Our ministers, Sydney and Dennis, wanted the Lay Ministers to have, and to wear, these lovely stoles as symbols of our calling. The seven of us found in ourselves an odd mixture of gratitude and something akin to embarrassment, pride, and humbleness. Perhaps we all must grow further into our roles before we are completely comfortable with this symbol. For that maturing process we ask for your patience and support.

I really love the stole and give thanks to Sydney and Dennis for wanting them for us and to Dot Chambers and Connie Zink for making them. I particularly appreciate the colors: red for fire, brown for earth, sea green for water, and blue for air – all the elements identified by the ancients and most appropriate to this service. I shall wear the stole happily this morning, and I am grateful for the opportunity to share my thoughts with you. May my words be worthy of our pulpit.

Welcome to the first week of February! We are now halfway to spring, halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. There is much to celebrate this week, this day: ancient traditions and festivals that remind us of our ancestors and great promise that reminds us of our shared future. There is the potential to be realized from the seeds still lying dormant in the heart of our Mother Earth, and great potential in the heart of this congregation as we look ahead to six months on our own, apart from Sydney and Dennis, our co-ministers who were called to us over five years ago and who began their well-earned sabbatical on February 1.

So welcome to St. Bridget’s Day, and to Candlemas, to the Celtic holidays of Imbolc and Oimelc, to the Festival of the Purification of the Virgin, and to Ground Hog’s Day! And welcome to the first Sunday of our sabbatical, the congregation’s sabbatical, when we begin to sow the seeds of hopes and dreams and vision for this church, the promise that will be called forth in the spring. There is much to celebrate this week, this day.

Our modern calendar which rules our lives in 21st century America tells us this day is young in the year 2006; we turned to the second page just this week.

Our children and grandchildren have settled back into their classes after the season of holidays after their first 3-day weekend of the new year. Our college students are already immersed in their Spring semesters, though Spring is weeks away. All of our young people are looking forward to Spring break, which seems unbearably far away. And their parents are looking forward to relief from worry about snow days and sniffles, and scarves and mittens and coats and hats and boots.

And for all of us? What does the tyranny of the calendar foretell for us? What does it mean to be halfway to spring? What does it really mean to have six more weeks of winter, as predicted by Puxatawney Phil, if we continue to stay cozy and warm in our homes, cars, and workplaces? None of us is truly cold, or seriously disaccommodated by winter in this temperate climate of the mid-Atlantic seaboard. What do these last weeks of winter mean, if we can buy strawberries and tulips at the Giant?? What value is the promise of spring, when we barely experience winter?

Some of you may remember the classic Peter Sellers satirical film Being There. The story line goes like this: A rather intellectually limited, quite passive hero, Chance the gardener, somehow, through a series of misadventures, is suddenly sprung from his isolated gardening life into national prominence as Chauncy Gardener. He is to be interviewed about his economic predictions, and everyone eagerly awaits his words. Chance gives his solemn pronouncement, “There will be growth in the spring!”

Not understanding that Chance is literally talking about the garden, the government and press representatives and the citizens hear a message about the economy, and the mishaps continue. Anyway, Chance spoke the truth: There will be growth in the spring.

However the final six weeks of official winter play out weatherwise, we can expect that spring will arrive by the end of March. There will be the new growth to which we look forward every year: that first, gentle new green haze as the trees slowly put on the leafy spring clothes; the snow drops and crocuses and jonquils that push their colorful little heads out of the still cold earth; the sprays of forsythia blossoms that wave joyously in March’s lamb-like breezes. And there will be growth and resurgence, and a soaring of our spirits, our hopes, our activities. SIGH!

But that is still weeks away. For now we have February, and let us not wish the winter away. “It is a season to itself, not simply the way to spring.… Let us therefore praise winter, rich in beauty, challenges, and pregnant negativities.” For the earth is pregnant with the growth to come and will give birth in Her own time.

