The Coming of the Sun: a three-part solstice sermon

© Copyright Peter Trimming and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

This is the text of the three-part sermon delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist on Sunday, December 20th, 2015.  I was weaving worship with two of our lay Worship Weavers.  Given the way our conversations about the theme unfolded, and the nature of the service itself, we decided that each of us would offer a perspective on our topic.  This is a collaborative version of the "jewel" form of sermon construction -- holding up and idea and, as if it were a diamond, turning it took look at several different facets.  You can listen to the sermon if you'd like, as always.  (I'd note that Lucy Wayne became a part of the Worhip Weavers' Guild this year, and then promptly moved with her husband to Israel.  It was especially delightful to be able to welcome her into the pulpit during a visit back to the U.S.)

Part 1:  Lucy Wayne

Today we are exploring our church’s theme for December, expectation. We are also considering the phenomenon of the coming of the sun.

Two days from now is the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice, the time that the sun is absent from the sky for the longest amount of time. This is immediately followed by an increase in light as Earth tilts closer to our big star.

As the longest night of the year approaches, I invite you join me in an inquiry into darkness.

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What comes to mind when you hear the word? Art, psychology - even social agreements - form from distinct understandings of what darkness brings.

For many, it brings welcome rest and respite - even relief from physical ailments like a migraine.

Darkness can be a place of things happening unseen, of gestation and the unconscious. It is in the dark oasis of the cocoon that a caterpillar works through its chrysalis stage before becoming a butterfly.

Some equate the word with an idea of badness. In Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness the eponymous land was not only a site of mystery but a place of dread.

Many children fear the dark and what it might contain - many adults too.  

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For just a couple of minutes right now, let us consider the darkness of pain. People who have experienced depression often describe it as a dark time. Suffering becomes so vast it eclipses even the expectation of brightness. In this kind of darkness, it feels like it is “always 3 o’clock in the morning” inside of us, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The contemplative stream of Catholicism has a name for this period. They call it: the Dark Night of the Soul, a phrase that was coined by Saint John of the Cross in the 16th century.

To simplify greatly, the dark night of the soul is when a faithful believer experiences no connection with their God. It is bewildering and scary.

One of the reasons it’s so scary is the fact there’s no “calendar” for when - or if - the dawn will come. This phase lasted astonishing lengths for people considered saints. Saint Paul of the Cross lived through a 45-year dark night of the soul. Mother Theresa beat him with 49 years in the night.

Whether an official dark night of the soul or an emotionally or physically crushing time, sometimes we cannot track where we - and the metaphorical sun - are in the rhythmic cycle.

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This brings us to a key question - Are there any advantages to not expecting an increase of light?

If we are not distracted from the present by a hope our hard situation will change, we can fully take stock of reality. This can give us the motivation we would not otherwise have to respond appropriately.

For example, recognizing incompatibility in a failing relationship and letting go of a conviction it can improve can give us the strength to move on.

Similarly, acknowledging a sick loved one is not going to get better - the sun of healing is not coming - can help us do the hard work of being present with someone who is dying.

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To further explore this concept, what are disadvantages to expecting the coming of the sun?

In concentration camps during the Holocaust, it was well-known among veteran prisoners that many people died soon after January 1 of each year. This was not due to the weather, but psychology that was tied to the seasons.

Some prisoners’ life strategy was to focus on hoping for change for the better. We might call these people optimistic solstice-waiters. They thought, “By the new year, we will be free.” At first, this conviction was a source of strength and in the autumn they were noticeably more cheerful than their peers as they counted down the months to liberation. However, when January 1 came and went and they remained imprisoned, these optimistic people lost their will to live, which in the camps meant death.

Although it’s an understandable impulse, pinning our resilience on an expectation that “things will be better” can be dangerous - especially when connected to a specific time frame.

Yet there is a strengthening way to await a solstice. We can trust that the darkness itself is a teacher, that there is growth, meaning, purpose in the suffering of a difficult time. Even if we don’t know what the meaning is, we can trust that the lengthened nights of the soul are part of a natural cycle. This is an expectation that can sustain us.  

So when we are in darkness and hear the community’s call reminding us the sun is coming, instead of anticipating the specific outcome that our lives will fill with light, we can be warmed by the sun’s reminder that the darkness is part of the circle of ebb and flow, the turning of our Earth.

Part 2:  Cypress Walker

One morning, a little engine was working in its railroad station. Then a long train asked a large engine to take it over the hill. "I can't; you are too heavy for me", said the large engine. Then the train asked another engine, and another, only to hear excuses and refusals. In desperation, the train asked the little engine to pull it up the hill. "I think I can", puffed the little engine, and put itself in front of the great heavy train. Believing that it could succeed and determined to do so, the little engine kept puffing faster and faster, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can."



