Our chalice, too, is a different kind of "cauldron," a vessel from which energy flames forth, an ancient symbol giving both new meaning and identity for half a century now in our liberal religious tradition and, at the same time, tying us back to other, older, earlier human experience.

So, this morning I invite you to look with me for some of the significance for our time and experience of the bowl, the cup, the kettle, the trough, the oven, as variant symbols pointing to that mystifying reality which invites us to deeper awareness and understanding of life leading to more profound participation in the world which sustains and nurtures us.

Let's begin by considering more carefully than usual the folk festival on our immediate horizon. Be forewarned: the more we search out the history and background of folk or secular celebrations, the more we we are likely to bump up against religious expressions from the past. For the leftovers from bygone world views often prove to have amazing tenacity, persisting because, even though they evolved within specific and, we are told, outworn religious traditions, they nonetheless continue to speak to and for some essential part of human experience. It is as if, alongside our predecessor, we were standing with our noses pressed hard against the glass of mystery.

This whole season of the year is especially replete with year-end/year beginning celebrations. First there was Labor Day to mark summer's ending. Then the Jewish community used the eight days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur to make a solemn assessment, thanksgiving and atonement that they might fully inaugurate a new year. Not long afterward, in reference to the European take-over of this continent beginning some five centuries ago, some of us had a three-day-weekend to mark the landing of Columbus in this hemisphere--an event that marked the ending of the known and loved for those then indigenous to this land and the beginning of what we now embrace as our country.

And, of course, before we get to that final frantic eight days of year's end we call Christmas and New Year's, there are yet two more harvest signifying the ending and the all but invisible beginning of the next growing year. Thanksgiving, which usually picks up on the Columbus theme with its images of needy European immigrants and helpful indigenous Americans breaking bread together, is of relatively recent provenance. But the harvest celebration with the most ancient roots of all, possibly older than the ram's horn call to the High Holy Days, akin to the subsequent Sukkoth festival--that new year tradition that blends the agricultural harvest and the recognition of human mortality is the one that is upon us this week. Of course, we're talking about what we now call Halloween.

Christianity christened--named-- the holiday, as it co-opted the more ancient celebration by instituting All Saints Day on November first so that October thirty-first then became All Hallow's Eve. But the older festival, Samhain, one of the Witches' Sabbaths, had earlier been a harvest celebration recognizing the departure of life. For the tillers of the soil it marked the disappearance of the spirit of life that made the grain grow. For everyone it was a reminder of the spirit that had once animated the friends, family, acquaintances whom life had at last used up. With those Old Ones we notice, too, that even the sun seems dispirited at this season: nights grow ever longer. But experience --ours and that of those who have been here before-- leads us to the recognition that, though the months to come may be dark and cold and apparently inimical to life, nonetheless time moves around. The harvested seeds will wait in their husky little tombs until the moisture and lengthening sun of springtime will raise them from their death-like hibernation to grow and green once more. So, for now, we make a festival of playing at scaring ourselves to death, like our predecessors, making merry that we might better face the gloomy weeks ahead and win through to the spring.

The left-overs, as is the literal meaning of superstition, certainly color our 20th Century version of this ancient of festival. Melding the gifts of the indigenous peoples in this hemisphere to the older customs brought from Europe, for instance, we now brave the darkness with jack-o-lanterns made of pumpkins where once they were carved-out turnips. Dried corn stalks and skeletons, masks and costumes, black cats and witches are everywhere: stalks and bones to symbolize the dying season; masks and costumes, the departed spirits; the witch (literally, the wise one) with her familiar, the cat, presiding over the festivities, a vestige of a once revered, now debunked religious recognition of the birth-death-regeneration cycles of living on this planet Earth. It is the Witch, the Wise One, who tends the steaming crucible of circling time and the mysteries of living and dying which it symbolizes.

In one of the Unitarian Universalist congregations I once served, it was tradition at this time of year for the children to make their costumed parade during the service. The kids, and then the adults, too, were invited to circle round a black cauldron (that sometimes contained dry ice to make it "steam" and into that pot each was invited to throw a piece of paper on which had been written the evils he or she would like to be rid of. Someone would recite Shakepeare as they paraded:

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble

So we made our own "hell-broth" of all the abhorrent things and attitudes and situations we wished we could wish away.

But that utterly negative character of the cauldron does not speak fully of its origin nor reveal completely the needs and experiences it once would, and still could symbolize. The negativity, its sinister aura, comes to us as a result of our very specific Jewish and Christian conditioning. In the Torah, in Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy, witchcraft and enchantment and sorcery are No-No's. Indeed, witches are to be killed, preferably by stoning--capital punishment, unfortunately, has a long history! So much for the Law. In the Prophets and the Histories the same holds true. You may remember that, according to the story of Saul's encounter with the Witch of Endor, there was no lack of credence in the efficacy of witchcraft, just the conviction that nothing good could come from it. Similar injunctions and reiterations of listings of evils including witchcraft equated with sorcery recur in Christian Scriptures, but the charicatured negativity so well depicted now at Halloween most probably derives more directly from attitudes that were instigated by a Papal bull issued in 1484. Both the ancient Hebrews and the medieval Christians were threatened by indigenous religions that referred to the sacred, the source of life, as feminine and so the patriarchal systems with their masculine deities had to pull out all the stops to put them down in order to retain their own authority. As inheritors of the Jewish-Christian continuum, then, we do not easily recognize Hazel the Wart-nosed as the Gray Panther she really is, the sagacious stirrer of a brew that is not concocted to poison anyone nor will it simply absorb and utterly destroy the evils we consign to it, but rather ...

