by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

Hardly anyone knows the name Virginia O’Hanlon, a little girl who was born 107 years ago in a row house at 115 West 95^th St. in New York City.  But everyone knows about her letter, the one she as an eight-year-old wrote to New York Sun.  It seems that she had gone back to school that fall and been told the unthinkable by her little friends: they had told her that there was no Santa Claus.  “Please tell me the truth,” Virginia wrote.  “Is there a Santa Claus?”  There has been only one possible answer to that question since September 21, 1897, when a certain journalist named Pharcellus Church responded to Virginia.

The man who wrote the editorial in response to Virginia’s letter was a sardonic Columbia College graduate and a veteran writer at the Sun.  His personal motto was “Endeavor to clear your mind of cant,” and he reportedly “bristled and pooh-poohed <the request>” of his editor when he was asked to reply to Virginia—and yet Mr. Church produced something of a classic, that lives until this day. 

This, in part, was his answer:  “Virginia, your little friends are wrong.  They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.  They do not believe except what they see.  They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds.  . . . .  Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.  He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”

Mr. Church wanted to preserve the mystery and the magic for Virginia, but if it had stopped there, we would never have heard of this editorial—no, he reached out beyond himself to preserve the mystery and the magic for all of us, young and old alike.  Yes, Virginia, life is more than it sometimes seems.  Yes, Virginia, out of the dark, cold nights of our lives sometimes come stars and the ringing of bells and unexpected visitors and gifts of the spirit.

A minister colleague of mine, Kelly Flood, tells the story of her encounter with Santa.  She was 5 years old and living in Fulda, Germany, where her father was stationed in the military.  It is after midnight on Christmas Eve, 1964, and she is wide-awake, restless with anticipation.  Her two brothers, with whom she is sharing the room, are fast asleep.  Faintly at first, and then louder and louder, she hears the jingling of sleigh bells outside her window.  She slips from her bed and pulls back the curtain.  Down below, in the snow-covered street, is Santa, on his sleigh, being pulled by a team of horses!  The scene changes.  Years later she is at seminary, very much a grown-up, preparing to become a minister.  She is engaged in a tutorial with Bob Kimball, the Dean of the School, and she begins telling him the childhood story, “I saw Santa when I was a child . . .” she begins, and then she stops herself, and adds, “though now I know that he wasn’t real—he was probably some fellow returning late at night from a party . . . .” And Bob, a very wise man, stopped her, stopped her in her tracks.  “No,” he said, “Don’t tell me how he isn’t real to you now.  I believe you did see Santa.  Tell me the story as you would have told it to me that night, as a five year old.”  And Kelly did.  Every detail.  When she was done, she remembered the truth of that night.  She saw Santa.  Bob said to her, “Kelly, I want you to keep that memory alive—I want you to never let go of that sense of awe and wonder.”

This is the precious quality that children have that we too often lose as adults.  As we mature, we categorize our experience, to make sense of it.  We generalize and come to conclusions about how things work and what things mean.  If we were unable to do this, we would be forever having to begin again with every task.  So this is a good thing.  But the down side is that this process can deaden us to the world.  As Alice Walker noted, we begin to walk past the color purple and not see it.  We become tamed and domesticated.  Unlike adults, children are neither tamed nor domesticated—thank goodness!  They do not have all the answers—they are relentlessly curious; they have a great and abiding need to know and to be known.  In a healthy family they can reach out, hungrily, to learn, and sleep peacefully at night, knowing that the parents who love them are bigger than all of their questions.

Children have a strong sense of imagination that lends color and magic to their lives—anything is possible!  In fact, sometimes when confronted too young with what adults call “the truth,” like there is no Santa Claus, they refuse to believe the adults.  I remember once making up a Christmas story for my son Kash, who must have been 6 or 7 at the time.  I told him, for some strange reason, that Santa had left one of his reindeer temporarily in our garage, and that we were supposed to feed it and take care of it until Santa came for it.  I thought Kash would know this was just a story, like “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but Kash believed me, and when he went out to feed the reindeer, he came back into the house crying, just devastated.  One of the many times I screwed up as a parent.  But just think about that—how wonderful to imagine that there is a reindeer in your garage instead of a lawnmower and some old paint cans.

