Tag: holidays

The Role and the Rule: Black Friday

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One of the insights I gained from studying Stoic philosophy, is that the different roles we play call for different virtues or rules to guide our behavior.  The virtues required of a student are different from those of a banker or a teacher. As a grandmother I know well how different my responsibilities are toward my grandchildren than their parents’ obligations.

Each of us plays multiple roles in the course of each day.  I may be called to act in my capacity as economist, writer, neighbor, friend, matriarch (mother/grandmother), social activist, or member of an organization.  This idea may devolve into a long series of blogs, but I thought I would begin wit one of the four roles that we identify in economics: a consumer, a worker, an owner, and a citizen. With Black Friday, the peak consumption holiday of the year, about to descend on us on Friday, consumer is where I will start.

You might not think of connecting virtue to buying goods and services, but in fact there are several virtues that come into play.  Among the classic Aristotelian virtues, virtuous consumption calls for prudence (practical wisdom) and temperance, or moderation.

But consumption is not just about “me.” Our purchases and use of goods and services has an impact on other people. The waste we produce fills our landfills and requires scarce and valuable resources. The buildings we build reduce the number of trees and their important functions of shade and carbon absorption. The cars we buy and drive affect air quality. The pesticides we use on our lawns and gardens reduce the population of insects and birds.

And it isn’t just about what we buy, it is also whom we buy it from.  Does this seller treat its suppliers and workers well and respect the environment? Will shopping online over time reduce access to local businesses that help communities thrive? Can we convert some of our gift giving to experiences rather than material objects (theater tickets are one of my favorites).

All the effects of our spending on other people and on communities and even the earth are what economists call externalities. .  An externality is a negative or positive consequence, usually unintended, on other people and places.created by how you spend your money. Prudence, or practical wisdom, calls us to be mindful of how our “votes” in the marketplace doing our holiday shopping impact of friends, neighbors, and fellow citizens. Temperance calls us to control our appetites for material goods, not only because it is good for the soul but also because it keeps prices down for other buyers and enables them to stretch their dollars farther.

Another virtue that comes into play in spending our money is gratitude and its expression in action as generosity. There are a lot of calls for generosity this time of year—making sure that poor children get holiday cheer, that no one goes hungry or lacks heat or other necessities. The Salvation Army bell ringer is there to remind us. Our shopping is often motivated by a desire to be generous toward our loves ones, but it can also incorporate a wider circle of caring.

Virtue ethics. Try it, you’ll like it.  You will come home from the mall with a warm sense of making loved ones happy while also conferring benefits on other anonymous, often invisible winners that are blessed by your practice of prudence, temperance and generosity in your holiday spending.

Hallowe’en, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day

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November 1st, is All Saints’ Day, a long-standing holiday in the Catholic tradition that emerged from the ancient pagan holiday Samhain (pronounced Saw-wain) in the Celtic tradition.  It was a  time to bring the herds back for slaughter or wintering, and to prepare for the coming winter. It was also the time when the veil between this world and the spirit world was thinnest, and ghosts walked the earth.  Finally, this holiday weekend is a time to remember those who came before. on All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day (The Mexican Day of the Dead.

The holiday runs from sundown Friday to sundown Sunday.  In observing the holiday from dusk to dusk to dusk, we are following the customs of our Jewish and Celtic forebears, who not only began their  holidays at dusk rather than dawn but also celebrated their respective new year’s days in the late fall, going into and through the darkness to await the return of the light

On All Souls’ Day we will also observe that most annoying of customs, arbitrarily redefining daylight hours t by setting the clocks back an hour. disrupting our biorythms for the four darkest months.

So celebrate! Dress up. Decorate. Carve a pumpkin. Hand out treats. Visit a cemetery.  Remember a loved one, or more than one. Share a memory.  Plan your funeral. Feed the hungry. Remember that every end is also a beginning, and the light and the new year lie ahead..

Here is a poem for this holiday

The darkness begins

The faces of carved pumpkins

Glow from lighted candles within.

Children ring doorbells, costumed, in search of treats.

Or so it once was,

This holiday is now sanitized for safety

Fear of the coming darkness is banished

Replaced by noisy crowds with sugar highs

And costumes not of ghosts and devils

But TV characters and superheroes.

