Renewal and Mabon
Preached 9/6/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
September is here and that means many things to us: the school year is beginning, the church year is beginning in earnes t. Next week we will celebrate a virual water ceremony. Autumn is beginning, and with it our hopes of return to routine, hopes for a normalcy, a new normal, peek through.
We are just at the cusp of the autumnal equinox—meaning that the hours of daylight and of darkness are essentially equal, in balance. According to UU minister Rev. D. Michael Smith, The Wiccan term for this time of year, one of their major sabbats, is Mabon. The origin and meaning of this word is both elusive and complex. A modern term, Mabon was introduced around 1979. What is important, though—while not trying to sort the term out—stems from the idea of honoring the changes in our natural world, the recognition of the harvesting of resources, and the concept that no matter how hard we try to destroy it, nature carries on with unchallenged regularity. The idea of balance in this Mabonic tradition is, at the very least, both a comfort and a warning. The comfort is that we can take a moment, a pause, to honor the balance of our lives that so much corresponds to the cycles of nature. The warning is that if we do not honor the balance, the very delicate balance, of natural cycles, we may find our existence, our role in the scheme of things endangered. We must stop the cycle of punishing and pilfering nature, and start protecting and replenishing it, well. So this particular moment in time, in nature, where light of day and dark of night should bring to mind the idea of enlightenment and of silent reflection—and planning.
The day offers a time to see; the night offers a time to listen unaltered by candle or flashlight—seen and heard as it should be.
An important part of this tradition is the focus on greeting the darkness as it inevitably becomes more and more - our days are shortening and death makes itself apparent in the leaves, in the grasses. While we are at a point of great autumnal abundance, our mother Gaia also reminds us that darkness and cold are coming.
What if we didn’t use the term darkness to mean bad or scary? What if light and dark were just ways of describing things, without good or bad attached to them? Martin Luther King Jr has said several times
(The Radical King p.170)
Historians now believe that there was a time when that dichotomy - good versus evil and dark versus light - there was a time when most humans on earth would have found that strange and confusing. For millennia darkness was no more evil or bad than light. But when the Aryan people came south and took over land around the Mediterranean, through the Middle East, and in the Indus valley, they brought with them a fear and hatred of darkness. For the people of the north, darkness was inextricably linked with death and fear in a more brutal and direct way than it had been for other groups of people elsewhere.
In our time, it is vital that we re-think the way that we have been taught to connect darkness to evil, terror, and all negative traits, as Martin Luther King Jr recommended. Not only because of the racial connotations, but also for our own well-being. Autumn reminds us that the darkness is coming, whether we like it or not. So why not embrace it and take what it, the darkness, has to offer us?
Parker Palmer wrote beautifully about this time of year:
Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring – and she scatters them with amazing abandon. In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die.
My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life. But as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances – on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. And yet, if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come.
In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time – how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the “road closed” sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know. On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown. This hopeful notion that living is hidden within dying is surely enhanced by the visual glories of autumn. What artist would ever have painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first? Does death possess a beauty that we – who fear death, who find it ugly and obscene – cannot see? How shall we understand autumn’s testimony that death and elegance go hand in hand? For me, the words that come closest to answering those questions are the words of Thomas Merton: “There is in all visible things…a hidden wholeness.” In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of the “hidden wholeness.” In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other – they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality.
Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out. But in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives. When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living thing. Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole.
There are still hints to the older way of thinking in the Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures, for instance where the singer of the Song of Songs delcalres herself to be “black and beautiful.” Not black but beautiful. She clames her blackness as one of the attributes of her beauty.
This is one of the very early goddesses, black and beautiful. There are many more. You may be familiar with the Black Madonna, a popular depiction of Mother Mary with brown or bluish-black skin, who is revered throughout the world, especially in Northern Africa and Eastern Europe.
Darkness. Our ancestors revered and embraced darkness. The connection between darkness and evil or fear is a relatively modern phenomenon. Some of us are related to those more recent people, too, the Aryan people, but all of us are related to the ancient ancestors who knew instincutally that to embrace darkness is to embrace another form of beauty, it is to embrace the whole.
