and gloom. 

These are the days when people in the Northern Hemisphere experience the nights growing longer and longer, with less and less light to cheer us. By 5pm, incredibly, it’s dark. The lack of light can wear on you, down to your very cells, as Vitamin D deficiency proves. Things can feel gloomy as the longest night of year, the Winter Solstice, approaches. 

It’s not a new thing. Anxiety about this was ever-present in the hearts of the ancients. Our ancestors framed it in a hugely dramatic way. Would the longest night move so fast that, like a bird of prey, it would sweep in, snatch up the sun, swallow it, and leave nothing behind but endless night forever? 

Or would the light ultimately triumph? Would the light return? 

The drama was projected onto the very physics of our universe. Good vs. evil. Everything at stake. Today we know that it’s not literally true–the increasing dark is only a matter of the North Pole reaching its maximum tilt away from the sun–yet there remains the poetry of it, which ancient holidays and holy days around the world evoke. There is Diwali, for one: the Hindu festival of lights occurring between mid-September and mid-November, meant to symbolize the spiritual victory of Dharma over Adharma, knowledge over ignorance. 

Jews light Hanukkah candles symbolizing the miracle light of freedom which triumphs over oppression. 

Christians light Advent candles of hope, peace, joy, and love on the way to the incarnation of God through the birth of the baby Jesus at Christmastime. 

And then there is Yule, originating among the Norse thousands of years ago with its themes of light, fire, and feasting even as the harsh climate of Northern Europe threatened to devour the people.  

These are just some of the ancient festivals expressing human anxiety and creativity in the face of the primal elements of existence: light, dark, and the dynamism between them. The increasing night which threatens to overwhelm and consume all radiance and joy, yet it goes only so far, it never transgresses the limit. 

Ultimately, the light triumphs. Every year. 

Now, this sermon is the fourth installation of our year-long sermon series focused on the book Active Hope by Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. 

And, as I was thinking things over, I had an aha! moment. I saw how, when they speak of the Business as Usual trance that people these days get lost in–that is, until something triggers a despairing awareness of how so much seems to be unraveling–I saw how this is a whole lot like darkness and gloom. 

The oscillation between the two stories–Business as Usual and The Great Unraveling–is indeed a gloomy place to be. Business as Usual is when we’re just going about our daily lives and things seem fine because what’s right before our eyes seems fine. In such a moment, if someone were to ask us, “What’s the state of our world?” we’d likely put the “problemometer” dial between 0 and 4: 

But The Great Unraveling is when we’re reminded, once again, of the worsening climate crisis, the threat of war and the cost of warfare, the pollution and destruction of the natural world, the widening of extreme inequality, the way trans folks are being targeted, the ways immigrants are being targeted, the dismantling of democracy, the widespread misinformation and lies blocking awareness of what’s really going on, and on and on. We’re reminded that this is all happening, it’s all real, and a business-as-usual mode of living–with all its complacency–only makes us complicit, makes us a part of the problem. 

And then, of course, there’s the 77 million Americans voting to empower Donald Trump to bring all of what he stands for to the highest office in our nation. Those 77 million may be cheering right now, but those cheers are met by the groans and cries of the almost 75 million who voted differently. 

Having acknowledged all this, where would you put the problemometer dial? 

How many of you would put it at 7? How about 9? 10? 

Maybe even 11?  

Darkness and gloom. It’s not so very different, after all, from the ancient fears that the longest night is coming to snatch up the sun and swallow it and leave nothing behind but endless, endless night…. 

Which is why the question of active hope is so critical in our times. A hope that’s not so much about the way the world is or will be as it is about the way our hearts and minds are and what our desire calls us to. Active hope liberates us from the complacency of Business as Usual as well as the disempowerment and despair of The Great Unraveling–it liberates us from both so that we can find our part to play in the far better story of The Great Turning, and to play it.

But we must know that a significant part of this work focuses on ourselves. How we see ourselves. And this is not so much a matter of having to build something that doesn’t exist but rather to reveal what’s already there. To do the work that reveals who we truly are because it’s been covered up. Rumi said it for the ages: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that have been built against it.”

This is what the Active Hope readings for today are all about, and what this sermon is about. Revealing a wider sense of self which is already there in us, just waiting to be acknowledged and embraced, which automatically leads to a greater sense of power. 

Helping the light return like this. 