Some adults know the value of this innocence of childhood and help to keep it alive.  A story comes to mind of a well-known pianist, Ignace Jan Paderewski.  His concert in New York had been sold out for six months.  On the night of the concert, patrons came in tuxedos and fancy dresses.  One mother, though, brought her nine-year-old son because he was beginning to complain about his piano lessons, and she thought maybe the concert would inspire him to continue studying.  Waiting for the concert to begin, the child was restless and impatient, and kept getting up, having to go to the bathroom over and over again. Finally the mother became exasperated, grabbed her son, and sat him down hard in his seat.  “Now stay there and don’t move!” she said.  But when she was distracted for a moment, the boy slipped out and walked toward the stage where a huge Steinway piano was standing.  The mother yelled at him to come back, and startled, he panicked and ran up on the stage, ran up the stairs straight to the piano, sat down, and began playing “Chopsticks.”  People in the audience began mumbling, furious at this outrage.  “Get that kid off the stage!” someone said. 

As the ushers moved toward the young boy, Paderewski heard the commotion and looked out and saw the boy.  He grabbed his tuxedo jacket, and stepped into full view of the audience.  There was a collective hush.  Everyone wondered what the great pianist would do.  The boy, oblivious to what was happening, continued to play.  Paderewski came up behind him, went down on his knees, and whispered in the little boy’s ear, “Don’t stop.  Keep on playing.  You’re doing great.”  While the boy continued to play, the great pianist put his arms around him, and began playing a concerto based on the tune of “Chopsticks.”  As he played, Paderewski just kept saying to the boy, “Don’t stop.  Keep on playing.”

As grown-ups, we need the faith and the innocence of a child, lest our days grow dull and listless.  But how do we keep mystery alive?  Several ways, I think.  First of all, through the arts.  Through music, through film, through painting and photography and stories and poems and all the various forms of art that are created through the imagination.  Art is never just a representation of reality, you know—it is always someone’s reality, acted upon by a particular imagination, and rendered therefore, truer than true, not ever just the surface of things, but rich with the dimension of another’s consciousness.  When we give ourselves to a work of art, it insists that we see, hear, feel in a new way, and our souls are in this way enlivened.

Another way to keep the magic alive is through travel—when we visit foreign lands, we cannot go through our daily routine anesthetized, as we so often do here at home.  New colors and smells and sounds, accents, food—all these wake up our senses, make us curious and alert once again—we become childlike, hungry to know, as we move amidst the unfamiliar.

And some of you who are teaching Sunday school have discovered that in being with children, we can once again capture some of the magic that adulthood has robbed from us.  Just yesterday I took a break from my work—I didn’t want to, but I said to myself, “Marilyn, you should go out for a walk and get your exercise,” and so I did.  About 6 blocks from my house, I saw that a child had set up a card table on the sidewalk, and as I drew closer, I saw that she was selling something—she was holding a bundle of holly tied with a ribbon.   “So you’re selling this holly?” I asked.  “Yes,” she said, as she smiled and handed it to me.  She was a most beautiful child, fair skin with a sprinkling of freckles, a cascade of strawberry blonde hair, and hazel eyes.  A veritable picture book of a child.  “It’s $1.50, and this is the last bunch I have,” she said.  I took a look at the holly.  It was awful.  She obviously had chopped a few small pieces off her parents’ tree—they were haphazardly wrapped together, and some of the berries were rotten.  Yet she had sold all her holly.  People weren’t buying holly, I thought, they were buying hope.  How could anyone not buy holly from this little girl?  Well, I didn’t—but by just experiencing her beauty and her earnestness, her willingness to take a chance, to set up her stand alone, on a cold wet day, I have to say, my heart was warmed—not to mention that my faith in capitalism was restored then and there. 

