Why Do We
Light The Chalice?
May 4, 2008
Rev.
Margaret A. Hart
First Universalist Society of Central Square, NY
This morning is being celebrated as
Chalice Lighter Sunday in churches throughout our District, so I thought it
might be helpful to look not only at the history and significance of the
Chalice Lighter Program in the Saint Lawrence District, but also to look at the
history and meaning of the flaming chalice itself. Why do we light the chalice? And why has the flaming chalice become a
symbol for Unitarian Universalism? Do we want it to be? And if so, are we happy
with the version of the chalice now being used by the UUA, or do we prefer
another version? There are so many choices. What do you prefer, and why?
First I would like to talk a bit about
the Chalice Lighter Program in the Saint Lawrence District. This program must have started at least
sixteen years ago, as that is when Betty, Mary, and Janice joined. Mary has been serving as our Chalice Lighter
Ambassador for a number of years, and makes a display and encourages new
membership in this effort each year. We
currently have twenty two individuals or families from this church in the
Chalice Lighter Program. I’d like to
tell you who the members are from this church, and when I’m through reading the
list, I’ll invite them to stand as they are able or raise their hands.
Betty Figie, Janice Ludington, Mary and Chet Perkins, Jody Brown,
Nancy Hallock, Tim & Margaret Hart, Rev. Libbie Stoddard, Andrea Abbott, Diane Gervaise,
Kurt and Ronna Schindler, Bob & Nancy Haskell,
Jeff Packard & Debra Smith, Michael & Cheryl DiGiovanni,
Sheila Emborski, Hillary and Sandy Harned, Charles & Marcia Moore, Larry Linder, Winfield Ihlow & Marcia Burrell, and Ellen LaPine. (invite to stand
and then sit)
This is
great, for a congregation our size, but we can do even better!
So what is the Chalice Lighter
Program? And why would you want to join?
The purpose of the Chalice Lighter Program is to promote the growth and
vitality of congregations within the St. Lawrence District in order to extend
Unitarian Universalist principles and faith. There used to be Universalist
churches in many of the towns around here, but ours is the only one remaining
in Oswego County. So, the growth and
vitality of the Unitarian Universalist movement needs
help to maintain a voice of free religion.
The Chalice Lighter Program helps to accomplish this by funding projects
that congregations plan for growth and renewal, projects to which they are
committed but that they would have difficulty affording on their own. An example is when we decided to put an
elevator into our church and make it accessible; the Chalice Lighter Program
helped us pay for it. This has helped us
serve our own congregation better as well as reaching out to ARISE and other
members of the larger community.
When a congregation has a vision of
what they want to do, they contact the Chalice Lighter Program and talk with a
member of the committee to make their application most effective. The committee reviews all the applications
twice a year and selects the ones that seem to be the most promising. Then a call goes out to all the
Chalice Lighters in the District; each Chalice Lighter responds by sending in
the money they have pledged ($20 or more).
All our small pledges add together to make thousands of dollars to help
fund the growth of Unitarian Universalism. It’s quite amazing what can happen
when we work together!
When the Chalice Lighter Program was
started, it was envisioned as a way to support the smaller congregations in
doing projects they couldn’t afford to do.
And this made sense, as there weren’t many Chalice Lighters at first,
and so the calls netted only a few thousand dollars. However, as the Chalice Lighter Program has grown, both in numbers participating and in the amount of
money pledged, I think the last call brought in $11,000. That’s enough money to make a difference to
even a larger congregation.
The recent Gould Discourse, named for
Josephine Gould, an early Unitarian Religious Educator, was presented by the
Rev. Joel Miller of the large UU congregation in Buffalo, N.Y. He talked about the conflict between large
and small churches in the UUA, and commented on how the Chalice Lighter Program
seemed to be geared toward smaller congregations. He said that if the goal of the Chalice
Lighter Program is to promote the growth of Unitarian Universalism, then the
main consideration should be the merit of the application and the potential for
it to lead to growth, rather than the size of the church submitting the
application. This is now happening, and
I applaud it. Rather than being in conflict,
large and small churches can recognize their commonalities as well as their
differences, and strive to work together for the growth of our Unitarian Universalist principles and our Beloved Community.