So, consider the wisdom from T. H. White’s book The Sword in the Stone, when he tells the story of King Arthur as a boy being tutored by Merlin. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone use this to illustrate the direct link between a wider sense of self and an expansion of power. 

As you may know from this popular myth, whoever pulls the sword out of the stone becomes the King of All England. “Grasping the sword’s handle,” goes part 1 of the story, Arthur “pulled with all his strength, until he was exhausted and drenched. The sword remained immobile.” 

But did he in fact pull with all his strength? And who was the person pulling, truly? 

Arthur in the story is by no means alone in imagining himself small yet facing great odds. It’s all of us too. 

And, no wonder. In our real world, these days, there are so many forces conspiring to cover up our true selves. Consumer culture with its marketing mythology is a big one. Raising awareness of this is tough, though, because we’ve been immersed in it for so long. It’s like asking fish to describe water. So Macy and Johnstone share the account of author and filmmaker Helena Norberg-Hodge who directly witnessed the before-and-after experience of the people living in the mountainous region of Ladakh in northern India–their experience. 

Before consumer culture came to them, “[e]ven though the physical conditions were challenging, with villages cut off by snow for many months each year, the villagers had a rich and satisfying way of life that met their basic needs well. Though the villages [Helena Norberg-Hodge] visited had no electricity, the villagers’ highly developed cooperative culture ensured that everyone had enough food, clothes, and shelter. There was hardly any crime, depression was rare, and suicides were virtually unheard of. That was in the mid-1970s.” 

But then comes the after: “With huge billboard advertisements in the towns glamorizing the path to material prosperity, many of the younger generation … left in search of employment. While some now have motorcycles and digital devices, there have also been suicides, even among school-age children. Previously, success and failure had largely been shared experiences; villagers worked together to succeed in tasks like bringing in a harvest. The modern consumer culture, however, has brought in its wake the rat race that divides people into winners and losers, with constant pressure to come out on top and to get hold of the fancy new products they’ve learned how to want.”

In America, this before-and-after happened in the early 19th century. Same result. Selfishness and self-centeredness, it turns out, is not so much the natural state of human beings as it is an adaptation to environmental changes. When your environment changes into that of a rat race, you become a rat. You become small. Identifying yourself with increasingly larger circles of connection–like extended family, chosen communities, city, nation, the global community, and then the Earth with all its beings–becomes less and less relevant to the day-to-day task of surviving. 

Look at this advertisement from the 1950s, when marketers were perhaps less subtle and sophisticated: 

To fall for the message of this ad (targeted mostly at women) is for your sense of self to shrink almost to nothingness–to anxiety and envy about surface appearances and fears of abandonment. Lost in the noise of that, a person forgets all the ways they are loved for reasons that are far more reliable and enduring than having a certain tanned look to their skin. A person forgets that they have a purpose in life that is far more meaningful than having a certain tanned look to their skin. A person forgets–and this forgetfulness is at one and the same time a loss of power. Power shrunk almost to nothingness as well. 

A rat caught in a rat race. 

But it’s not just consumer culture with its marketing mythology to blame.

What’s happening with education these days is also a factor–how the “rat race” metaphor isn’t exaggerated. But this would need its own sermon…. 

So turn with me to yet another force that builds barriers against our true selves. It actually comes from the progressive left. Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone illustrate with a quote from ecologist Arne Naess: “Unhappily,” he says, “the extensive moralizing within the ecological movement has given the public the false impression that they are being asked to make a sacrifice — to show more responsibility, more concern and a nicer moral standard. But all of that would flow naturally and easily,” he goes on, “if the self were widened and deepened so that protection of nature was felt and perceived as protection of our very selves.” Arne Naess, in other words, is calling out progressives in the ecology movement for how they are trying to motivate change in people’s behaviors. Their efforts are doomed to fail because they proceed out of a false vision of who people are–that people are bad. Bad must be made good. The gap must be crossed. So the ones doing the motivating assume a holier-than-thou attitude–and all it does is make people feel even worse about themselves (that, and to want to strike back at the ones acting all high and mighty…)

It’s just not the way forward. 

