First Parish Unitarian UniversalistLeap Day –The Sacred Leap of Fun
A Homily by Lyn Stangland Cameron
Director of Religious Education
First Parish Unitarian Universalist – Canton
February 29, 2004
Well, – today is it! Today, this very day, leap year day is where all those minutes that have been getting lost for the past three years or so have ended up. We got short-changed about 6 hours in 2001, 2002, and 2003! And combining them with the hours that would be extra in 2004, the calendar adds them to the end of February!
But why February? I mean, these past few days have been pretty nice, but it’s still February, and now everything is melting and covered with mud! The ice is mushy so you can’t slide and skate. Why not add the extra day in May when everything is freshly green, new flowers bloom daily and the trees are covered with bright baby leaves? Why not October when the air is fragrant and often sunny warm even when it is crisp and the sky startlingly blue behind the scarlet, vermillion and yellow of new England autumn? Or, better yet, why not add the time to July or August so we could all have an extra day of summer vacation?
Why February! February is cold and the nights are still long - it is the very tail end of winter. The almanac tells us that February is often when we get our biggest snowfalls, and now, but this year without a blanket of snow, we mostly see only browns and grays---some days the sky is gray all day long. So why add this precious whole extra day, now, in February?
Well the story is complicated, you see, a day is not a exactly a day ---nature is not regular! Each “day” is not 24 hours long –it’s really 24.0159 hours long and so adding up all those extra minutes means that a real year is 365 days, 5 hours 48 minutes and 45.06768 seconds long….it is almost 365 and a quarter days, but not quite….so since each year has about an extra quarter of a day, we accumulate a day every four years and make it up by having a leap year. Every four years – we add a February 29. Pretty tricky! (from Leapin Lizards, Dion Neutra, R Cronen and Lisa Masson)
But , adding an extra day every four years, we actually add a little too much time and so …every hundred years we also have to skip a leap year so in 1700 and 1800 and 1900 the lack of a leap year allowed the accumulated time to be added to the time that was building up for the previous hundred but even that didn’t fix everything because this over shoots by a quarter of a day every hundred years so every four hundred years the century mark does have a leap year and so 2000 did have a leap years day!
And if you think this is confusing, In the sixteenth century when Pope Gregory XIII recognized that their calendar had never addressed the problem, Europe was operating under the Julian calendar which had been developed in the court of Julius Caesar, by the sixteenth century all those extra 11 minutes and fourteen seconds per year had been adding up to 10 extra days- –so they decided to simply make up the days and Pope Gregory declared that in 1582 they would make up the time by simply leaping October 4 to October 15 or “leaping forward solving the problem of the accumulated days!”
(except of course for Protestant countries and England and her colonies – that was us! We kept the old Julian calendar until 1752, two hundred years later, and by that time we had to drop another day, so in 1752, Parliament expunged, deleted, dropped those days so the calendar simply leaped forward dropping 11 days from September in 1752!!)
So the original “leap” was a 10 day jump! – Now we get this one “extra” special gift of a day only every four years and I think that makes it an extra “special” treasure of a day. It gives us an opportunity to consider what a day is worth. This is a good time to think just a bit about all those days that fly by each week; think of all the Tuesdays and Wednesdays that just zip past those bedtimes when we simply sigh because we can hardly remember what we did all day, And time acts a little crazy too because for you youngsters a year seems to take forever, but for many of us older folks, as we move on, not just days, but whole years seem fly past us. And I bet most years most of us might have barely noticed the passing of “leap year day” when we wrote a letter or a check –unless you or someone in your family is a leap year day baby and celebrates four birthdays at a time! Mostly “leap year day” is no big deal.
But this year Leap Year Day is today -on a Sunday – the day we gather together here at First Parish to celebrate our faith and our community. And Leap year day won’t happen on a Sunday again until 2032! So we want us all to notice it and enjoy it ---to recognize how much it is the “noticing” that adds meaning to our lives!
It is by paying attention and noticing that we see. Actually I was talking with Elaine Lowry at our watercolor workshop and we agreed that one of the most enjoyable things about painting is that it helps one to really see – you have to truly look and see things differently – you might walk by a tree for your whole life and never see it until you try to paint the way its shadow falls across the lawn. We remember because we take the time to see, to notice to make meaning of the events in our lives.
And sometimes I look back into my life and I wonder why I remember some particular event or story? Why did I memeorize and why do I still recall this poem?
(Puffin Poem:
Oh there once was a Puffin, just the shape of a muffin
And he lived on an island in the4 bright blue sea,
And he ate little fishes that were most deliucious,
And he had them for breakfast and he had them for tea.
But the poor little Puffin,
He couldn’t play nothing,
For he hadn’t anybody to play with at all.
SO he sat on his island and he cried for a while,
And he felt very lonely and he felt very small.
Then along came the fishes and they said,
“If you wishes, you can have us for playmates instead of for tea.”
Now they all play together in all sorts of weather,
And the Puffin eats pancakes, like you and like me!)
I have no idea just when or why I memorized that poem. But, was it that poem which lies behind the little fascination I have with puffins? Is it that I have always thought the Puffin story carries within it one of the secrets of life? It is a story that reminds us that it is not power or riches that offer us hope and happiness, but a sharing and caring community.
In our families the times and events we tend to notice and remember most fondly are the funny ones – the stories that we tell again and again, and everyone starts to laugh at the beginning of the story, like the time at my very clean and tidy grandma’s house when my little son Christopher sat with his bowl of peaches quietly stirring and calmly repeating to himself, “I don’t like bugs, I don’t like bugs, I don’t like bugs,” Until at last I looked to see why he wasn’t eating to notice that he did indeed have a couple of little black bugs floating in the peach juice ! Of course at various times over the years someone in my family will simply say “ I don’t like bugs” and we all laugh.
We notice things and they become part of the stories of our lives. And when we notice and smile or laugh we are able to experience something important for our health and well being – something holy and good and sacred- something that helps us understand what it means to be fully alive – to experience being human and religious.
In the words of, A. Powell Davies, long time minister of All Souls UU in Washington DC, "religion has been thought too sacred for laughter; nobody seems to have suggested that laughter itself might be a sacred gift. Why should it be thought that no one should laugh in church? And so seldom remembered that laughter could have something to do with refreshing the soul?"
And so here we are on this bright morning of this blessing of the gift of a day – let us share this time by sharing our stories and the sacred gift of fun and partake of refreshment of our souls.