The Chalice Lighter Program has helped
fund such things as developing new congregations, securing professional
leadership, and programs that promote membership growth. It has also helped to
support the creation of a quiet room in which parents and restless children can
hear the worship service through a video feed on equipment which doubles as a
training vehicle to be used for districtwide
workshops. It all starts with a
congregation having a vision of how they can encourage the growth of Unitarian
Universalism. That vision is articulated in an application to the Chalice
Lighter Program. If approved, that
vision is funded by a large number of Unitarian Universalists
throughout the district, like you, who believe that growth and vitality are
valuable, and that we can help make them a reality. Working together, we can
make a difference. And we all do better
when we all do better. Rising water
lifts all boats.
If you would like to join this effort
and be a Chalice Lighter, please see Mary Perkins after the service today. We have been asked to get new Chalice
Lighters registered as soon as possible so that the next call can be sent
out before the postage rates increase May 12.
Every dollar that is pledged by a Chalice Lighter goes to the
congregations to help fund their projects, and the costs of doing business are
minimized. If you would like more
information, please see the display about the Chalice Lighter Program and talk
with Mary.
Next I would like to look at the
symbol of the flaming chalice itself, its history and its significance. I take the history of the flaming chalice
from a UUA brochure by Donald D. Hotchkiss:
At the opening of
Unitarian Universalist worship services, many
congregations light a flame inside a chalice. This flaming chalice has become a
well-known symbol of our denomination. It unites our members in worship and
symbolizes the spirit of our work.
The chalice and
flame were brought together as a Unitarian symbol by an Austrian artist, Hans
Deutsch, in 1941. Living in Paris during
the 1930s Deutsch drew critical cartoons of Adolf Hitler. When the Nazis invaded Paris in 1940, he
abandoned all he had and fled to the South of France, then to Spain, and
finally, with an altered passport, into Portugal.
There, he met the
Rev. Charles Joy, executive director of the Unitarian Service Committee (USC).
The Service Committee was new, founded in Boston to assist Eastern Europeans,
among them Unitarians as well as Jews, who needed to escape Nazi persecution. [It is fitting that we are talking about this
today, as the Holocaust Remembrance, is being celebrated.]
From his Lisbon
headquarters, Charles Joy oversaw a secret network of couriers and agents. He
felt that this new, unknown organization needed some visual image to represent
Unitarianism to the world, especially when dealing with government agencies
abroad.
Deutsch was most
impressed and soon was working for the USC.
He later wrote to Joy:
“There is something that urges me to tell you ... how much I admire
your utter self denial [and] readiness to serve, to sacrifice all, your time,
your health, your well being, to help, help, help. I am not what you may
actually call a believer. But if your kind of life is the profession of your
faith--as it is, I feel sure--then religion, ceasing to be magic and mysticism,
becomes confession to practical philosophy and --what is more-- to active,
really useful social work. And this
religion-- with or without a heading-- is one to which even a ‘godless’ fellow
like myself can say wholeheartedly, Yes!”
The USC was an
unknown organization in 1941. This was a
special handicap in the cloak-and-dagger world, where establishing trust
quickly across barriers of language, nationality, and faith could mean life
instead of death. Disguises, signs and
countersigns, and midnight runs across guarded borders were the means of
freedom in those days. Joy asked Deutsch
to create a symbol for their papers “to make them look official, to give
dignity and importance to them, and at the same time to symbolize the spirit of
our work...When a document may keep a man out of jail, give him standing with
governments and police, it is important that it look important.”
Thus, Hans
Deutsch made his lasting contribution to the USC and, as it turned out, to
Unitarian Universalism. With pencil and
ink he drew a chalice with a flame. It
was, Joy wrote his board in Boston, “a chalice with a flame, the kind of
chalice which the Greeks and Romans put on their altars. The holy oil burning in it is a symbol of
helpfulness and sacrifice... This was in the mind of the artist. The fact, however, that it remotely suggests
a cross was not in his mind, but to me this also has its merit. We do not limit our work to Christians. Indeed, at the present moment, our work is
nine-tenths for the Jews, yet we do stem from the Christian tradition, and the
cross does symbolize Christianity and its central theme of sacrificial love.”