You know, Arne Naess isn’t the only one in the ecology movement to call this out. Two years ago, when we read the amazing book Braiding Sweetgrass together, we heard Robin Wall Kimmerer express great concern about her third-year college students who aimed to enter careers in environmental protection, nearly all of whom saw humans as a poison to the earth and agents of destruction and it would be better, all things considered, for the human race simply to disappear. “How is it possible,” asks Robin Wall Kimmerer, “that in twenty years of education they cannot think of any beneficial relationships between people and the environment?” “How can we begin to move towards ecological and cultural sustainability,” she wonders, “if we cannot even imagine what the path feels like??” 

Speaking out of her Potawatomi Native American heritage, she asks: How do we find the Honorable Harvest again? How do we make our relations with the world sacred again? How do we consume in a way that does justice to the lives we take? Such questions do indeed imply that we are in a Great Unraveling time. That the Honorable Harvest is lost and people take more than they need and take way beyond what they are given. But her questions also imply the possibility of repentance. They also imply the possibility of repair, restoration, return. And this ultimately depends upon a transformed vision of who people are: not rats in a rat race, but members in a family of all life. Members who have lost their way, yes. But family members nevertheless. 

And the family can be restored. It can. 

“[T]he grassy meadows tell us,” says Kimmerer, “that for sweetgrass, human beings are a part of the system, a vital part.” “Humans participate in a symbiosis in which sweetgrass provides its fragrant blades to the people and people, by harvesting, create the conditions for sweetgrass to flourish.” This is why she titled her book as she did, Braiding Sweetgrass. Sweetgrass is the symbol of the hope that humanity may rediscover its larger identity as an earth citizen and find its way back to its earth family. 

So don’t go for the holier-than-thou message. Motivation by the stick is not necessary. Because it’s just not reflective of reality. It totally misses the point. 

From a widened sense of self comes an expanded sense of power. And now we are ready to go back to the Arthur story which T. H. White tells. You may remember his initial attempt to pull the sword out of the stone. It was an abject failure. But then: “Glancing around, he saw in the shrubbery surrounding the churchyard the forms of those with whom he had lived and learned. There they were: badger, falcon, ant and the others. As he greeted them with his eyes, he opened again to the powers he had experienced in each of them — the industry, the cunning, the quick boldness, the perseverance. Knowing they were with him, he turned back to the stone and, breathing easy, drew forth from it the sword, as smooth as a knife from butter.”

“When we draw on a sense of fellowship, belonging, and connection,” say Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone, “it is as if we are remembering our root system. This is power with, which comes from the larger circle that we can draw on and which acts through us.”

Who is your larger circle? Who are the beings who have taught you and loved you? For what and for whom are you grateful? 

This is your root system and a power that can act through you. 

When asked how he handles despair, rain forest activist John Seed replied: “I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather, I am part of the rainforest protecting itself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.”

May it be so. 

The days before us are indeed darkening. Gloom is increasing. Not just as the North Pole increases its tilt away from the sun and the light becomes less. But also because of what we’re seeing in the world and in America. There is fear in many, many hearts. 

There’s also exhaustion. Disillusionment. Disappointment. As one of my favorite bloggers, Unitarian Universalist Doug Muder, said recently, “Many articles are being written about how best to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected assault on democracy and human rights. I had planned,” he says, “to write a post curating those articles for you, picking out the best ones and summarizing their advice. Unfortunately, I’ve bookmarked more of them than I’ve read, and I haven’t given the ones I’ve read enough serious thought. That lack of motivation has forced me to admit something about myself: I’m not ready to resist yet. I hope I will be soon.”

To Doug Muder and to everyone, this is what I say, which is the last thing I’ll say: let this season of the drama of dark and light itself be a teacher to you. Let all the holidays and holy days of this time drive the point home. Even as the darkness descends to the longest night of the year, the Winter Solstice, that day is the absolute limit. From that point forward, the light will increase. And it will happen by itself. Being busy out of sheer anxiety’s sake is useless. The only work you need to do is watch and wait. None of us creates the light. The light exists of itself. The light is in you. Love is in you. So watch and wait for the return of the light in nature, and watch and wait for the renewal of the light in your heart. Watch and wait for the light of opportunities for action which will show themselves. Let the timing of things be right. 

If you are feeling a need to avoid the news, if you are still in process of recovering from the disillusionment of the election, take the time you need. You will heal. The healing will happen. 

There is a sword in the stone for every person here. 

Remember, remember, who you fundamentally are. 

That will give you the power to pull the sword out.

The destiny that is yours and only yours, finally, you will claim.