Surely the church is a place, too, where mystery should be kept alive.  We wear these special robes, we ring chimes, we sing “Spirit of Life” every Sunday for a reason, you know.  We do these things to evoke Spirit—to acknowledge that we are accountable to something larger than ourselves, and we are making space for that something, by whatever name we call it.  This is not a place where we have all the answers, where we box up the answers to the mysteries of life and hand them out, like perfectly packaged gifts.  Yes, we have conventions that we follow—but this is not essentially a place where parameters are emphasized.  Rather, this is a place where boundaries loosen and possibilities open up. 

Last Sunday I talked about spiritual growth emerging from our becoming radically ignorant, from our very sense of despair in not knowing.  Like the child whose questions are safe with his parents, we must feel here at church that our doubts, our questions, are safe.  Then we can do what Jesus admonishes us to do in Matthew 18:  to “become like little children.”  To forego our cynicism, and become innocent and open.  Then we can follow the star to the manger to worship the baby who came to bring love into this world.  Then we can rejoice at Hanukkah in the miracle that the little bit of oil they found lasted all eight days.

I think again of the child playing chopsticks, with the master pianist behind him, urging him on.  Church should be that welcoming, that safe.  These are difficult times.  When we think our efforts are going nowhere, or when we’re being shouted down, we need the church, we need those arms around us saying, “Don’t stop.  Keep on playing.  You’re doing great.”

I read a wonderful story in the New York Times yesterday that I want to share with you, in closing.  It appears that a pair of red-tailed hawks, Pale Male and Lola, have been nesting for 11 years in the façade of a sumptuous apartment building overlooking Central Park in New York City.  The apartments in that building are worth over $10,000,000—each.  The pair of hawks has raised 23 chicks over the years.  But some of the residents of the building wanted the hawks gone from their exclusive address, and exploited the law to have the nest removed.  They said that the hawks were not “hygienic,” and that they preyed on pigeons and rats, sometimes dropping parts of bloody carcasses on the sidewalk.  And the nest itself had grown to some 8 feet across.  Little did these residents know what a fuss they would stir up.  Supporters of the hawks have been standing vigil out in the cold across from the apartment where the hawks had nested, holding up signs like “Bring Back the Nest.”  The Audubon Society has been called in to effect a solution.  Mary Tyler Moore has been giving speeches in the hawks’ behalf. 

What is going on here?  Why all this fuss?  This is not just about these two birds, lovely as they are. The hawks have become symbols of nature and instinct in what can be a hard and unforgiving city.  They have found their niche, and raised their young, flying with their twigs and branches 12 stories up to make a warm home amidst the cold stone.  The birds did what no bird could be expected to do, nurturing their young year after year in these unlikely surroundings, and people watched this miracle of life unfold before them each season.  No one could observe these birds without stopping to wonder, “How can it be?” and being thankful that life springs forth where we thought none could.

Of course, there are always people who eschew the magic, who say “bah humbug” to the season, and sometimes those people have power, and they use the rules and the laws to get their way.  But let me tell you about those birds.  They are gathering twigs again, and circling around and around, looking for a new nesting site.  And if the hundreds of people cheering them on having anything to do with it, they will find one.  Because miracles happen.  And love breaks forth.  And life itself—the power of life itself—will find a way.  So be it.  Amen.

PRAYER

God of mystery and wonder, we believe—help thou our unbelief.  Forgive us when we become jaded and cynical, when we push love away, thinking that Christmas is only a story for children; when we refuse to hope, believing that the tale of Hanukkah can’t be for real.  As we move into this season of miracles, let us become like a child again, with open eyes, and open hearts, ready to learn, ready to be surprised by joy, taken aback by celebration, upended by love.   Amen.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and be open to the magic of the season!  Believe in miracles, and they will surely happen.  Go in love, and go in peace.  Amen.