Merry. Happy. Glad tidings. Comfort and joy. The words of the season, speak to the aspect of the spiritual life that should be filled with fun and pleasure. As the darkness turns to light with the solstice, may our spirits also turn to that which should be the goal of life in every season: jo
Every year, as we get past Thanksgiving and start to creep toward the big, unavoidable holiday on December 25, whether you’re Christian, or not, whether you decorate the house, or not, whether you send cards, or bake cookies, or buy a tree, or hang a wreath, or throw a party, or make a list, or spend more money than you should, or not….
There comes a day, an event, sometimes just a moment, even though I sometimes think it’s not ever going to happen this year, when all of sudden I get the Christmas Spirit.
Sometimes it happens early in the season. I have weeks and weeks of joy. The world is bright. Interactions with people are cheerful. I’m optimistic and happy. I’m singing around the house and smiling at strangers on the sidewalk.
Other years it comes late, sometimes right up to the edge of Christmas Eve, although I know if I haven’t gotten the Christmas Spirit by Christmas Eve, the candlelight service at the church is always sure to do it for me. I leave church exhausted from the month, but exhilarated from the evening, and grateful, like Ebeneezer Scrooge, that my Christmas Spirit came just in time for the actual day.
The Christmas Spirit arrives so surely, in whatever way it comes, every year, that many years ago I started to watch for it, and notice when it happened.
One year I got the Christmas Spirit after attending the Gay Men’s Chorus holiday concert. Another year it was attending a party at a friend’s house when we went caroling afterward. As a kid it was when the family took the car around the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights.
Do you have the same experience? You’re trudging along through December. You know Christmas is coming because who cannot be aware in our American culture, but Christmas’ first advent is always as a long list of obligations, a set of culturally required tasks, more work, not a holiday from work, something to get through, not to get to.
And then something happens. Maybe you receive an unexpected card from a friend in the mail. Maybe you consent to watch a Hallmark movie with your romantic partner and find your jaded resistance overwhelmed. Maybe it’s when that one nostalgic Christmas song that always gets you in the heart pops on over the loudspeaker at the grocery store.
And then the Christmas Spirit has got you.
I got the Christmas Spirit earlier this week.
And if you don’t have the Christmas Spirit yet and aren’t in the mood for a Christmas story, don’t worry, this is the least Christmas-y Christmas story you will ever hear.
About a month ago, Jim and I had a new neighbor move into the apartment directly beneath ours. We’re on the fourth floor. He’s on the third. I still haven’t met this guy, and I wouldn’t even know that we have a new neighbor except that this new guy has a habit of smoking copious amounts of pot, every evening. And sometimes in the morning, too.
So much pot, that the smoke comes up from his apartment below and into our apartment.
I don’t indulge myself. And it’s not a smell I enjoy. So the new situation has been irritating to say the least. But Jim and I discovered with a combination of open windows and turning on the fan that we could clear the smoke from our apartment.
Then, about three weeks ago, Jim and I were awakened at about 1:30 AM by a chirp from the smoke alarm in our apartment. I woke up, smelled the pot, opened a window, turned on the fan. The smoke alarm chirped a couple of more time over the next hour and then stopped. And we went back to sleep.
The same thing happened a few more times over the next week. A couple of chirps from the smoke alarm. Always at night. But not every night. I assumed it was responding to the smoke coming up from the unit below. And with an open window and the fan, the smoke would clear and our smoke alarm would go quiet again.
So you might think the smoke alarm was telling us it had a low battery, but this is the kind of alarm that’s wired directly into the electric system. Jim and I live in a building that was originally built, in 1904, as offices, and was converted to loft-style apartments about thirty years ago. So we have very high ceilings, about 11 and a half feet. The smoke alarm, attached to the ceiling, is not easy to get to. I’d only tried to reach it once before and decided it was too high. But in the eleven years we’ve been in the apartment we’ve never had to touch it.
And then, two weeks ago, Jim and I left to Mexico for a week to celebrate Thanksgiving with his mom. His stepsister and step brother joined us, too, and we had a great time.
I came back without Jim because he had some financial business he needed to attend to with his mom.