As it neared the top of the hill, the little engine went more slowly. However, it still kept saying, "I—think—I—can, I—think—I—can." It reached the top by drawing on this expectation that it could. As the little engine went down the hill, it said "I thought I could, I thought I could.”

How many of you are familiar with this story?

If you know the name of the story, please call it out for us to hear. I thought you could, I thought you could tell me the name of the story! 

In this story, the little engine is faced with a seemingly insurmountable task. With the ambitious yet realistic expectation that it could do what others deemed impossible, it was able to draw upon the strength and determination to pull the large train up the slope. I believe that we are not so different than this little engine, because we too need to create and act on expectations that enable us to do what at times seems beyond our power.

Optimistic yet rational expectations of ourselves and each other can compel us to achieve well beyond our initial beliefs of what can be done. A fit individual who embarks on marathon training with the expectation of completing the race may still be awed by what she went through to cross the line on race day. By contrast, irrational expectations may not only be unproductive but even downright harmful. If an individual with a cardiovascular condition resolves to run a marathon, the same expectation is more likely to diminish health rather than boost a sense of accomplishment.

We’re talking about light and darkness this morning.  How do expectations of light and darkness affect our expectations of ourselves and each other.

Though climate change and El Niño weather conditions may affect what we expect of this winter, millennia of seasons suggest that for the most part we can expect a fairly routine shift from winter to spring. Indeed, this pattern is so well established through our observations and measurements that we can look at the day on the calendar and form reasonably accurate predictions about what the weather will be. For those who are curious, weather.com forecasts that on the 2015 Winter Solstice we will have a high temperature of 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Nature and life hold many mysteries, but when the longest night of the year will be is not generally considered one of them. My question is, if we know when we can confidently expect the sun’s resurgence, why do we have so many rituals to call forth the light? If these rituals are not physically necessary to restore the sun, why do we summon it in the heart of darkness?

I think that it’s because we need to feel that we play a part in the annual resuscitation of brightness. By acting on our hopeful expectations for the earth’s renewed verdant vitality, we may also create and express expectation for ourselves and each other to be resilient. I think I can survive the darkness.  I think you can work through the hard times.  I think that we can help it to be better.  I think I can, I think you can, I think that we can be better.

Optimism that the sun will come may be insufficient. It may even be inappropriate in times where we need the darkness to incubate or instruct us. I personally am craving, and needing, that hibernation and reflection. When it is time to leave the darkness – and I believe that that time always does come – the realistically optimistic expectation of ourselves that we can and should bring more light into the world can increase how brilliantly it shines. Perhaps we don’t bring forth nor brighten the morning star, but we can enable the sun to rise on our own lives. Through song, prayer, connection, action, and the many ways in which people around the world seek to prepare for the sun in the times of greatest darkness, we enact a belief in our human abilities to learn from our own darknesses in readiness to shine greater light in our lives and societies.

Given what I understand of science, it is not realistic to expect that we have much sway in how the solar calendar plays out. Given what I understand of human nature, we can stretch our expectations within reasonable limits to keep growing. Without running from darkness, we can remember and rejoice that there will be light again. Without ignoring reality, we can expect of ourselves to learn from adversity and emerge stronger. Channeling the little engine and expecting light via darkness, I am fueled by this mantra: I think I can, I see we have, I believe we will.

Part 3:  Wik Wikstrom

There is Christmas, of course, and I’ve long argued that there are two distinct religious holidays that bear the same name – I call them “homophonic holy days.”  There is the Christian holy day of Christmas, and a more recent, secular holiday that’s also called Christmas.  There’s Hanukkah, a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar that’s been elevated in stature because of the way Christmas gets all the hype.

But there’s a lot more than these two at this time of year!  There is Diwali –  significant to Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains – symbolizing the victory of good over evil; and Loi Krathong in Thailand, when people put lighted candles, incense, and coins into a small lotus-shaped boat made out of banana leaves, place it in a river, and allow the current to carry it, and all a person’s bad luck, away.  There’s the more recent Kwanzaa, of course, the week-long celebration that has its roots in the black nationalist movement of the 1960s, and was established Dr. Maulana Karenga as a means of helping African Americans reconnect with their African cultural and historical heritage.  In fact, I read somewhere (but was not able to confirm) that there are something like 27 different holidays and holy days during this “holiday season.”