Think of a yin yang symbol. The light and the dark are not in opposition to each other, but rather, they are a perfect balance for one another.
This is what Mabon, the Autumnal Equinox gives us: a reminder that the dark is coming. We have been socialized to hear that truth as a threat, the dark is coming, but it is not. It is a statement of fact and we get to decide whether we greet this fact with joy in our hearts.
According to writer China Galland, “The Indoeuropean root of the word black meant gleaming. Only later did the meaning darken. This author, Ms. Galland, wrote a book titled “Longing for Darkness” in which she visits several Black Madonnas, trying to tie the historical roots of that tradition to the Hindu tradition of honoring a black female Buddha named Tara. Here is what Ms. Galland says about honoring darkness:
(Longing for Darkness p. 158 & 153)
This time of year, we have the honor of greeting the holy darkness as she descends into our lives. According to Galina Krasskova,
"On this holy tide, we hail the hunter and the hunted, the predator and the prey, the plough and the scythe, the blessings of growth and of decay. We honor our resources, and the frugality and careful planning of every ancestor whose careful household management got their families safely through the cold constraints of winter. Mabon is a time of remembrance and of culling away, of honoring what we have, what we need, but also what we can provide to others. It is a time to look clearly at where we are weak in spirit, where we are strong, and where we stand somewhere in between, a time to take stock of our portion of gratitude and blessings for the coming season."
Because this is, for many people, a time of high energy, there is sometimes a feeling of restlessness in the air, a sense that something is just a bit off-kilter. Any time you're feeling a bit spiritually lopsided, it is good to call on the Dark Mother.
We invoke Demeter, Inanna, Kali, Tiamet, Hecate, Nemesis, Morrighan.
Bringers of destruction and darkness,
We embrace you.
Without rage, we cannot feel love,
Without pain, we cannot feel happiness,
Without the night, there is no day,
Without death, there is no life.
Great goddesses of the night, I thank you.
And let’s take a few moments to meditate on the darker aspects of your own soul. Is there a pain you've been longing to get rid of? Is there anger and frustration that you've been unable to move past? Is there someone who's hurt you, but you haven't told them how you feel? Now is the time to take this energy and turn it to your own purposes. Take any pain inside you, and reverse it so that it becomes a positive experience. If you're not suffering from anything hurtful, count your blessings, and reflect on a time in your life when you weren't so fortunate.
And now a short meditation:
A balance of night and day, a balance of light and dark
This morning I seek balance in my life
as it is found in the Universe.
A black candle for darkness and pain
and things I can eliminate from my life.
A white candle for the light, and for joy
and all the abundance I wish to bring forth.
At Mabon, the time of the equinox,
there is harmony and balance in the Universe,
and so there shall be in my life.
Meditate on the things you wish to change. Focus on eliminating the bad, and strengthening the good around you. Put toxic relationships into the past, where they belong, and welcome new positive relationships into your life. Let your baggage go, and take heart in knowing that for every dark night of the soul, there will be a sunrise the next morning.
I’d like to end with a blessing. A blessing for you, a blessing over you, by Jan Richardson, this is a Blessing for those who are traveling in the dark:
Go slow
if you can.
Slower.
More slowly still.
Friendly dark
or fearsome,
this is no place
to break your neck
by rushing,
by running,
by crashing into
what you cannot see.
Then again,
it is true:
different darks
have different tasks,
and if you
have arrived here unawares,
if you have come
in peril
or in pain,
this might be no place
you should dawdle.
I do not know
what these shadows
ask of you,
what they might hold
that means you good
or ill.
It is not for me
to reckon
whether you should linger
or you should leave.
But this is what
I can ask for you:
That in the darkness
there be a blessing.
That in the shadows
there be a welcome.
That in the night
you be encompassed
by the Love that knows
your name.
Preached 9/6/2020 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
September is here and that means many things to us: the school year is beginning, the church year is beginning in earnes t. Next week we will celebrate a virual water ceremony. Autumn is beginning, and with it our hopes of return to routine, hopes for a normalcy, a new normal, peek through.