We need this celebration now that speaks to “Spring-inspired word about life and death.” And we can move “the seasons of the self,” our individual selves and the selfhood of our church by planting the seeds of our hopes and plans for the future, and by nurturing them with our honest inquiry and dialogue, and by growing our collective will and courage as we begin to see our shared path through the winter woods to a renaissance, a new birth in Spring and Summer so that our ministers will return to a congregation transformed, as they themselves will be transformed; we can move the seasons of the soul of UUCR to revision our mission, our covenant, our goals, our plans for who we want to be, AFTER THE BUILDING IS BUILT! These are the challenges of our sabbatical which begins this week.

And how appropriate that our sabbatical should begin the first week in February, when there are many ancient traditions connected with these very days, celebrations of which you may not have been aware but festivals that remind us of our ancestors who lived closer to the earth’s cycles than we ever shall. Wherever on earth those ancient ones flourished, we can be sure that they were students of the seasons, for the sake of their own survival. And we, in our urban/suburban modern societies can only dimly guess how it felt to be halfway to spring.

It has long been my fun and spiritual pleasure to bring these old traditions to your attention and to our worship experience. It is not that I believe in the Gods or Goddesses or saints, or groundhogs who can predict the weather! What I do believe in is the eternal struggle by members of our myth-making species to make sense out of our natural and often capricious world and of our existence in it. And I believe myself to be – in an unbroken, though, perhaps, raggedy line – a part of that never-ending search for truth and meaning. Last week we, your lay ministers, recited benediction words from our mission covenant statement. We said we all are the links, the ties that bind heritage and future, between our founders and our successors.

I once read that God created humankind because She loved stories! Indeed we have always told and retold stories to explain the world and our relationships with it and with one another.

I would like to share some old stories with you from some of our human heritage. Though we cannot accept myths and stories from our ancestors as being the literal truth, perhaps we can find kinship with their yearnings and questions and, perhaps, even some old wisdom about living in good relationship with the earth and Her eternal cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth.

So let’s start with Ground Hogs Day, celebrated on February 2. In Puxatawney, Pennsylvania, this year’s Phil the ground hog, saw his shadow and ducked back into his warm burrow, therefore predicting 6 more weeks of winter! This custom is based on ancient and traditional weather signs. For hundreds of years, European farmers had similar traditions that involved bears, badgers, and other animals. People have long looked to the awakening of hibernating animals as one of the first signs of spring.

The Germans who settled in Pennsylvania brought that tradition to America. The ground hog, which is plentiful in this part of the country, became linked with the custom. Having lived through German winters as a child, I can understand the deep need to find reassuring signs that Spring might indeed by on Her way.

Candlemas, another midwinter celebration on February 2, also gave rise to predictions about the coming of Spring. Have you ever heard the rhyme If Candlemas Day be sunny and bright, Winter again will show its might. If Candlemas Day be cloudy and grey, Winter soon will pass away.

Candlemas, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean, has both Jewish and Christian roots. It is the day for observing the ritual purification of Mary 40 days after the birth of Jesus, as well as the presentation of Jesus in the Temple of Jerusalem. This ritual cleansing of a new mother is described in the Old Testament in the book of Leviticus, and as a Christian celebration it can be traced to at least 543 CE. The Feast of Lighted Candles, or Candlemas, is mentioned by Bede and St. Eligius, who was the Bishop of Noyon, France 640-648 CE. It certainly makes sense that Jesus’ Jewish family would follow the ancient traditions.

It has often seemed to me that these various rituals of purification of women were annoyingly patriarchal. However, after reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, I could see there might have been a certain adaptive value for women in their periods of isolation, where they enjoyed freedom from the otherwise daily grind and for new mothers to bond with and to nurture their newborns. Historic and anthropological speculation aside, like many other Christian festivals, including Christmas itself, Candlemas has roots which lie deep in pagan tradition and an understanding of nature.

Imbolc, celebrated February 1, was an important day in the Celtic calendar. The word comes from the Irish which was originally thought to mean “in the belly,” although some people translated it as “oimelc,” meaning ewe’s milk. As winter stores of food were getting low, Imbolc or Oimelc rituals were performed to harness divine energy that would ensure a steady supply of food until the harvest six months later. By the first week in February, herd animals have either given birth to the first offspring of the year, or their wombs are swollen and the milk is flowing into their udders. It is the time of the “Blessing of the Seeds” and consecration of agricultural tools. It is the Festival of the Maiden, who takes over from the Crone of Winter, in the Celtic Triple Goddess story. Home hearth fires are put out and then re-lit, and a broom is placed by the front door to symbolize the sweeping out of the old and welcoming of the new. Candles are lit and placed in each room of the house to honor the rebirth of the sun.