But unquestionably the one that started it all was the solstice – as Lucy said, the day on which the balance between night and day tips as far toward night as it can.  Thousands and thousands of years ago our ancestors were building astonishing stone structures that – whatever else they were built for – were (and still are) amazingly accurate markers of the winter and summer solstices.  Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in England is probably the most famous one, but there are thousands more around the world.  And each one of these stone circles was built by a people saying, “I think I can, I think I can” over and over, and over again.  Just kidding.

Each one of these stone circles was built by people who were deeply connected to the earth, the sea, the sky; people who were deeply connected to nature in all of her many forms.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, today, may inspire many of us when he points out that the iron in our blood is the exact same element as the iron in a comet; and Carl Sagan, in the 80s, may have poetically taught us that “we are made of star stuff;” but the people who built Stonehenge and the other remarkable stone monuments didn’t need to be told these things – they lived that truth.  They did not see themselves apart from the natural world but, rather, as a part of the natural world.

Here in the 21^st century we have become so distanced from the world we live in.  Most of us spend much more time with concrete beneath our feet than we do grass and dirt.  For many, if not most of us, the changing of the seasons means little more than the changing of our thermostats and how long we leave our lights on.  But not them.  Not our ancestors’ ancestors.  They didn’t just live in the world; they knew that the world lived in them.

So I’m going to throw out a new idea here – new to me, at least.  It came to me as I was writing this sermon.  It came to me as Lucy and Cypress shared their homilies with me and I reflected on these themes of light and dark and expectation.  Here’s the new idea:  we are the ones who fear the descent into darkness and await the return of the sun.  We, our ultra-civilized selves, and not our so-called primitive ancestors.

They did not fear the shortening days and lengthening nights.  They did not worry about whether the sun would ever come back.  At least that’s what I suddenly realized this week:  I don’t think that they did.  And that’s because for them the cycles and seasons weren’t something out there; the cycles and seasons were part of them.  Integral to them.  Part and parcel of them, and they of it.  There was no doubt that the sun would return.  They expected it.  Their bones told them it would, as did the world in which, with which, and as part of which they lived.  So with all due respect to Cypress, and the notion I held strongly until just this week, I do not believe that all of these light festivals were meant to “call forth the light.”

So why all the celebrations?  Well … don’t you make a big deal of it when you see an old friend who’s been away for a while?  And what better way to welcome back the sun than with fire?  The more fire the better.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Christmas – both the Christian and secular Christmases.  And I value Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.  But when I really want to get in touch with “the reason for the season” I go back to the roots – the roots kept alive by modern Wiccans, and Druids, and Asatrus, and other neo- and paleo-pagan groups.  Because we are made of star stuff, and these seasons and cycles live within us as we live within them no matter how far removed we have tried to make ourselves.  We cannot live over, and above, or outside of the natural world because we are the natural world, as are the rocks and the trees … and the sun and the moon.

We do not need to fear the lack of light – out there or in here – nor do we need to be anxious for its return.  We need to be reminded to trust it … to trust Life … our life  … Life itself.  My prayer for each of us is that in the days to come we find such a reminder, and that we find ourselves because of it able to live with more confidence and more courage.

Pax tecum,

RevWik

Seeing In The Dark

This sermonic exploration was originally delivered at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA on Sunday, December 23rd 2012.

[Listen to the podcast!]

Okay.  So I know that Deborah really already covered this, but I want to go over it again.

It’s thought that about four and a half billion years ago a celestial object about the size of modern-day Mars, slammed into the then quite young earth.  Scientists call this object Theia, after the mythical Greek titan who gave birth to the Moon goddess, Selene, because it’s thought that this “giant impact” did, in fact, create our moon.  It’s also thought that it was this impact, or one quite like it, that tilted our planet’s axis to its current roughly 24 degrees.

And because of that tilt, as Deborah said earlier, for part of the year the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun – making it warmer with longer days and shorter nights – and for part of the year it’s further away – making it colder with the days and nights reversed.  She mentioned how folks nearer to the equator experience roughly even days and nights all year long.  In more northern and southern latitudes folks experience days and nights that never end.  In fact, in Alaska, the sun goes down on November 31st and remains below the horizon for 67 days until it re-appears on January 24th. During this time there is a small amount of light each day – but it’s what most of us would call “twilight.”  On December 21st, the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice Deborah mentioned, this “twilight” lasts just about 2 hours.

So while it’s clear that this affects people in different places to different extents, there’s no question that our largely northern-hemisphere influenced culture has developed in its DNA a memory of this light/dark cycle.  And I’d love to say that our more primitive ancestors experienced the time of short days and long nights as frightening or, at least, really mysterious and, so, they began to develop light ceremonies to encourage the sun to return.  I’d like to say this because it sounds great, and it’s certainly the story I grew up with, but there’s one small problem.  I keep discovering that our “primitive” ancestors weren’t as ignorant as I’d been led to believe.

