For years I have honored Winter Solstice as a kind of a landmark of survival. We made it this far into the dark night (huray!) and now we start turning back into the summer sun. My personal tradition was to toast the sun at sundown even if was so cloudy that I had to go look up the exact moment on a weather internet site. I turned off all the lights in my house and start a fire in the fireplace. In one of my old houses I had a fireplace in the kitchen. I prepared a whole meal over by candlelight and over the fire. I invited friends over and we’d all drink too much and I’d try to read poems or liturgies about light. At the end of the meal we’d all peel an orange to honor the slow return of daylight.
It was a lot of fun but the whole thing was also a complete resistance to the darkening season. A denial that there could be anything good in the dark and cold. In this winter of disease, ill-governance, ongoing climatic change, isolation, sudden disruption of our lives and economies, it finally occurred to me that maybe there is something important for us to find in the dark.
As I’ve read other people’s writings and thinking about Soltice, they also try to frame this hinge day with light. Some try to reach back past living memory to a time when everyone lived by daylight and firelight. We really didn’t start to exert day and night control over our light until the late 1700s. If we call a generation as around 20 years, then we have exerted control over our light for about 10, 12 generations or so. Is it dark at 5:30 p.m? That’s okay, turn on a light and pick up a book or take food out of the refrigerator. Turn up the radiator, draw the curtains close. Winter darkness, winter cold has no control over our daily life. We can go about the same projects and tasks as if we were in June or March or September.
But sometimes not with the same energy. We may not remember what it was like to live at the mercy of the sunset and the sunrise but our bodies remember. My daughters, myself, my parents, my friends – all of us slow down at this time of year. We lose energy, we become sad or angry. My worst grades always came in the third quarter when I was in school. Here in Germany, the medical people prescribe vitamin D as a mood lifter and the internet is full of solar lights for sale to try and fool our bodies back into full summer performance levels.
I think we’re caught up in a culture that demands full performance from everyone at all times. There is little room for weakness. There is no patience for the time necessary to grounding, for rest, for regeneration. Our need for rest is denied and worse, we buy in and participate in the medicalization and stigmalization of what is perhaps a normal response to the world as we have found it for millennia and still find it today. Creation all around us, even here in the cities, clearly takes a step back from production both as a way to survive this cold season but also as a way to prepare for the next growth season. Maybe we should do this too.
We have always known about solstice. We’ve clearly had a long standing need to know which days frame the sun’s journey from low on the winter horizon to the heights of the summer sky. Ancient structures from simple stones to complex temples were built all over the world with a window or a door or even just a simple slit in the stone that would light up when the sun reached the end of its seasonal swing. Clearly we have wanted to know where we are in these twin seasons of light and darkness.
We can imagine that each swing of sun would be met with celebrations of bonfire, food and drink, gatherings as well as any other ritual we could think of at the time. I certainly understand the desire to see hope as we move back toward a longer day. As I’ve said before, I’ve personally set up significant celebrations for the lessening of darkness. I’m not the only one. Many of the major religions include some sort of festival of light around this time of year.
Christianity centers the birth of Christ around this time of darkness. Christianity, at its ancient, pre-marketing culture core, also treats Advent as a time of penance, of self-examination and preparation for the entry of God into this world. Advent is a time to get ready for the community to began again retelling the story of how death itself is overcome for everyone. The middle of a dark winter is a great time to think about death. We can’t help it, no matter how much we’d prefer to change the subject. Yet, like darkness, it still comes along with all its mysteries. What is it like to die? What comes next?
Winter solstice is a season of darkness. It is the day of maximum darkness. Is there a gift for us in this darkness? Is there a message, a way of seeing or living when we allow ourselves to be centered in the night? Shall we pull out our Jungian text books or our Joseph Campbell Myth reclaiming videos and then ask ourselves what do we fear right now? What are we hiding from? What parts of ourself terrify us so much that we try to shut it out of our daylight minds? What happens if we notice the the darts of movement outside our campfire’s circle of light? If we observe the sounds that come to use in the middle of the night?
What happens if we invite one of those sounds to come into the light with us so we can see its form and shape?
Not all of the sounds and shapes, just one.
Who or what dances in our internal darkness that is ready to be seen? That we are ready to see?
I think this year for Solstice I will still light a candle but not because I want to continue to resist the darkness. Instead I think I’ll sit in the darkness first for a while before I strike match to flame. I will ask the darkness to tell me what I am hiding from, what I need to see. The darkness may keep its peace.
Eventually then I will light the candle not as a resistance but as an act of hope and celebration. Darkness can be embraced if we know it is not the only story for us to live. We know that light and green growing is also a part of our story.
Strange things can happen in the darkness. Angels can suddenly appear to shepherds, or to anyone really, singing incredible stories about new life for the whole world still hidden within a new born infant. Dreams can come to men and women with direction to act as protectors of the hidden gift.
We can find Hope itself in times of darkness, out there on the edge of light and dark.
This year I want to ask what is hidden and wants to be seen by me. And then I will put fire to the candle because light returns. It always returns and the darkness can not overcome it.