Light Breaks Forth

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For our ancestors, the only light of night was provided by the moon and the stars. The moon turned from its first sliver of newness to its fullness before fading into a total blackout. In the three days each month after the old moon had disappeared and before the new moon became visible, the darkness of night was illumined only by the distant twinkling stars. When clouds made the stars invisible, the darkness was total. With darkness came danger and fear. The darkness was inhabited, ancient liturgies suggested, by "ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night."

The human ability first to capture fire and later to create fire was the first gigantic step in the quest to defeat the always-threatening darkness. Fire is, however, a relatively recent human accomplishment. The vast majority of the human beings who have inhabited this earth lived with unrelieved and unconquered darkness.

When one further embraces the fact that people in the ancient world did not understand the relationship between the heavenly bodies and the earth, it is easy to grasp why magic, miracle and ritual acts were wrapped around these mysterious natural wonders. Modern men and women deal with these realities in a quite secular manner. We manipulate our clocks with various time zones and with something we call daylight savings time. We anticipate and name the shortest day of the year as the winter solstice. We understand that the earth rotates on its axis as it journeys around the sun every 365 1/4 days. We know the months when we are closer to the sun and the months when we are farther away. None of this, however, was known by our forebears.

They only knew that the sun seemed to retreat into darkness as the winter came. They wondered why and they speculated about this observable phenomenon, using a wide variety of religious explanations. They lived with a chronic fear that one year the enveloping darkness that came each winter might finally capture the light forever and thus doom their lives to be lived without light at all.

For this reason in almost every human culture there was a great religious celebration when the sun stopped its relentless retreat and began slowly but steadily to return.

Both Hanukkah and Christmas became expressions in a later form of this celebration. They thus reveal their northern hemisphere human origins.

It is time to recognize that religious truth, like all truth, emerges out of human experience. Once that is understood, then religious people will recognize that their exclusive claim to possess divine revelation is nothing but a part of our human security system. Those claims create the mentality that fuels religious imperialism.

That was a major learning out of the tragedy of Sept. 11.

Perhaps the only way for the Christmas promise of peace on earth to be achieved is for every religious system to face its human origins and recognize that worshipers in every religious system are nothing but human seekers walking into the mystery and wonder of the God who is beyond anything that the human mind can finally imagine.

That insight represents both a gigantic step into a new sensitivity and a gigantic step away from the negativity that religious systems perpetually dump into the human bloodstream. In our observances of Hanukkah and Christmas this year, that could well be our most important learning.