I was going to start this sermon by describing what it would have been like if the world were flat which, as we all know, was the dominant belief well into the Middle Ages.  In fact, Columbus had problems launching his famous expedition because folks were afraid that their investment was going to sail off the edge of the world.

Well . . . not so much, it turns out.  Pythagoras, the Greek mathematician, postulated a spherical earth back in the 5^th century BCE and Aristotle affirmed it in 330 BCE.  By the time Columbus came around it’s been pretty well established that the idea that the world was flat was held by pretty much none of the educated people.  True, there were a lot of rather uneducated people in those days, but when it comes to the teachings of science, there really still are.

And it turns out that our most ancientancestors weren’t all that much in the dark about . . . well . . . being in the dark.  As far back as 3000 BCE – what’s known as the Neolithic era – at least some of us humans knew enough about what was happening to erect a bunch of giant stones in such a way that the sun set above a particular stone on the evening of the winter solstice.  That would have been a heck of a lot of work to mark that particular moment if they didn’t know what it was about.

A better explanation may be that they did recognize the solstice as the tipping point from lengthening nights to lengthening days and the fires and candles were not so much to encourage the return of the sun but, rather, to celebrate it.  These celebrations may have been born not so much in fear as in relief.

But whatever the origins and the original intent may have been, there are a lot of festivals at this time of year that honor the coming of light.  Wikipedia notes thirty-four winter solstice festivals – from the proto-Scandanavia’s Beiwe to the Roman’s Brumalia, from the Pakastani Chawmos to, well, Christmas.    There’s Dongzhi, Goru, Hannukkah, Hogmanay, Inti Raymi, Junkanoo, Lá an Dreoilin, Makara Sankrati, Maruaroa o Takurua, and . . . well . . . in seminary they told us never to use lists in our sermons.  (People apparently tune out after a while.)

My point is just that it seems human and natural to mark this time:  this time when the nights are so long and the days so short; this time when darkness – the good and the ill of it, its fearsomeness and its freedom – hold sway over the light – which has its own good and bad aspects, of course.  Throughout the whole of human history and across this diverse globe we human beings seem to have a need to mark times such as this.

And I think that the real reason – the deep, down, core, essential reason – is that such times as this do not only occur “out there.”  It’s not just the skies and the seasons that change and flow; it’s not just our external world that goes through cycles.  Our inner world does, too.

When Deborah and I were first talking about this service, she told me that she wanted to use something by Maurice Sendak.  We knew that this would be a multigenerational service and she said that no one quite captured the inner nighttime, if you will, of children better than Sendak.  Mickey, in In The Night Kitchen, is nearly cooked in the “morning cake.”  Max, in Where The Wild Things Are, travels to the very land of the Wild Things who love him so much that they want to eat him up.  And Pierre?  Pierre is actually eaten by the lion. 

And I really wish you could see the illustrations because Sendak drew a lion that just looks so . . .  proud of himself which, maybe you would be too if you’d just eaten a kid who was being such a pain in the neck.  “I don’t care.”  “I don’t care.”  “I don’t care.”  Utterly unpleasant little urchin.

But who among us – let’s be honest now – who among us hasn’t gone through our own “I don’t care” phase?  Who hasn’t had one of those really long nights that seems to go on forever?  One of those times when we’re just aching for the dawn and aren’t really sure we can wait all that much longer?  One of those times when we can’t see our own hand in front of our face, and certainly can’t see any help . . . or hope?

And maybe you know it, too . . . that feeling of being inside the lion’s belly.  Luckily not all of us have been there, but some of us have.  And others know people who have.

This longest-night-of-the-year stuff is not just something that happens “out there.”  It happens “in here,” too.  And I think that that’s the real reason we’ve put so much energy – as a human family – into these festivals of light and hope.  Not because our ancient ancestors feared that the sun would never rise again.  But because we still do.

So here’s my Yule-tide message for this year.  (And my message for Shab-e Chelleh, and for Soyal and Zagmuk too.  And let’s not forget We Tripantu, now either.)  The sun is coming back.  The light and the warmth are on their return.  Love and hope are expanding.  A new day dawns. 

And if not now, then trust that it all will.  And don’t trust it because I’ve said it.  (Although I’m generally pretty reliable about this sort of thing.)  And don’t trust it because pretty much all of humanity’s sacred books say that it is so.  (Although when you can get pretty much all of humanity to agree on something it’s a pretty good sign.)  

Instead, believe it because it’s been proved to be true – year after year, decade after decade, millennia after millennia.  That’s why we light the festival fires.  That’s why we light the candles.  And that’s why we always will.

In Gassho,

RevWik