But wait a minute; let's look first at one of the alternate myths from a religious tradition that was eclipsed by Christianity for a clearer idea of where the cauldron came from and what its contents are:

There is a curious old, old story retold in the Welsh Mabinogion written down some 400 years ago. It begins with a couple who have two children. The daughter is the most beautiful girl ever; the son the ugliest boy. The mother, Caridwen by name, wished to compensate for her son's handicap by rendering him most intelligent. So she began by boiling up a cauldron of inspiration and knowledge which had to simmer for a year and a day. Since she needed to add certain herbs in season throughout that time, she enlisted the aid of a youngster called Little Gwion to stir the concoction while she gathered herbs. Toward year's end three burning drops splashed out and fell on Gwion's finger. He immediately thrust the finger into his mouth and suddenly understood not only the nature and meaning of all things past, present, and future, but as a result also realized that it was Caridwen's intention to destroy him when his work was accomplished. So Little Gwion fled. Caridwen pursued him like a screaming hag. Equipped with the wisdom of the cauldron, he turned himself into a hare; Caridwen became a greyhound and gave chase. He dove into the river and became a fish; she became an otter. He flew into the air as a bird; she became a hawk. He became a grain of wheat on the barn floor; she was a hen who scratched, uncovered and swallowed him.

Back in her own shape, Caridwen discovered she was pregnant and, after the usual nine months she bore Little Gwion as a child of such beauty she could not bring herself to kill him, so she encased him in a leather bag and cast him into the sea. He was rescued, of course, in due time, renamed, and, as a result of his inordinate wisdom, lived on to rescue his rescuer when the need arose.
(abridged and rephrased from Graves, THE WHITE GODDESS)

You may well recognize many mythic themes in this tale. But let's look more closely at the cauldron.

Cardiwen's cauldron was both in here and out there; she herself was both the vessel of incarnation and birth, and the one who presides over the kettle of inspiration and knowledge--the physical and the intellectual suggesting the spiritual mystery of transformation. She represents both life and death, womb and tomb, Ma and Maw, if you will; she is also the Muse who enables each individual to transform the terrors of the oughtnesses and caughtnesses of the constant round of the years into the wisdom and understanding that allow us to embrace our living and our mortality and to minister to each other. Here is a mythic message affirming the both-ands of our existence--both light and dark, masculine and feminine, self-serving and selfless service.

These old both-and mysteries, however, fly in the face of the either-or mind set with which patriarchal Judaism and patristic Christianity have colored our world. Nonetheless, all the mysogynistic meddling, the witch hunts, and the violent repressive measures over the years have not fully expunged belief in the presence and efficacy of mystery; nor have they erased the subliminal recognition of our need for and our responsibility to the universe as transforming Mother.

Even in the religious systems which pervade our contemporary experience with alternate mythic symbolisms, there is still a powerful use of grain as a spiritual symbol, be it as unleavened bread for the Seder meal, or as a wafer-become-the-flesh-of-God in the Roman Mass. A paragraph by the Czech writer Karel Capek goes a long way to explain why.

You wouldn't believe what a fine job it is to bake rolls,
and especially to bake bread. My poor old dad had a bakery,
so I know all about it. You see, in making bread, you've got two
or three important secrets which are practically holy. The first
secret is how to make the yeast; you have to leave it in the trough
and then there's a sort of mysterious change takes place under the
lid; you have to wait until the flour and water turn into live yeast.
Then the dough is made and mixed with what they call a mash-ladle;
and that's a job that looks like a religious dance or something of that
sort. Then they cover it with a cloth and let the dough rise; that's
another mysterious change, when the dough grandly rises and bulges,
and you mustn't lift the cloth to peep underneath-- I tell you, it's as
fine and strange as the process of birth. I've always had the feeling
that there was something of a woman about that trough. And
the third secret is the actual baking, the thing that happens to
the soft and pale dough in the oven. Ye gods, when you take out
the loaf, all golden and russet, and it smells more delicious than
a baby, it's such a marvel-- why I think that when these three
changes are going on, they ought to ring a bell in the bakeries,
the same as they do in church at the elevation of the host.

A short sentence I ran across some years back has been flitting like a Halloween bat back and forth across my mind ever since I first read that. At last I have found where it fits. It belongs to our activities and considerations this season. The words are those of Sheldon Kopp:

An evil
is potential vitality
in need of transformation.

This week as the mummers cavort and the pumkins grin, may we remember that deeper than an old folk need to scare off haunts and spirits on All Hallows Eve is the recognition of the both-and nature of our existence. And more, when we see the depictions of the Great Cauldron presided over by the Hag Caridwen may we also remember that there is no away to throw people and attitudes and things to-- neither the homeless nor the criminal, neither garbage nor nuclear wastes, neither violence nor carelessness-- none of the negatives we would be free of. Instead, we need to recall that the Cauldron of Transformation, the universal vessel of life holds and enfolds everything and all of us, boiling, yeasting, baking, fermenting, seething, changing. We may seek to institutionalize the "useless," hide our garbage, bury our nuclear wastes and cast our evil intentions and irresponsibilities into a pot as a symbolic negation of those negatives, but they will not disappear. The old wisdom still holds true: the negatives may only be transformed.

The world itself is a cauldron, its contents always in process, and if we would garner life and wisdom, we must become involved, risking all that we are in behalf of that transformation. Like the white bowl gong responding tobeing struck by emitting an eternal, spiraling tone; like the chalice that withstands the searing heat so that the flame may make light; like the cauldron that is the earth seething with the being born and the dying to make way for new life--like each of these we have the opportunity to be vessels of transformation, discerning the vitality in the negatives and evils we see within and about us and working to bring the ghosts and goblins of our time in consonance with that which serves the wholeness of Life.