January 2025
by Rev. Bill Gupton
We wait, collectively and individually, at another “liminal time” – a period of time between times, when the door to the past is closing, and the door into an unknown and uncertain future is not yet quite open. It is like this each year at this time, of course: the holiday season and the end-of-the-year / New Year celebrations, the shortest day and longest night of the year, the turn of the wheel. But perhaps this year, our liminal experience is more pronounced. Perhaps it is a bit more difficult to see and have faith in the return of light.
Yet the light will return. Buds will burst forth in spring, and the earth will green again. Metaphorically, too, our world will one day emerge from the current darkness. And we have learned, through the rhythms of the planet we inhabit and the cosmos that sustains us, the importance – the actual life-saving and spirit-supporting necessity – of huddling together, in the dark, of holding one another, of gathering in community around the symbolic (and literal) hearth. My prayer is that this holiday season, in this winter of our discontent, this liminal time, we will do just that – with, and for, one another.
My friend and colleague the UU Rev. Kimberley Debus (who recently appeared on “Jeopardy,” and who has a wonderful blog that lately has been uncannily spot-on in expressing how I am feeling, even if sometimes I didn’t realize I was feeling that way), wrote this week that “what matters is that there is always a glimmer of hope. There is always a light. And those things exist because we exist, together – to be a light for one another.”
May you find, and know, and shine your own special light, in this time of darkness. May you be illuminated by the light of others. And may we, together – we who call ourselves Heritage Church – offer the light of hope and hospitality to our hurting world.
With much love,
Rev. Bill