Without the fear and mystery of darkness

Without the silence to let us hear

The sounds of nature once again.

How can we reclaim our rightful role

As partners, not as overlords

Of the turning earth?

Mabon: It’s All Downhill from Here

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The least known of the eight seasonal Celtic festivals is Mabon, this earth holiday celebrated at the autumnal equinox.  If Lammas (August first) is first Harvest, Mabon is second harvest, at least where the Celts lived in the British Isles and the northern part  the giant peninsula that is Western Europe. Apples. Pumpkins (not in Europe!). Root vegetables. The days grow short, the temperatures fall.

The equinoxes are what mathematicians call inflection points, as compared to Litha (the summer solstice) and Yul, which are peak and trough, mountain and valley. We climb the mountain after Yu, head back toward the valley of delight at midsummer.. Unlike many mountains, the length of days is on an accelerated path at the beginning, slowing down at the inflection point and climb more slowly toward the midsummer peak.  The reverse comes with the decline into winter.

We notice peaks and valleys in the wheel of the year, but often neglect the turning points in our own lives until long after the fact.  Mabon and Ostara (the vernal equinox) remind us to be more attuned to the changes in the seasons that mirror the changes in our lives.

The interval from Litha or Lammas to Mabon is the beginning of aging in the seasons, including the Corn God or the Sun God.  It is a time of anticipation of both death and birth.  The children are grown, perhaps we are retired or planning to retire. It is a good time to take stock of our own aging process, to notice the changes in our bodies, our interests, our daily activities.  We can try to slow the aging process so that these later days of autumn leaves and fires in the fireplace can be enjoyed in different and more leisurely ways. 

My aging friends and I can assure you that travel is fun and inspiring but also is not a full- time occupation. If you haven’t taken care of your health until now, that can too easily become a full- time activity!  But if your health and memory are good, and your income is adequate to your needs, it is a good time to give back to the earth and human communities that have nurtured us. Volunteering, mentoring, teaching, coaching, helping rescue animals, organic gardening, are among the many options. So is part-time work in something completely different. Many of my friends have turned to writing fiction.  Always a nonfiction writer, in retirement I have written nine more books to join the nine I wrote when I was working. Currently I am writing my autobiography,  not in hopes of publication, just for family and friends.

There are two poets with contrasting views of the aging stage of life.  Dylan Thomas        : Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, Rage against the dying of the light.”  Or Robert Browning, “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.  With Browning, I vote for the goodness of aging.  My role model for engage aging is Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer, humanitarian, disease eradicator, Habitat for Humanity worker, Sunday School teacher, and fiction writer until his death at age 100. Who is yours?

Celebrating Labor Day

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Labor Day. observed on the first Monday in September, is celebrated in many other counties on May 1st as International Workers’ Day.  Americans thought that holiday had overtones of socialism, so a different date was chosen.  This holiday weekend marks the end of summer, not too far from the autumnal equinox (the pagan holiday of Mabon) on September 22nd.  For many years the week after Labor Day was time for back to school, but in many states, public school schedules have been shifting as schools experiment with shorter summer vacations and longer breaks during the year. Our state went back to school at the beginning of August.

Labor gets short shift under capitalism.  Labor is a commodity, bought and sold in labor markets, the price being determined partly by supply and demand and partly by power or lack thereof.  The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour has been unchanged since 2009. At that rate, a full -time worker (40 hours a week for 52 weeks) would have a gross income of $15,170 before deductions, like social security tax and maybe even health insurance.  The poverty ceiling for a single adult is $15,650, In most states, that wage would be barely enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment, with nothing left for food and other necessities.  Among workers paid by the hour, 843,000 workers were paid the minimum wage OR LESS in 2024.

Regardless of our income, work or labor takes up a very large share of our lives. At some time between ages 16 and 22, people typically enter the labor force, and stay there with breaks for unemployment, health issues, domestic responsibilities and other reasons, until age 63 (typically 62 for women, 65 for men). Many people spend that long stretch of their lives working at a job that they find physically demanding, boring, high pressure or long hours.  Or at least not the answer to “What I want to do when I grow up?”—our favorite question for small children.

