Throughout the eight nights of Hanukkah it is traditional to play a sort of gambling game with the dreidel, a little top with Hebrew characters on the side which indicate how many pieces you may take out or must put in. But the game only works because at the start of each round each player contributes to the common pot. You never know how much you will take out; you only know that the game is possible because each person contributes.
What will you put in for the common pot of a community today?
“The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect [people].” –George Eliot
How might your imperfections help you to move the world forward?
In Sweden Santa Lucia, or Saint Lucy’s Day is welcomed in by a girl with a crown of evergreens and candles on her head. January 13 was the solstice in the old, Julian candle, so the day honoring Saint Lucy was a way of ushering in the growing light. But in Sweden you will have to wait quite a long time past December before you will see much of any light at all.
How do you find patience to wait for the light when it is nowhere to be seen?
Many families that celebrate Christmas welcome in the season with an Advent calendar that has a little window that opens on a special picture for each night of the Advent season, or which harbors a small treat to be discovered each day.
How might it change your experience of this season if you looked at each day with the expectation that it was holding some little hidden treat for you?
“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”
–T.S. Eliot, from “East Coker”
How do you still your soul when you are impatient for change?
