The Fire of Commitment in the New Year
Yesterday I attended the Fire Communion at DuPage Unitarian Universalist Church in Naperville. The focus of the service is to burn away our fears, hurts, losses, and angers of the prior year and start afresh with our hope, faith, and love.
We hold fire in our hands (controlled by the simple candle) and watch the magic of the flame that breathes the air we breathe and transforms into something not itself. We then literally write down what we want to let go of and burn them in a caldron. This ritual helps us mark the old and enter the new year renewed.
Calendars are a human need to make sense of time. They are necessary and ground us, but I don't like beginnings and endings. Beginnings mean expectations. I hold hope, but don't like to get comfortable with passive expectation. Meriam Webster defines hope as "to cherish a desire with anticipation: to want something to happen or be true." I love the idea of cherishing something with anticipation. Anticipation opens up to possibility, to the infinite.
The "wanting" of something to be true is what gets me into the trouble of wishful and magical thinking (expectation). We cannot want something into being (with respect to my pals who believe in "manifesting magic"). Want is a substitute for what I really mean: to love something into being.
I don't like endings because endings can mean loss. But then I think of the "Death" card in the Tarot. Not all loss is final, but a beginning point. The death of injustice is positive. Its destruction makes room for creation.
I have a friend who doesn't hold tight to hope either. She believes in faith. For her, that is a trust in something bigger than us. I keep faith, but the idea of absolute trust that something will happen for which there is no proof makes me pause. How I envy the ability to have absolute trust. We can look at past events and draw logical conclusions about what may happen. We have empirical facts, and a bit of expectation (realistic or not) and optimism mixed in. Having faith is an active choice to work with something bigger than us. Faith supports our place in the community. Faith is a leap of bravery we take together with others.
To me, hope and faith must be fueled by love to be meaningful. Love is bigger than us. Love is transpersonal. It is. It is everywhere and accessible if we allow it in. That love is a noun. It is. Love is.
Hope and faith require us to love something into being. Love, the transpersonal, is also the personal. Our love must be accompanied by action. Only with action are hope and faith able to transform the world. Love in community is the driving force of justice. Our fire of commitment is the courage to endure through adversity and create a better world. Love keeps our feet rooted to the ground, as hope and faith burn brighter and ascend.
The Fire Communion ritual reminds us that hope can move with grace (a result of faith) in the face of adversity. With faith, we work with our communities in strife and joy. Love is a choice we make. Love is the place where hope, faith, and action form with the goal of peace, of acceptance, of wholeness. In this time of pain and loss, I hold hope and faith that we will dwell in a place of love and its warming comfort, and practice courage to overcome the difficulties ahead.
In the spirit of love, buoyed by hope and faith, I share the words to the hymn, "Fire of Commitment." I wish you hope, faith, and love, and the courage to bring forth a better, more just, and compassionate world. We have the power to do so together. Let's go forth and make it so.
The Fire of Commitment
by Jason Shelton and Mary Katherine Morn
From the light of days remembered burns a beacon bright and clear
Guiding hands and hearts and spirits into faith set free from fear.
When the fire of commitment sets our mind and soul a blaze
When our hunger and our passion meet to call us on our way
When we live with deep assurance of the flame that burns within,
Then our promise finds fulfillment and our future can begin.
From the stories of our living rings a song both brave and free,
Calling pilgrims still to witness to the life of liberty.
From the dreams of youthful vision comes a new, prophetic voice,
Which demands a deeper justice built by our courageous choice
You can listen to it here.