 Work or labor is a part of life, but not all of life.  Many of us view our labor as primarily a way to put a roof over our heads and food on the table. It can provide those essentials,  but our work can and should be more than that.  It is interesting that labor gets a negative religious cast. When God evicts Adam and Eve fromf the garden, She says that Adam shall earn his bread by the sweat of his brow and Eve shall suffer in bringing forth children (labor). Economists share that biblical perspective, that labor is suffering for which we must be compensated by some reward—bread or a baby among other possibilities. Labor or work is equated with suffering. 

Yet some of us are privileged to choose  whether to work or not because of inherited or acquired wealth.  Better yet, many of us to choose work that enables us to harness our gifts and our passions to engage in a vocation. Even a vocation has its downsides—a difficult boss or customer or client, tasks associated with the job that are distasteful, or other drawbacks. I used to joke that if I was paid for the distasteful side of my work as a college professor, then I was being compensated for grading papers and attending committee meetings!

Those who are fortunate enough, or wise enough, experience their work as a vocation at which one can excel and through which one satisfies the need to be useful, do develop and parcixe one’s skills,  and to have a community of fellow workers. Almost any kind of work can be a vocation, whether it is cleaning houses or raising chickens or putting out fires or managing a household or teaching grooming dogs.

 Sometimes we make the wrong choice. When I went to seminary at age 59 to study theological ethics after an early retirement from teaching, I met an ex-lawyer at orientation. “What are you doing here?” he asked.  Jokingly, I said,” I’m doing penance for 30 years of teaching economics.”  (I really liked being an economist and still do!) He nodded. A candidate for the ministry, he said he was doing penance for seven years of practicing law. I was just seeking a way to broaden and redirect my efforts as an economist, but he was making a much bigger change. As my former department chair Bruce Yandle used to say, if you try, you can fit three careers into a lifetime.

I was fortunate to work part-time early and late in my 50 year career. I continued to do public policy work and teach two graduate courses, one each semester, in an interdisciplinary program in Policy Studies. That light schedule freed me to do other things—travel, community leadership, writing. That’s one way of having a career AND a life.  It comes with a lower income, but when your children are grown and your mortgage is paid, it doesn’t seem to matter as much.

Labor is one of the ways we find meaning and purpose in life.  All kinds of work deserve our respect, and opportunities for the workers to feel useful and to have some degree of autonomy. And a decent wage.

So on your last visit to the beach before the start of college football, falling leaves, and shorter days, do something fun. You’ve earned it!

Women’s Equality Day

~ purplesage41 ~ 2 Comments

Twenty-five years ago, when I put together my holiday essays in a book called Economics Takes a Holiday, I sorted them by month.  I came to August and there was no holiday. Somehow, I had forgotten about the Celtic holiday of Lammas, August 1st, the celebration of first harvest.  But there was an even more important omission.  I failed to include Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of the 19th amendment, which can be celebrated on either the 19th (ratification by the 36th state) or August 26th, when it was officially added to the Constitution.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal.  Man is a troublesome word in English. Sometimes it means a human being and other times it means a male human being. I took four years of Latin in high school.  Despite the patriarchal, misogynistic, authoritarian, slave-owning culture of the Roman empire, Latin did distinguish between a homo as a human being and vir and mulier as, respectively, as a male human being and a female human being. Jefferson must have missed that lesson.

The Declaration of Independence assumed an even narrower view of man., It meant a white male property owner. It took a Civil war and four constitutional amendments and several Civil Rights Acts and the Voting Rights Act to broaden our definition of man.  T

As we celebrate the right to vote, women are once again fighting for women’s rights, the right of reproductive choice and control of our bodies, which we have enjoyed for fifty years.  I was married in 1962 in my native state of Connecticut where contraception was illegal.  That law that was not being enforced. Fortunately, condoms could be purchased for the prevention of socially transmitted diseases and birth control pills could be prescribed for menstrual irregularity, both of which were apparently epidemic in the state.  In 1965, SCOTUS handed down a ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut overturning the state’s contraception blue law on the grounds of a right to privacy inherent in the 14th amendment. That case set the stage for Roe v. Wade.. 

Only in recent years have we learned the extent to which assumed rights are fragile—voting rights, civil rights, privacy rights, safety rights. A major difference between the contraception ban in Connecticut before 1965 and the new abortion laws was enforcement. There was no enforcement in the earlier era, but now some states have established criminal penalties for doctors, clinics, and women for having abortions—even miscarriages that someone claims were actually abortions.