The smoke alarm was silent. And even the pot smoke was less. I had complained to the building manager and she said she would say something to the new tenant. But then, the same thing happened again one night: chirp, smoke, open windows, fan, silence. I went back to sleep.
But then on Wednesday evening this week it happened again. I had gone to bed kind of late, around midnight, and hadn’t really fallen asleep when the smoke alarm chirped. I didn’t smell any pot smoke but I got up anyway to open the windows and turn on the fan. But this time the smoke alarm kept chirping. And not just once or twice an hour as it had been, or every half hour, but increasingly often: every ten minutes: every five minutes.
At 1:30 AM, feeling dead tired, and really wanting my rest because I was recovering from a cold I’d picked up in Mexico, I realized that the open window and fan wasn’t going to solve the issue this time. I dragged myself out of bed. I positioned the ladder beneath the smoke alarm. I climbed up and realized that if I stood on the second to highest step and braced myself against the wall I could reach the smoke alarm, but also, if I fell, I didn’t want to be naked when the firemen arrived. So, I climbed back down, got completely dressed, climbed back up the ladder, and using my iPhone as a flashlight inspected the chirping smoke alarm.
It was easy enough to unscrew the cover, and then, lo and behold, there was a battery. The unit is wired into the electrical system but there’s a back-up battery, and in eleven years of our being in the apartment the back-up battery had finally run down.
I removed the battery, climbed down from the ladder (safely, as you can see) and then hunted around the apartment for a replacement 9-volt battery. Of course, we didn’t have one. And amazingly, the smoke alarm continued to chirp even entirely removed from its mount and with the battery out. I guess the back-up has a back-up, too. I considered for a moment just smothering the annoying thing in the bottom of the clothes hamper and dealing with it in the morning, but by this time I was wide awake and fully dressed, so I decided to go out and buy a new battery.
I looked up a 24-hour CVS on my phone about a mile away, grabbed my wallet and keys, and left the apartment.
Do you remember that this is a Christmas story?
Driving up Main Street through downtown Los Angeles at 1:30 AM on December fifth. The streets were empty of traffic. There were a few Christmas decorations up, but that wasn’t it.
I was thinking, “I hope this drugstore really is open 24 hours. And I hope they have the batteries, because I don’t know where I’ll go next if they don’t.” I was thinking, “I used to stay up past 1:30 AM often. The bars aren’t even closed yet. This isn’t so bad.”
And suddenly, just about the time I passed the old LA Times building, the Christmas Spirit, came to me. This strange errand I was on. The beautiful, empty city, lit by traffic lights. The resolution of a problem that had been nagging me for a couple of weeks.
I pulled into the parking lot of the CVS and the store was open and lit, and other people were coming in and out. The scene could not have been more blessed if angels were hovering either side of the doors and the store was illuminated by a star.
Inside, all of America’s consumerist bounty offered its gifts to me. I found the battery display at the end of one aisle. Hook after hook of battery packs of all sizes: B, and A, and triple AAA, and the circular disc-type batteries, in packs of two, or four, or eight. And on the two hooks where the label promised 9-volt batteries: nothing. Emptiness.
But I had the Christmas Spirit.
I asked the cashier, wearing a Santa hat to match her red uniform vest, and she said with no tone except cheerful friendliness, “I think we have more in the back. Do you want the two-pack or the four pack?”
I said the four-pack if you have it.
And laying a finger to the side of her nose, up the aisle she rose. She returned, quick-as-a-wink with a four pack of 9-volt batteries. But instead of handing them to me she said, “How do you want to pay, cash or card?” I said card. And she said come with me.
She led me over to the self check-out. She scanned the batteries. She rapidly punched several selections on the screen. I tapped my credit card. I said thank you amazedly and profusely, and before the machine spit out my receipt, she was gone.
I drove home, filled with the spirit of Christmas. I replaced the battery, filled with the spirit of Christmas. I undressed and got back in bed, filled with the spirit of Christmas. I fell asleep with visions of sugar plums dancing in my head.
We’re talking about spiritual fundamentals in worship this year, and there is no spiritual quality more fundamental than joy.
Joy is what it’s about.
When I, after several years of trying, refined my definition of Unitarian Universalism down to an “elevator speech”, joy made the cut.
