By Thy Light Glowing: Winter Solstice

December 18, 2022

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

We’re in a cave, a dark temple, with a fire and some candles to keep us from complete darkness. The light is low, the sounds hushed. We hum, we sway, we huddle together, smiling at each other across the warm light. We see the night through until day, resting, leaning on each other, holding sleeping children in our arms and across our laps. Blankets draped over us, we tell stories about the dark, and the light-returning. We watch for signs of sun as a symbol of the turning Earth, the days yet to come. For tonight, the sun rests having been wrapped by the night and when he returns, we all awaken to greet the dawn, the new day.

The ancient peoples gathered on the winter solstice around fires, inside caves and temples in just that way. They brought comfort to each other, leaned on each other, sang and danced, and created hope and joy with each other. Into the darkest, longest nights, they brought themselves and their families, they prayed to the gods and goddesses who controlled the turning, or whose stories helped make sense of the cycles of Earth that still define our lives.

During these late December, early January days, hovering around the winter solstice, we have about 9 hours of light. That’s it. Just about enough to last the work day. My alarm goes off at 6:00 every morning and it’s dark as night. Within 2 minutes of opening my eyes, I’m outside in the cold, walking my dogs, looking at the moon. Back indoors, I turn lights on and heat up, trying to trick myself into believing daytime has begun. At 7:00, we start the trek toward school. The sun is beginning to wake, but won’t really be up until 7:30. The morning feels soft. Everything is draped in gray, as if the filter from an old black and white tv show has been laid over it all. Red and green traffic lights seem out of place in the muted colors of the morning. When school is over, the sun is already descending, and dark returns at 4:30, hours before the busyness of the day comes to an end.

We live in the dark. We tend to think of daytime as the hours when the sun is up, but for a portion of the year, we move through our lives in an almost perpetual night-scape, waking and working without the sun to beckon or support us. Plenty of people find this lack of daylight depressing, but I find it comforting. Cold and dark conspire to slow us down, to shift us into a state of semi-hibernation, a natural time for winter sleep, and I welcome it. In the story Rev. Jude told us earlier, the sun is tired, so the night wraps around the sun, allowing the sun to rest while the people wait.

There are many stories told all over the northern hemisphere, handed down over millennia, to put this time in context. In Judaism, Hannukah might not be a holiday of major importance, but it is, nonetheless, a story told every year, partnered with music and games, to explain and help us live into this time of dark. The story itself is problematic since we’re technically celebrating the victory of a ruling family opposed to religious and cultural pluralism, but there’s no reason to get stuck on the details. The Jewish story speaks to our shared lived reality. It was dark, very dark, and with the dark came the cold and in the dark and cold there was fear. The people took a chance on hope, used the oil they had and did the best they could to survive. The fire burned for 8 days, long enough to get them through. They celebrated, and we remember every year that faith can sustain us even when it seems all is lost.

Both the Menorah and Christmas Lights are modern echoes of the ancient impulse to cast off the dark, a collective act of defiance. In the very recent past, from the 2016 election through the pandemic, people have been more likely to leave lights on well into March reportedly because days felt sad and frightening and they needed the reminder of joy the light could bring. I understand that, but instead of seeking the light this year, I’m enjoying the dark. It might be a Covid thing. For a good long while, the world slowed down. Recently, it sped up again, and while I’m not romanticizing anything about Covid, the experience of modern life in slow-motion was healing. I’m sorry we seem to have forgotten. As a society, we’ve kicked into high gear again. Before the light returns, I’m hoping for a little more time being comforted by the dark.

In the dark, edges become blurry. In the light, we can see each finger on our own hands, and where our wrist extends outside the sleeve sitting on it. In the dark, it all melts together. My sleeve and wrist and fingers and hands. And when someone puts their hand in mine, I can feel them as distinct, but I see them as part of my own body. We begin to blend, as people will if they are walking arm in arm or a group is huddling together in the dark and the cold, keeping warm. In the dark, we bend and breathe and feel the energy of each other, but the hard edges of our bodies aren’t discernable like they are in the light when we stand apart, hands in pockets.

There is mystery in the dark. There’s growth in the dark. Plant a seed beneath the soil, and the seed will blossom. If you have an idea, a thought, something dangerously brilliant, plant that beneath the soil too so it can take root. It’s in the wet Earth, away from the people and the eyes and busyness of our lives that genius has the space it needs. Babies also need dark, deep in a womb where eyes are closed, but experience profound dependence, and a love not yet quantifiable.

And it’s from the dark that our new world will be born, too. Winter is a time for reflection. A time to sit, to think, to wonder and consider. A time, also, to sleep, to curl up under a pile of blankets, letting imagination run wild.

One of the reasons we moved this service a little earlier – as early as we could possibly get, really, given the availability – was that we didn’t want people walking home in the dark. But, maybe we should have rethought that. Walking home as the sun is going down on a late Sunday afternoon is a perfect time to dream the new world.

We need that time. The world is turning. Turning toward or turning into or turning away from what? What is being born? Who are we in this new time? The dark gives us that space. If we can’t see everything in stark relief, we can pay attention to the interior landscape, to the meadows and shorelines and breathing trees of our own bodies. The world gets larger, we get larger, when we have time to dream in the dark.

David Whyte writes:

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and

the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Here in the dark this winter solstice, I plan to wonder about what should be cast off, and what should be reclaimed. I am going to think about who I belong to, who my people are, which bodies should melt into mine and which should be held at arm’s distance. And I’m going to dream the new world, one where everyone has been claimed, everyone has people and dreams that have room to take root.

This sermon wanted to be written in poetry, and music and dance. As I was writing, I kept complaining to myself that my sermon doesn’t have a point. But, that is the point. It’s not time to know or be right or clear. It’s time to grapple, to wander, to lie back and dream big. That’s the invitation of the solstice, of the deep dark that envelopes us. I know how important words are in this congregation and that I’ve already cut sermons nearly in half, but today, seven days from Christmas Eve, three from Winter Solstice, and just two hours from the first night of Hanukkah, what’s beckoning me isn’t the hard line of prose, but the soft body of poetry. Instead of explaining through well researched argument or posing life-defining questions, let’s bury ideas in the soil and dance over them, summoning the sun to birth a fresh year. During this Winter Solstice, let’s hum, and sway, and lock arms and huddle under blankets around a fire together while we dream the new world.