How did it finally happen after 72 years of agitation that women got the right to vote?  The movement was launched in 1948 at the Seneca Falls Women’s Convention with a Declaration of Women’s Rights. Soon that agenda had to take a back seat to the battle over slavery.  In 1868, after the War of the Rebellion, as it was sometimes known in the north,, the lesser-known 15th amendment was ratified. It prohibited the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen’s right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Efforts by women to explicitly include gender were ignored.

Four other significant events took place in the intervening years that helped the suffrage cause. One was the settlement of the west, which was less conventional about women’s roles than the east. One by one, western states gave women voting rights.  Another was the 1913 constitutional amendment requiring direct election of senators by the people instead of appointed by state legislatures.  Western senators had to court the women’s vote, and increasingly, so did presidential candidates in states where women could vote.

The third event was the service rendered by women in so many ways for the war effort during the first world war.  They could fight, nurse, or do men’s jobs while the men were away, but they had no say in the government they were serving.   A fourth and final factor was the victory of the female-dominated temperance movement in enacting prohibition, passed in 2018. Many men and especially liquor interests saw a link between suffrage and prohibition, but when liquor became illegal even without women being able to vote, the opposition lost its steam. 

Back in the days before the 19th amendment, when my great-grandmother was marching for women’s suffrage, there was a split in the movement over strategy. Two splits, in fact.  One was whether to over focus on suffrage or push the ERA.  Realistically, the ERA would probably not have made it, but suffrage did.  Sometimes compromise is the best path.  But if the ERA had been enacted as a Constitutional amendment, then or later, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. The other split was more tactical.  Get the right to vote state by state or focus on Congress and a Constitutional amendment? And the answer was yes.  It took both to get the 19th amendment through Congress and ratified by 36 of the 48 states. In August 1920, Tennessee put the amendment over the top by a single vote by a first term young representative responding to a request from his mother.

The majority of Americans value their civil liberties and those of their fellow citizens, not to mention immigrants and refugees.  For almost 50 years we have taken these rights for granted—freedom of religion, a right to privacy, the right to vote in free and fair elections, the right to engage in peaceful protest. The right to an equal and not separate public education. More recently, we have added the freedom to marry a person of the same gender or a different race. 

When one Constitutional right is threatened by the courts, all rights are at risk.  As Martin Niemoller, a Lutheran minister during the Nazi era,  wrote:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The 19th amendment in 1920 was the culmination of a 72-year battle. Tennessee, the 36th state to ratify, passed it into law by a single vote, giving the required ¾ majority on August `19th. The Secretary of State in Washington enrolled in the Constitution on August 26th, giving us not Women’s Equality Day but Women’s Equality Week.  A fitting length for such a long labor before it was birthed. Only one of the original suffrage leaders was still alive in 1920 but too ill to vote.  My great-grandmother Alice Stewart, who was born in the 6th year of that battle, marched in New York for the suffrage movement in 1913 and lived long enough to vote in 1920 and 1924. Given my birth family’s Republican leanings, I am guessing that she voted for Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge.

There are lessons in that struggle about compromising and holding firm, about strategy and tactics, and about the truth of Reinhold Niebuhr’s dictum that nothing worth accomplishing is ever accomplished in our lifetimes. Therefore, we are saved by hope. As we struggle to keep hope alive and make a difference in democracy, voting rights, and human rights, let us hold up and retell the stories of these past struggles to revive our commitment and determination.

First Harvest, Celtic Style

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Got some Irish, Scottish, Welsh in your ancestry? Or maybe some of the original Brits (Celtic) in your English ancestry, or Gallic that came to he islands with the Norman conquest? Celttc culture once covered a huge part of the European continent only to be run off to Britain those annoying Romans. Some of these holidays were baptized and melded into Christianity, especially . Easter with Ostara (the spring equinox, with bonfires at dawn), as well as Sammain/Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Day), Yul and Christmas(and midnight mass).. Others live on in other customs, like Groundhog Day (Imbolc) and the fertility festival of Beltain (May Day, the maypole as a mating ritual).. Lithia, the summer solstice was celebrated with midday bonfires, a midsummer holiday that is most closely kin to July 4th in this country.