We are just at the cusp of the autumnal equinox—meaning that the hours of daylight and of darkness are essentially equal, in balance. According to UU minister Rev. D. Michael Smith, The Wiccan term for this time of year, one of their major sabbats, is Mabon. The origin and meaning of this word is both elusive and complex. A modern term, Mabon was introduced around 1979. What is important, though—while not trying to sort the term out—stems from the idea of honoring the changes in our natural world, the recognition of the harvesting of resources, and the concept that no matter how hard we try to destroy it, nature carries on with unchallenged regularity. The idea of balance in this Mabonic tradition is, at the very least, both a comfort and a warning. The comfort is that we can take a moment, a pause, to honor the balance of our lives that so much corresponds to the cycles of nature. The warning is that if we do not honor the balance, the very delicate balance, of natural cycles, we may find our existence, our role in the scheme of things endangered. We must stop the cycle of punishing and pilfering nature, and start protecting and replenishing it, well. So this particular moment in time, in nature, where light of day and dark of night should bring to mind the idea of enlightenment and of silent reflection—and planning.
The day offers a time to see; the night offers a time to listen unaltered by candle or flashlight—seen and heard as it should be.
An important part of this tradition is the focus on greeting the darkness as it inevitably becomes more and more - our days are shortening and death makes itself apparent in the leaves, in the grasses. While we are at a point of great autumnal abundance, our mother Gaia also reminds us that darkness and cold are coming.
What if we didn’t use the term darkness to mean bad or scary? What if light and dark were just ways of describing things, without good or bad attached to them? Martin Luther King Jr has said several times
(The Radical King p.170)
Historians now believe that there was a time when that dichotomy - good versus evil and dark versus light - there was a time when most humans on earth would have found that strange and confusing. For millennia darkness was no more evil or bad than light. But when the Aryan people came south and took over land around the Mediterranean, through the Middle East, and in the Indus valley, they brought with them a fear and hatred of darkness. For the people of the north, darkness was inextricably linked with death and fear in a more brutal and direct way than it had been for other groups of people elsewhere.
In our time, it is vital that we re-think the way that we have been taught to connect darkness to evil, terror, and all negative traits, as Martin Luther King Jr recommended. Not only because of the racial connotations, but also for our own well-being. Autumn reminds us that the darkness is coming, whether we like it or not. So why not embrace it and take what it, the darkness, has to offer us?
Parker Palmer wrote beautifully about this time of year:
Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring – and she scatters them with amazing abandon. In my own experience of autumn, I am rarely aware that seeds are being planted. Instead, my mind is on the fact that the green growth of summer is browning and beginning to die.
My delight in the autumn colors is always tinged with melancholy, a sense of impending loss that is only heightened by the beauty all around. I am drawn down by the prospect of death more than I am lifted by the hope of new life. But as I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances – on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. And yet, if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come.
In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time – how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the “road closed” sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know. On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown. This hopeful notion that living is hidden within dying is surely enhanced by the visual glories of autumn. What artist would ever have painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first? Does death possess a beauty that we – who fear death, who find it ugly and obscene – cannot see? How shall we understand autumn’s testimony that death and elegance go hand in hand? For me, the words that come closest to answering those questions are the words of Thomas Merton: “There is in all visible things…a hidden wholeness.” In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of the “hidden wholeness.” In a paradox, opposites do not negate each other – they cohere in mysterious unity at the heart of reality.
Deeper still, they need each other for health, as my body needs to breathe in as well as breathe out. But in a culture that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives. When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. But if we allow the paradox of darkness and light to be, the two will conspire to bring wholeness and health to every living thing. Autumn constantly reminds me that my daily dyings are necessary precursors to new life. If I try to “make” a life that defies the diminishments of autumn, the life I end up with will be artificial, at best, and utterly colorless as well. But when I yield to the endless interplay of living and dying, dying and living, the life I am given will be real and colorful, fruitful and whole.
There are still hints to the older way of thinking in the Torah, the Hebrew Scriptures, for instance where the singer of the Song of Songs delcalres herself to be “black and beautiful.” Not black but beautiful. She clames her blackness as one of the attributes of her beauty.
This is one of the very early goddesses, black and beautiful. There are many more. You may be familiar with the Black Madonna, a popular depiction of Mother Mary with brown or bluish-black skin, who is revered throughout the world, especially in Northern Africa and Eastern Europe.
