This is the season when the interplay of day and night, of light and darkness is much with us. The time when nights lengthen toward the Solstice…next Tuesday…when the predictable miracle will occur …and the days will begin to lengthen again. This is a time of waiting when the spiritual task is to prepare ourselves for the return of the longer light. And metaphorically at least, for the rebirth of hope.
This time of year is a liminal time, a time of transition…when the earth appears to rest and the heavens appear to shift… this time of year called to our human ancestors long before the current valuing of light over darkness was solidified…long before, when the light and dark and the space between were all part of the mystery…all with a rightness…all somehow needing to find a place in our lives…our lives needing to make space for all of them.
We are in a liminal space in more ways than one right now, called to prepare for we know not what…
I want to spend a few moments this morning exploring the interplay of light and dark…opening ourselves to the wisdom of this season and asking what preparation we need to make in our spirits…
“If you are going to meditate by candlelight,” writes Rev. John Marsh, “do not hurry to light the candle. The glow [of the flame] may concentrate your energies but it will cost you the contours of the room.”
“All that your light does not expose will become alien.
[Leave the flame unlit and be present to] the night…as one who belongs.”As one who belongs. Not alien.
The circle of light…sets the boundary of what we can see and know…there may be security and some safety in that small circle of light…but much, John Marsh says, is lost.
The only direct flight from Washington DC to Portland is a night flight that leaves the East Coast at 7 PM and, thanks to the time zone change, arrives, after 6 hours in the air, three hours later, at 10 PM. I took that flight earlier this week. Most of the flight was spent above the clouds in the deep darkness, of course. But as the plane descended toward PDX we broke through the low cloud cover and instantly found ourselves confronted by the jarring brightness of the lights of the city. It looked as if every light in the city was lit to hold back the dark.
It seemed, for all the world, as if we, collectively, were afraid of the dark.
For me, there is usually some comfort in the lights of the city…the lights are a comfort to me…they offer some sense of safety…for me…
The dark night…outside the circle of those lights…feels… dangerous…
Is that so for any of you. Does the dark feel dangerous?
Rosemary Bray McNatt is now the President of Starr King School for the Ministry. But she was a writer before she was a minister, an editor at the NY Times Book Review and she wrote a personal memoir entitled “Unafraid of the Dark.” I commend it to you.
In that memoir, Rose tells of growing up poor on Chicago’s South Side. She writes: “Certain things can shape you, change you forever. Years later, long after you think you’ve escaped, some ordinary experience flings you backward into memory. Being poor is like that. Living surrounded by fear and rage is like that. I grew up hating the cold, dreading the approach of night. Thirty years later, a too-cold room at night can trigger a flash of terror.”
Rose, despite her accomplishments, lived much of her life, afraid of the dark. She had good reason.
But she goes on to write of her sons, now grown, who found the dark a safe place to rest because she made it a safe place for them.
And she writes of learning not to fear the dark herself. “I am learning to be a black woman in a world that often fears and resents my presence…. I am learning to [live through the defeats and the frustrations of living in this nation]. I am learning to continue in the face of failure, as caring women and men have done before me for generations.”
“I am learning not to be afraid of the dark. …For the sake of my precious sons, and for the precious children not my own, I can stay unafraid of the dark, and work my way toward morning.”
Perhaps that language can be helpful for us this season. How can we learn not to fear the dark…not to fear the troubled times we have lived through and are living through still…
And how can we work our way toward morning?
What is it we need to do in this season? Is it simply rest? The earth does seem to rest in winter but we know that there is active preparation going on underground for the rebirth of spring.
What preparation do we need to be making to hold hope when the light begins to lengthen…as it will. The movement of the earth around the sun continues…despite the pandemic, despite the injustice in our world.
The light will lengthen. Will we be ready to work our way toward morning?
The electric lights that startled me flying into Portland mute the impact of the darkness.