But one lonesome little Celtic holiday seems to have disappeared from memory. This sweet little holiday on the first day of August is Lammas or Lughnasad, the celebration of first Harvest. I sit at the table with my friends eating fresh corn and tomatoes from the farmers’ market just two days before the holiday. As the Druids disappeared and the Celts turned to Christianity, Lammas was celebrated by bringing the first fruits of the harvest to church for a blessing, a custom carried on in this country into colonial times. I myself have led a blessing of the vegetables service, which is must less disaster-prone than a blessing of the animals and also provided fresh vegetables to our local food bank.

So add an upbeat holiday to your calendar the first of August and celebrate the abundance of harvest and the rich taste of fresh fruits and vegetables!

Celebrating the Solstice

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Friday June 20th marks the summer solstice, the longest day of the year.  In Australia, New Zealand, and most of South America, it is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.  There they huddle before a warm fire at this solstice and celebrate the December solstice at the beach. Here in the Northwest quadrant of the globe, we have picnics and celebrate Fathers’ Day. Why Fathers’ Day? Perhaps because, inn Celtic mythology, the sun God is at the peak of his powers, even as the mother Goddess is pregnant with his child who will be born at the winter solstice. After the solstice, he begins a long descent into aging and death before being reborn in December.

The four sky holidays (equinoxes and solstices) are celebrated with bonfires—spring at dawn, summer at midday, autumn at dusk, winter at midnight.  Do these times of day remind you of Easter, (sunrise service), Fourth of July picnics (two weeks past the summer solstice), Trick or treat (five weeks past the fall equinox), and midnight mass (winter solstice)? If so, you have penetrated the Celtic roots of some of our non-biblical religious and secular customs of honoring the rhythm of the earth.

The ancient Celts, from whom many Americans trace their descent, observed eight evenly spaced holidays.  Solstices and equinoxes were dictated by the rotation of the earth around the sun, while the four cross-quarter holidays were earth-centered. Males were associated with sun and sky, women with moon and earth.

We modern humans are largely disconnected from these rhythms of earth and sky, with air-conditioned harvests and food from the grocery store that can be frozen or refrigerated.  We can eat blueberries and watermelon year-round even if it means shipping them long distance from Chile or other points far south. Change of clothing is one of the few acknowledgements we make of changing seasons as we swap coats and sweaters for t-shirts and bathing suits.

And yet the pull of the rhythm of the seasons is still strong. The urge to plant is evident in the spring, even if we are more often planting for beauty than for sustenance. Recreation moves outdoors in the warm summer months, while long winter nights are a time to huddle in front of the fireplace, alternating with snow sports in the short daytimes in more northern parts of the hemisphere.  We can try to insulate ourselves from nature, but we are in fact a part of nature and our bodies and hearts pulsate to its changes. We are also dependent on nature for all the resources that sustain us—food, and water, and electricity, and fossil fuels, metals and minerals,  plants and animals.

Each season brings us different gifts of both beauty and sustenance, challenge and opportunity.  If a single word unites these eight ancient holidays into a common thread, it should probably be gratitude.  Gratitude for rain and sun, soil and water, food and fuel, beauty and wonder. Eight chances to count your blessings and honor Mother Earth and Father Sky.  A joyous summer solstice to all my readers!

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Saint Patrick Meets Ostara: The Living of the Green

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It is no accident that Saint Patrick’s Day falls in the same week as the vernal equinox, the holiday called Ostara by the ancient Celts. Ireland is the Emerald Isle with, as Johnny Cash reminded us, its 40 shades of green. Ostara had other names, Oestre, Astarte, and, of course, Easter, yet another celebration of revival, renewal, and resurrection. (I once was asked by a seminary professor why Unitarian Universalists celebrate Easter. I replied with my own question. Why do Christians name their most important holiday after the goddess of the dawn?

Some of the customs of the equinox holiday have migrated to the moveable feast of Easter, celebrated in the Western world on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox. They are supplemented by ancient Roman and Scandinavian equinox customs involving eggs and rabbits, agents of fertility.

What comes to mind about Saint Patrick, besides green beer and shamrocks? You probably know that he was born around 400 CE in Britain to a Romanized Christian family. Captured by Celtic pirates, he was hauled off to Ireland and worked as a shepherd. He escaped, returned to Britain, studied for priesthood, and was ordained. He chose to return to return to Ireland as a Christian missionary..

