Learning from the Youngersters

2025-1207—Learning from the Youngers
UCM—Rev. Rita Capezzi

I find the holiday season a time of challenge, I would say a time of risk. Along with all the levity, disappointment raises its ugly head so often—a gift not quite right, a message in a Christmas card jarring, a family gathering annoying, even painful. It is a time for family, however you define “family,” and families are complex. I mean, there are so many people in them, doing their irritating people-y things. Their excessive things. Their overwhelming things. Their mean-spirited things. Their self-destructive and devastating things. Layers of parents and caregivers doing their best with the resources they have been granted and they have garnered through the work of their lives, doing their best, making mistakes, finding the path sometimes hard and sometimes easy but always risky. Always risky, this living in families, living in communities, trying to celebrate the goodness of our place in the web of existence, trying to draw meaning from what might sometimes seem threadbare stories of the past, meant to sustain us and instead giving us heartburn—literal and spiritual.

We turned the Christmas story on its head this morning, its truth not necessarily our salvation in a Savior-child but rather in compassion and companionship, in recognition of the refugee, in being “science-based.” Let me tell you one of our family stories, a story that turns truth not only upside down but inside out.

My son loved the TV show “Bill Nye, the Science Guy.” You know that one? Evan was about four or five years old, munching his sliced apples and staring at Bill explaining about melanin. Melanin is the substance in our skin that gives it color. The higher the concentration of melanin, the darker the color. It’s a simple, scientific truth about our bodies, a truth we all know that has meaning beyond the bald facts, meaning that has historically enabled a ranking of humans in ways that dishonors us all.

Evan listened and stared at the tv and munched his apples. And then he said, “Oh, I get it. We’re all African American.” Now, my boy is a white boy, skin more fair than mine. He had not yet learned the story of our human evolution from one Mother, the Eve of eastern Africa. He did not yet seem to know about the hierarchies of worth and value that Western culture impose on our bodies. But he had lots of people in his life who lived in skin with much more concentrated melanin than his or mine. And in his little brain, cogitating away, fueled on apples, he put together the two and two that his four years of lived experience had yielded, and he flipped the script, equalizing us all, with the most marginalized as the measure. He turned the dominant paradigm inside out, rendering status and power irrelevant. His answer was not, strictly speaking, “correct.” And yet it was wisdom, from the mouths of babes.

I’ve had time to observe this congregation, to watch the interactions and the patterns. Here is some of what I have witnessed. Such great tenderness between parents and children, including so often between young adults and their parents, as well as older adults and their aging parents. Such great willingness to let the children be children—they are sometimes noisy, they literally play with fire, they like throwing pies in peoples’ faces. I have witnessed the tenderness and the annoyance between siblings—so very real. I have witnessed parents longing for help with raising their children, seeking the guidance of elders and anyone with a shred of an idea for how to provide their babies with a spiritual and an ethical center, firmly planted, even if they don’t attend this UCM community, or any UU church per se. I have witnessed young adults wanting to be part of this admittedly older congregation and also taking more and more delight in being with themselves, building deeper connections of time and place and activity. These are your norms.

And so, how to take the risk of the holiday season? How do you open yourself to unexpected wisdom? How do you engage and amplify your norms? Look for the joy. Look for the excitement. You are not obligated to feel it, or even partake in it. But ask about it and let someone tell you about it, especially a younger. You might just find that a younger has as complex a sense of the season as an older does. And we are, most of us here, older to someone else. You don’t have to celebrate the season fully if you don’t want to. You also don’t have to be a humbug about it, your grinchy-self can grow a heart three sizes bigger with a bit of contemplation, analysis, and self-awareness. There may be more, or different, truth and meaning than you might have expected, more than you could generate yourself. And so the potluck can provide you with wisdom, to go along with that little bit of heartburn.

We Unitarian Universalists are seekers on a quest, “a quest to discover truth and meaning. Sometimes we think we’ve found it—But truth has a way of coming in disguise.” It comes in stories and silliness. It comes in questions and unexpected answers. It comes in wacky and wrong and ridiculous answers that bend the way things are, that offer insights we cannot come to merely from knowledge or even experience. Wisdom lies in what happens between people—when we really listen to each other, not just to tell or be repeated but to talk and exchange and see the wider perspective that is in each of us, the depth that is each of us, our surfaces important and only that—the upper edge of who we each are.

Let our time together, in community, in worship, in companionship be always an acknowledgment “of the never-ending journey toward truth and meaning, and our appreciation of those we learn from,” including our young ones. May we claim them as ours, not to own them, not to control them, but to honor them with our attention, with our confidence, and with our love. And let us be faithful to the pull of the season, it all its complexity, allowing joy and love to buoy you, to open you, if not to the message of Christmas or the promise of the burning light of Chanukah or the turning earth once more toward the sun, at least to each other, younger and older alike. May it always be so.