“Unitarian Universalists believe that human beings are good enough, smart enough, and strong enough to create lives of health and joy for ourselves, for each other, and for the world we share.”
What I mean by joy is something like what I felt driving to CVS late Wednesday night, something like the Christmas Spirit, but a year-round feeling. Not just being happy. And not just being very happy. But what the mystics call ecstasy. That’s what I mean by joy. That’s what I felt that night.
Joy as a foundational feeling that all is right, and all is good, and in the largest frame of existence all will be well, and I, amid this peaceful love-energy of existence will be sustained and included with it and in it.
I don’t mean a kind of blissed-out joy that ignores the pain of living or pretends that suffering isn’t real. Not a Pollyanna-ish joy that pushes sorrow away, but a healthy spirit, that move through tough times, feeling the feelings completely, without letting go of the spiritual quality of joy rolling on underneath.
Perhaps it sounds strange to imagine you could feel joy at times you’re not feeling happy. But joy is not great happiness. Joy means engaging with life’s core energy and creativity. Joy means merging with reality. Joy is the ecstatic feeling of being lifted out of yourself into a communion with the divine. Joy is not the opposite of depression. Joy is the opposite of separation. Joy means fitting in, but fitting in so well that even the illusion of separateness falls away. We become one.
I am one with the empty city. I am one with the few random people on the sidewalk. I am one with the cashier at the CVS.
Our hearts fill. Our spirits soar. Our eyes and ears are open wide. Our skin tingles. We feel both exhilarating excitement and also a satisfied peace. It’s not the happiness of, “I have everything” or the power of “I can do anything” but the wholeness of “I am everything.”
Happiness is not joy. Happiness comes from outside. I’m happy because I got what I want, or I’m doing the thing that pleases me, or I’m with the people that I love. We receive happiness when some outside source of pleasure directs its attention to us, or when it comes to us or we go to it. But the trap of that kind of happiness, as we discussed last week looking at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism (and today is actually Bodhi Day, by the way) is that when we attach our spirits to the transient world, inevitably we will experience loss, and we will suffer.
When that outside thing upon which our happiness depends doesn’t come to us, or stops coming to us, or when we grow tired of that outside thing, then we cease to be happy. So, when one source of happiness fails us, we turn our attention to the next outside thing to make us happy again, which will also fail us, eventually. So, life becomes a desperate quest for fleeting happiness that always slips between our fingers. We may be occasionally happy, or even often happy, but still be spiritually broken.
Joy, though, is an inner quality that we carry around with us, independent of outward circumstances. It is possible to be joyful, when there’s nothing to be happy about. We can be joyful in prison. We can be joyful while facing devastating illness. We can be joyful in the most troubling of circumstances. We can be joyful even in pain. The healthy spirit seeks connection to inner Joy. Joy like a fountain that wells up from a source deep within us.
How do we do that?
The Christmas reading from Dori Jeanine Somers we used as our Call to Worship offers one kind of answer, based on the truth of the solstice. She reminds us that “light returns to balance darkness, life surges in the evergreen–and us,and babes are hope, and saviours of the world.”
All true, but she is still describing an outward dependent happiness, because in the cycle of seasons the light will eventually give way to darkness again, babes will eventually grow old, the evergreen Christmas Tree will, in a few weeks, lose its needles and be hauled out to the curb. Best not rest our faith in transient things.
Better is the theology of the Opening Hymn when we sang, “Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Since I laid my burden down.” The theology of Joy is the lesson that suffering is a burden you carry and a burden you can lay down. The Buddha says you lay down your burden of suffering through following a practice of walking the eight-fold path of right understanding, thought, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration.
But even without walking that path all the way to the end, you know that suffering is a burden you can lay down, because occasionally the feeling of joy comes upon you suddenly, unexpectedly, without seeking it.
A late-night drive to the drugstore. A particular song on the loudspeaker at the grocery store that releases you from mundane thoughts. A stranger’s helpfulness.
Joy comes in moments of clarity. The truth of the world reveals itself to you. Reality is not my mind filled with swirling thoughts, but this sidewalk lit with that streetlight. That person in the grey overcoat. The feel of a paper receipt in my hand.
The quiet of an apartment, comfortable in my own bed, on a Wednesday evening three weeks before Christmas.
That’s joy.