Like many such missionaries, Patrick adapted the Christian story to the local environment—a rural, earth-centered culture, He used the shamrock or three -leafed clover to explain the concept of the trinity. He planted churches and monasteries all over Ireland. It is appropriate that his day is celebrated during the season of preparing for spring planting. Like so many other holidays including Yule), the celebration of Ireland’s patron saint was part of the bridge from the old Celtic nature-based religion to what the Irish called the New Faith.

Initially the New Faith was welcomed to Ireland as an addition, rather than a competitor, but eventually it became its own wayward version of Roman Christianity. Today there is a revival of the Celtic version of Christianity not only in the two strongholds of Celtic culture, Ireland and Scotland, but also in North America. That culture and that way of being Christian was earth-centered, non-exclusive, and egalitarian, with a particularly strong affirmation of women as full participants in the larger community. Women in early Ireland had the right to choose their spouses, divorce if they wished, get an education, own property, and enter many of the professions. Many of those rights were not available to women in this country until the late 19th century. (A nod to another annual observance in March, Women’s History Month.)

Even after Roman Christianity forced the Irish to end their practice of co-houses of nuns and monks who were free to marry, have children, and raise them in the faith, there was still always a Celtic underground that survives today in some of the ancient holy places, especially the Scottish island of Iona. There is much wisdom in dedicating this pair of holidays to the re-planting of that vision in our own hearts and mind, As as we begin the season of fertilizing and planting, we can celebrate our oneness with the natural world that nurtures and sustains us.

Note: I am indebted to historian Peter Tremayne’s fascinating set of historicall novels about Sister Fidelma for background on the customs of the Irish in the 5th and 6th centuries CE.

It’s Groundhog Day Again!

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This is my annual updated version a holiday variously known as the feast of Saitn Bridget, Imbolc, Oimelc (both Celtic words related to lambing), and Groundhog Day. I mentioned that the first of February was the only holiday devoted to housecleaning in an email to my daughter. Aha, she said that explains the backstory for the movie Groundhog Day. It’s like house cleaning. You clean, it gets dirty, you clean it again, it gets dirty again… A good story line for a movie! At least my repetition, unlike the movie, is only once a year.
Imbolc, Oimelc, or Groundhog Day, they all anticipate spring. It is one of the lesser-known cross-quarter holidays on the Wheel of the Year. In addition to Groundhog Day it survived as the feast of the purification of the virgin (Mary) after the birth of her son 40 days earlier. It is also the day devoted to Saint Bridget or Brigid. Bridget is the Triune Goddess in her maiden phase, converted to a Christian saint. The corn maiden from the previous harvest is brought out in her honor as a virgin once again, ready to encounter the Sun King reborn at Yul in a mating ritual of spring.
The purification part of this holiday was known in pre-feminist times as spring house cleaning. In ancient time among the Celts, Imbolc cleaning consisted of removing the Yule greenery from the home and burning it, cleaning up fields and home, and in Ireland, burning old Bridget wheels and making new ones. By Imbolc, most of us have taken down the tree and put away the decorations from Christmas, but if you haven’t, you can use Imbolc as the excuse for delaying it till now. After Imbolc, you are at risk of being labeled a lazy pagan if you don’t deal of the winter holiday residue.
Imbolc is approaching the end of an indoor time. It’s cold and still pretty dark, but it is the waxing period of light and warmth following the winter solstice. It represents a final stage of wintry inwardness before the crocuses and daffodils invite us to look outward again. Housebound, we must find our spiritual practice within that space. It is the late stage of the hibernating season as we prepare for the cycle of life to begin again.
Spiritual practice has enjoyed something of a resurgence in recent decades. A spiritual practice is anything that is centering, mindful, focusing, and connects you to the sacred in a very inclusive sense. Practicing patience with difficult people is a spiritual practice. Listening attentively is a spiritual practice. Eating mindfully is a spiritual practice. Meditation and prayer are traditional spiritual practices in many religions. But there is also a form of spiritual practice that invests the ordinary activities of daily life with significance in the way carry them out.
The essence of spring housecleaning as spiritual practice blends several Christian and Buddhist ideas. One is humility; no task is too menial that we are above it, as in Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. The second is mindfulness, to be engaged in the moment, to calm the monkey mind, to focus all our attention on the window being washed or the floor being swept. The third is letting go of attachment to possessions as an encumbrance on our spiritual life, passing them on to another use or another user. The spiritual practice of spring housecleaning can incorporate all three.
Housecleaning means two different things. One is the emphasis on clean, as in wash windows, polish furniture, remove cobwebs, paint, scrub floors, clean woodwork, dust the books. That’s both the humble and the mindful part. In the words of one contemporary Buddhist writer, “after enlightenment, the laundry.” The other kind of housecleaning is to declutter, simplify, recycle, let go of possessions no longer needed, like the greens from Yul in the Celtic tradition. That’s the letting go part.
For many years my Lenten practice, for the forty days that begin sometime after Imbolc and stretch to the floating holiday of Easter, was to wash a window every day. Then I moved to a smaller house, which taxed my ingenuity to find forty windows. I included car windows, TV and computer screens, mirrors. Friends helpfully offered their windows, but I did not wish to discourage their own spiritual practice. There is something very satisfying, very symbolic in letting the light of the returning spring shine through a clean window, but it means more when it’s my window.
A friend described a similar cleaning ritual, only she does it all on New Year’s Day. She takes each of her many books down one at a time off the shelf, dusts it (and the shelf), and decides whether it stays or goes. If books are a rich and meaningful part of your life, revisiting these old friends and deciding what role they still may play in your life and which ones should be shared with others is definitely a spiritual practice. This particular ritual embodies both humility (dusting). mindfulness (concentrated attention on the books and the memories and teachings they hold) and letting go (books to be passed on). This year I used my cocooning season, December 26th to February 1st, to declutter bookshelves, which led to one empty bookcase and about 80 book donations, plus a major cleansing of my Kindle.
So, as the daffodils and crocuses pop their leaves through the ground, as the groundhog in Punxatawny ponders his forecast, we can prepare to emerge from the hibernating season by renewing the spaces we inhabit. Like the bluebirds, whose house I have to clean very soon because they refuse to return to a used nest, let us be about the humble tasks of maintaining our habitats. Spring housecleaning only comes once a year!