The flaming
chalice design was made into a seal for papers and a badge for agents moving
refugees to freedom. In time it became a
symbol of Unitarian Universalism all around the world.
The story of Hans
Deutsch reminds us that the symbol of a flaming chalice stood in the beginning
for a life of service. When Deutsch designed the flaming chalice, he had never
seen a Unitarian or Universalist church or heard a
sermon. What he had seen was faith in
action-- people who were willing to risk all for others in a time of urgent
need.
The flaming
chalice has become an integral symbol of Unitarian Universalism today. We light
the chalice at the beginning of most Board meetings as well as worship
services. Small Group Ministry and
Religious Education sessions often begin with a chalice
lighting and some inspirational words. In this church, a child lights two
chalices at the beginning of our worship service, and one is
taken to Religious Education, symbolizing our strong connection with the
children.
But the chalice has not always been
easily accepted in Unitarian Universalist
churches. The Rev. Joel Miller shared
that when he was a young adult, and very active in his home church, many in the
church were resistant to the introduction of a chalice. They felt that the Unitarian Universalist church should be free not only of creeds, but
also of symbols and rituals. But they loved and admired Joel. He was one of them. And sometimes
relationships are everything, and love allows us to try things we otherwise
wouldn’t be willing to try. They started
lighting a chalice for Joel, and continue to do so today.
The Unitarian Universalist
Association recently started using a version of the flaming chalice as its logo
in which the flaming chalice is centered in a circle of light, with flames
extending in all directions. As someone
mentioned to me, it looks rather like clipart.
I prefer the flaming chalice which sits off-center inside a double
circle, representing the two denominations which joined together in 1961 to
become the Unitarian Universalist Association of
congregations. Being off-center
acknowledges that we, like other faiths, are just one among many rather than
being the center of the universe. There
is another artistic rendition of the flaming chalice which looks very much like
a dove, representative of peace and our calling to work for peace. There are many representations of the flaming
chalice, rather than one official one, and we are free to choose what speaks
most powerfully to us. Such is the
Unitarian Universalist way.
Symbols are meant to be useful. We heard about the design of the flaming
chalice for its use by the Unitarian Service Committee in Eastern Europe. We have seen how the flaming chalice has
become a useful symbol in many Unitarian Universalist
congregations and affiliates (including the Unitarian Universalist
Service Committee). But I read recently
that the Rev. George Tyger, who now serves as an army
chaplain after having served the Universalist
congregation in Rochester, N.Y., wears a cross rather than a flaming chalice on
his uniform. He explained that to do his
job he needs soldiers to identify him as a chaplain. They do when he wears a cross, but most of
them wouldn’t if he wore a flaming chalice.
But he is there to serve everyone who needs him. A symbol is meant to be useful.
I remember that when I was growing up
Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message”. And I read in the most recent newsletter from
May Memorial Unitarian Universalist Society that Angus
MacLean, one of our religious educators, delivered an address in 1951 called
“The Method is the Message”. In other
words, how we live our lives speaks volumes about what we believe. This is certainly true in religious education
and how we interact with our children on a daily basis. In newsletters from one of the local
Unitarian Universalist churches, service projects
which are conducted with the children have been called “louder than
words”. When we teach our children the
value of service, through service, it is truly louder than any words we might
speak. This is also true as we interact
with each other and with the wider world.
So, what Hans Deutsch wrote about
Unitarian Universalism and his observation, as a relative outsider, of the
sacrifice and service of its members, was a moving tribute to the significance
of faith in action. One thing that
impresses me about most members of Unitarian Universalist
congregations is that their actions and their words are congruent. In this church we strive to embody our
affirmation of faith, and that’s one reason we say the affirmation together
each Sunday, to remind ourselves of our covenant and our commitment:
“Love is
the doctrine of this church
the quest of truth is its sacrament
and service is its prayer...”
As we light the chalice, may we remember that people throughout the world are joining in this act of faith. As we light the chalice, we honor the light of Truth and reason, the warmth of community with respect for all, and the fire of commitment to freedom and justice. May we do our part to ensure that someday, in every city and village throughout the world, people will be lighting chalices of hope. May we be inspired whenever we light our chalice, and may we always strive to let our actions embody our beliefs. Together we can make a difference. May it be so.