Darkness. Our ancestors revered and embraced darkness. The connection between darkness and evil or fear is a relatively modern phenomenon. Some of us are related to those more recent people, too, the Aryan people, but all of us are related to the ancient ancestors who knew instincutally that to embrace darkness is to embrace another form of beauty, it is to embrace the whole.
Think of a yin yang symbol. The light and the dark are not in opposition to each other, but rather, they are a perfect balance for one another.
This is what Mabon, the Autumnal Equinox gives us: a reminder that the dark is coming. We have been socialized to hear that truth as a threat, the dark is coming, but it is not. It is a statement of fact and we get to decide whether we greet this fact with joy in our hearts.
According to writer China Galland, “The Indoeuropean root of the word black meant gleaming. Only later did the meaning darken. This author, Ms. Galland, wrote a book titled “Longing for Darkness” in which she visits several Black Madonnas, trying to tie the historical roots of that tradition to the Hindu tradition of honoring a black female Buddha named Tara. Here is what Ms. Galland says about honoring darkness:
(Longing for Darkness p. 158 & 153)
This time of year, we have the honor of greeting the holy darkness as she descends into our lives. According to Galina Krasskova,
"On this holy tide, we hail the hunter and the hunted, the predator and the prey, the plough and the scythe, the blessings of growth and of decay. We honor our resources, and the frugality and careful planning of every ancestor whose careful household management got their families safely through the cold constraints of winter. Mabon is a time of remembrance and of culling away, of honoring what we have, what we need, but also what we can provide to others. It is a time to look clearly at where we are weak in spirit, where we are strong, and where we stand somewhere in between, a time to take stock of our portion of gratitude and blessings for the coming season."
Because this is, for many people, a time of high energy, there is sometimes a feeling of restlessness in the air, a sense that something is just a bit off-kilter. Any time you're feeling a bit spiritually lopsided, it is good to call on the Dark Mother.
We invoke Demeter, Inanna, Kali, Tiamet, Hecate, Nemesis, Morrighan.
Bringers of destruction and darkness,
We embrace you.
Without rage, we cannot feel love,
Without pain, we cannot feel happiness,
Without the night, there is no day,
Without death, there is no life.
Great goddesses of the night, I thank you.
And let’s take a few moments to meditate on the darker aspects of your own soul. Is there a pain you've been longing to get rid of? Is there anger and frustration that you've been unable to move past? Is there someone who's hurt you, but you haven't told them how you feel? Now is the time to take this energy and turn it to your own purposes. Take any pain inside you, and reverse it so that it becomes a positive experience. If you're not suffering from anything hurtful, count your blessings, and reflect on a time in your life when you weren't so fortunate.
And now a short meditation:
A balance of night and day, a balance of light and dark
This morning I seek balance in my life
as it is found in the Universe.
A black candle for darkness and pain
and things I can eliminate from my life.
A white candle for the light, and for joy
and all the abundance I wish to bring forth.
At Mabon, the time of the equinox,
there is harmony and balance in the Universe,
and so there shall be in my life.
Meditate on the things you wish to change. Focus on eliminating the bad, and strengthening the good around you. Put toxic relationships into the past, where they belong, and welcome new positive relationships into your life. Let your baggage go, and take heart in knowing that for every dark night of the soul, there will be a sunrise the next morning.
I’d like to end with a blessing. A blessing for you, a blessing over you, by Jan Richardson, this is a Blessing for those who are traveling in the dark:
Go slow
if you can.
Slower.
More slowly still.
Friendly dark
or fearsome,
this is no place
to break your neck
by rushing,
by running,
by crashing into
what you cannot see.
Then again,
it is true:
different darks
have different tasks,
and if you
have arrived here unawares,
if you have come
in peril
or in pain,
this might be no place
you should dawdle.
I do not know
what these shadows
ask of you,
what they might hold
that means you good
or ill.
It is not for me
to reckon
whether you should linger
or you should leave.
But this is what
I can ask for you:
That in the darkness
there be a blessing.
That in the shadows
there be a welcome.
That in the night
you be encompassed
by the Love that knows
your name.