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Day of Service

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This year, ironically, the start of the second reign of Donald Trump coincides with both the national college football championship and Martin Luther King Day. I’m betting that more people will watch the football game than the inauguration. But the real contrast is between how we observe the other two events, Inauguration Day and the Day of Service, that many of us observe in honor of MLK. Many communities will have organized service projects that will, alas, overlap the noon inauguration. For me, that’s an easy choice..

But I like to honor the day of service my way. So I chose this week, the week of his actual birthday (January 15th), because I don’t believe in forcing actual dates of a holiday into the nearest Monday. And instead of a day, I will do something each day from Monday through Friday.


Today I am speaking to the county legislative delegation about making the state’s local governments more accountable and transparent rather than evading or ignoring the legal procedures they are required to follow. Advocacy is one form of service.On Tuesday I plan to take my blind friend and neighbor to the grocery store and the recycling center. Care giving is another form of service. I will also try to recruit a college student to help her with transportation. Care giving is another form of service.

On Wednesday, I am making my share of dinner for about 25 residents of a local homeless shelter, It is a monthly service organized by my congregation. Helping the less fortunate is also a form of service.


On Thursday I get paid, so it is a good time to go to my favorite charity website and give some money for Gaza and California. Money can be a vehicle for service. I am also attending a Zoom meting with updates on what is happening in the state legislature that we might want to discuss with our legislators. Advocacy again.


On Friday I will tend to my duties for the two organizations through which I channel much of my service, The League of Women Voters and the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. Service is more effective and more satisfying when done within organized caring communities. I serve the fellowship as Social Action chair and the League as program chair. Both communities are dedicated to making the world a better place in many ways. Serving in leadership roles sustains the organizations through which we can engage in service more effectively.a


The point of this recitation is not to tell you what a good person I am, but to be mindful of what I do and why I do it. It is also meant to illustrate the variety of things that I choose to do, while others among you may have totally different but equally valuable ways or serving the larger community. I hope that this day will make me more intentional about carrying through this commitment the other eleven months of the year.


Celebrate your day of service in ways that reflect your unique challenges, opportunities, skills and interests.