The Maiden is honored as the Bride. Her name is Brighid, later to be St. Bridget, the Patroness Saint of Ireland, who has an interesting story of her own: Bridget of Kildare was born about 450CE into a Druid family, being the daughter of the court poet to King Loeghaire. Some say her father was an Irish prince and her mother a druid slave. Converted to Christianity at an early age, she took vows as a nun, and established a convent at Kildare, which had formerly been a pagan shrine where a sacred fire was kept perpetually burning. Bridget and her nuns kept the fire burning, giving it a Christian interpretation. As abbess, Bridget participated in several Irish councils, and her influence on the policies of the Church of Ireland was considerable. She was buried next to St. Patrick. We shall revisit Bridget in the stewardship story which celebrates her generosity.

The early Christian church appropriated February 1, associated with the Goddess Bride, or Brighid, with St. Bridget of Kildare, and just as Bridget was the Goddess of Poetry, healing and smithcraft, so St. Bridget became the patron saint of all three, as well. Connections upon connections, allowing us to pick and choose how to celebrate this first week of February, this milestone time halfway to spring.

I need to suggest some ways, now, to bring these ancient links to the past into our present and beyond. In the ministers’ last service two Sundays ago, Sydney gave us several hints. She said that we “need a time to reflect and renew, a time to get our bearings and determine new directions, lest the well-worn path become stale.” A time to pause, reflect, and renew. What gifts our sabbatical can bring! This truly can be a time for variety and experimentation in our worship and in our programs.

With our intern minister Amy DeBeck, our visiting ministers, and your new lay ministers, there will be many new voices in this pulpit. May we be inspired and challenged by their words.

In addition, the Board will lead us through an assessment process to allow us to evaluate our goals and to look at new and better ways to achieve them. Especially, we shall be “re-visioning” our future.

We have waited so long for our dedicated sanctuary and the increase in our religious celebration space that sometimes it seemed as though the building became an end in itself. Sometimes it is difficult to think and plan beyond the completion of the construction process. But think and plan we must, because it seems that our long-awaited dream may come true, and I know there is life after the dust literally settles.

And what shall we become then, besides a church with a new building? First and foremost, I think we shall have to deal with the issues around growth. We shall have the sanctuary and RE capacity for more members; the traditional church wisdom is that our new space will probably attract new members. “Build, and they will come.” A practical problem is that our parking will not increase in size, and, therefore, we shall need creative solutions to handling additional traffic.

More importantly, we must grapple with what increased size will mean to the intimacy of our religious community. Members and friends will continue to need to feel included and valued, and we shall have to strengthen all the current programs that help people connect and to develop new programs that provide additional opportunities to join with others in learning, growing, and serving.

One such program that is dear to my heart is one I mentioned last week. I have a long-held dream that UUCR would join many other local faith communities who offer English-as-a-Second-Language and also Basic Literacy courses. There are few other skills more important to economic and social success in our society than English language competence. And it has always seemed to me that Unitarian Universalists are not only highly literate, but incredibly generous and compassionate, the very combination we need to create and sustain the kind of outreach I am proposing. Part of my dream includes the possibility of partnership with the Literacy Council of Northern Virginia, who has a successful history of programs, excellent teacher training and student assessment, and wonderful materials. With the help of others in this congregation who are interested in this project, I shall be expending some of my Lay Ministry energy in preparing a proposal to the UUCR Board. If anyone of you might be interested in my little dream, please see me, talk to me, call me, email me!

I have shared with you my own very personal and passionate hope. Please, all of you, use this congregational sabbatical to share your dreams for UUCR. We have time and opportunity “to pause, reflect, and renew,” to re-vision our future, to plan to be all that we can be.

So, do not wish winter away. Use the coming weeks until Equinox and beyond to sow the seeds of the future deep within and to kindle the lights of your spirits, so that we can indeed move the seasons of ourselves. I promise, “There will be growth in the Spring!”