Time After Time
After the service two weeks ago – the Winter Solstice – a small group of you came to me with a question or conversation. Not a complaint. I wasn’t being mistaken for customer service. It was an observation accompanied by a disappointment by at least one person. That conversation became a source of joy for me these past two weeks. I have realized that I’ve been feeling very hopeful about 2026, largely because of that interaction.
The gist of the concern was that the service was intended to lean into pagan wisdom and the ancient solstice stories, but the closing song was decidedly Christian in the theme of Christmas. One person noted that that this church tends to be a little more Christian in general than other UU churches, which is true. Historically, this has been a Christian church with more people who identify as Christian even now than any other specific non-UU tradition. There are also more Jews here than most other UU churches, and more Muslims. While other UU congregations made sharp turns into atheism in the mid to late 20th century, a turn which many are now reversing, this church didn’t follow that path quite so far. So, the general observation that we lean Christian is fair, as is the recognition that closing with a song about Jesus might have been misplaced. I have taken the note.
But that wasn’t the whole conversation. Along with the observation, was a discussion about pluralism. How do we make room for pagans at Christmas? How do we make room for Muslims during Rosh Hashanna? How do we celebrate a wide variety of religious holidays without appropriating practices that are not our own? These are living questions of our faith and we aren’t going to solve them in a single conversation, or maybe ever. But, those congregants stood before me wrestling with these big ideas.
And that’s where my joy came from. They were with me.
This might sound small to some of you. It wasn’t.
In so many communities, especially ones that are religious, especially ones where people have rejected one historical religious path because of abuses or even just a lack of proof of life, people don’t talk directly to the minister. Instead, they’re suspicious of her, assuming some unkind things about her intentions, maybe based on past experience of others with similar authority. Here’s how that would have gone elsewhere.
The closing song is over and one person turns to another and rolls her eyes. The friend smiles sarcastically and says, “I know.” They then head to the diner with a group of other congregants where they start their complaining about me or the music director or the board chair or all of us. There are all kinds of assumptions, and even the people who don’t agree are joining in. No one is diving into the complex balance of a pluralistic faith tradition; they are just bitching and accusing. And, next week, they do it again.
Instead, 2 weeks ago today, we embodied my greatest hope. Someone disagreed or disliked something, and engaged me and others in a conversation to tease out the issues. Nothing fancy. Just honest, respectful, mature conversation. No unnecessary drama. Genuine communal behavior, building and embodying the world we dream about. I am telling the truth when I say that it has since been a source of tremendous joy.
Some of you might be aware of something I’ve written about and brought to a few workshops. It’s my list of Shit We Don’t Have Time For. We are, objectively speaking, in a very dangerous moment. Both our nation and our planet are on the cusp of treacherous transformations and we will need to be focused if we are going to put up any kind of effective defense. Because the moment is so charged, people are behaving badly, acting out of fear and anxiety, but we don’t have time for that. Which is why that conversation brought to me 2 weeks ago was such a relief. We don’t have time for gossip or finger-pointing. But we do have time for working together to find a road we want to travel as partners. We do have time for co-creating community. We do have time for wondering how to embody big ideas in very specific situations.
I’m not one for resolutions, but the new year is a good time to consider who we want to be, and maybe who we need to be in the upcoming year.
It’s easy to look at the new year and hope things change. I know I do. I hope Congress finds a spine, I hope the Supreme Court confirms the boundaries outlined in the Constitution, I hope the military refuses illegal orders. But those are all things we have no direct control over.
In this complicated and fragile moment, our job is to put up a fierce resistance, to set up a safety net for all the people being neglected and forgotten, and to care for our spirits, personally and collectively. Our job, our work, our task, is to use our time well.
Time is elusive and unpredictable. We plan for lives we never live. We are taken by surprise, sending us in unexpected directions. We meet people, learn things, are victims of crimes or accidents or illness, inheritors of fortunes or beneficiaries of social generosities or any one of an infinite number of things happens to alter the course we thought we were on.
I asked my 15 year old son what he expected in 2026. He said, and I quote, “I’ll hit a 1080 before spring.” Baffled, I asked what that meant and the rest of the words sounded like every adult in Peanuts: whom whom whom whom whom. I did catch that it has something to do with snowboarding. When I clarified that I was thinking bigger, he told me he expects the country will go to war. This was on Friday and I told him I didn’t think so. I woke up Saturday morning to see that we’d launched a large scale attack to illegally capture the Venezuelan president, and that now we’re saying we’re going to “take over the country”. It happens that fast. For his sake, I hope he’s also right about the 1080.
But, time itself is neutral. I mean, if Zack is going to land the 1080, which I now know is three full rotations in midair (god help me), he’s going to need to practice. He has done two with a clean landing, and he has 2 months to keep working on it. And that’s the point. We keep working on it.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that time isn’t itself going to solve any problems. Injustice isn’t resolved in time, broken systems aren’t fixed, in fact wounds don’t even heal in time. You have to clean them, dress them, partner with the process, take action. Dr. King wrote:
“And somewhere along the way it is necessary to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation. And so we must help time, and we must realize that the time is always ripe to do right.”
“The time is always ripe to do right.” Doing right comes in the form of a thousand tiny choices, but each one is grounded in the idea that time is not neutral and what we do and how we act, as tiny as we think we are in this massive structure of planetary existence, matters. There is no formula for “doing the right thing”. Some days the right thing is to rest. Some days it’s to protest. Some days it’s to take a friend out for coffee to listen. Some days it’s to let someone take you.
What isn’t the right thing is waiting for the arc of the universe to bend toward justice if we aren’t going to help. What isn’t the right thing is waiting for what we hope is an inevitable justice to happen spontaneously or at least eventually. We don’t have time for passive shoulder-shrugging and empty hope. We, small as we might feel, are all we have. And we are enough. We have what we need to bend the arc of this complicated universe.
Because the right thing is sourced by Love, and we have plenty of that. Plenty of compassion, and empathy. Plenty of interest in the idea of integrity, the concept of affordability, the movement for equity. We are a people of faith rooted in Love. Love is, to repeat myself, at the Center. If it’s not, time will not, can not save us. But, it is. We are doing the work to ensure that it is. I can see it, feel it, I know it to be true about every one of us.
Toward the end of 1939, WH Auden wrote a poem reflecting on his historical moment, one that looked sadly like our own. The nations were, again, at war, having learned, it seemed, nothing the first time around. Hate was on the rise. There had been a Nazi rally that same year a few blocks from where we’re standing at Madison Square Garden. Antisemitism was common and anti-Black racism was entrenched even in places it wasn’t actually the law. Immigrants were marginalized, women had very few rights, and a small group of people were hoarding money, protecting themselves at the cost of everyone else.
On the eve of a new decade, he starts his poem saying:
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
He goes on, though, and finds himself at exactly the same conclusion I am drawing. There on 52nd street, on the eve of a new year, a new decade, disappointed in how things were going, he wrote: All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky;
There is no such thing as The State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die
Time is neutral. We make choices over and over again which create our reality, create the next moment, create the world in which we exist. We decide to bring our thoughts directly to the minister for an honest conversation, even if that’s not the most enticing or delicious way to address the issue. We commit to the practice, the risk taking, to reach a goal even if it’s just spinning around 3 times in the air. We aid in the healing, we chose the empathetic response, we engage honestly and maturity, even when we are afraid or uncomfortable. We bend the arc toward justice because it’s not going to bend itself.
Because no one exists alone; hunger allows no choice…We must love one another or die.