We have grown accustomed to believing that we can construct a world to suit our imagined comfort…a world in which the absence of interruption of our comfort becomes the standard…
When the Winter Solstice arrives on Tuesday there will be just a little more than 9 hours of daylight…and 15 hours of darkness
We have grown accustomed to simply flipping a switch to lengthen the light. But electric lights, in the grand sweep of history, are new on the scene. Just a hundred years ago, less than half of the homes in this country even had electricity.
Until just yesterday in historical terms, we humans have had to align our living with nature’s light…and nature’s darkness.
Alignment was long the spiritual task. Perhaps it still is.
Over 4000 years ago, the indigenous people of southern England built a circle of huge standing stones…we call it Stonehenge…where large numbers of humans gathered at the summer and winter solstices…
Such ancient stone circles have been found not just in Europe but in the Horn of Africa, Korea, Mongolia…there are over a thousand of them in Great Britain alone…
Why were these huge standing stones erected…dragged miles and miles…by hand… and set with amazing accuracy…to capture the movement of the sun and the liminal moment when the longest night was reached and the days began to lengthen?
All of that effort was not to learn or predict the solstice. They had to know, with certainty and in detail, when the solstice would occur in order to locate those huge stones. This was not an effort of inquiry.
All of the stones are no longer standing at Stonehenge. But the sun would have set between the two tallest stones, right down in the narrow gap between them.
Here is what our ancestors would have seen on the night of the Winter Solstice at Stonehenge:
We do not know what they thought or felt in response, but they made enormous effort to be present to the progress of the earth and sun, the light and dark …
Enormous effort… was it to align themselves with that transition…to be present to it…to prepare themselves to deal with the long winter and the hoped for coming of spring and the challenges they faced in their world?
Was it to align themselves with the truth of the world, the model of hope offered by the earth?
The sun is setting…or perhaps it has already set… on the world we knew as normal. The pandemic has made it crystal clear that that world will not return unchanged.
Many of us raged against the injustice of that world, to be clear. We were not content with the way things were. But that world somehow still defined us all…those who benefitted and seemed to thrive in it and those who protested most loudly against it.
And now, we are all waiting to see what will emerge…what the world that follows Covid might look like…
Our waiting this season has a different quality…there seems to be more at stake somehow…
Some of us are weary…just worn out…worn down by 20 months apart and now with the news that there is more ahead of us…
Others of us came to almost like Covid life…almost. Privilege made that possible of course. Many of us still seem to prefer church in our pajamas…and work in our sweatpants.
And some of us find ourselves ready to get on with it…with energy to burn…ready to explore and shape a post-Covid life…
But all of us know that if there is a spring of the spirit in our future…some miracle to justify hope…we all know that we are still waiting…
And what will become of us….and for us… is not yet clear.
The task in this season has always been to rest and prepare ourselves for the return of the light….prepare our hearts to welcome the rebirth of hope.
What do we prepare for when so much is uncertain?
Here is what I think we can know:
Our rest in this season cannot be a mindless rest, a shutting down of our senses, a closing off of our yearnings.
For us, as religious people, it should be a mindful rest.
A mindful rest when we continue to feel our yearning for Beloved Community…our yearning for something better than the world on which the sun has set.
There is a re-setting of standards, a re-setting of the bar that we need to allow our spirits to do.
So, a mindful rest…in which new approaches can be imagined. A mindful rest in which the way things were…does not close off possibilities for the way things could become.
I heard Martin Luther King III say that we should not hold celebrations of his father’s life next year…not another re-playing of “I Have a Dream”…until the right to vote…for all of us… has been secured once again.
Would a celebration of Dr. King next year simply serve to divert attention from the attempt to return to the world he gave his life to change?
Could NOT celebrating Dr. King help move us toward morning? Would we have thought of that before?
Don’t we need to begin asking questions like that, questions like those posed in our reading…questions that can bring us out of old habits of thought…habits in which we have become too comfortable?
So, a mindful rest in which new possibilities can emerge.
And a deepening appreciation of who we are…all of us…who is here…and who is not…
And a more honest and complete knowing of what is of value to us and to the earth…and what we can let go.
These are things I believe we can know…things we can know to do.
Will these things be enough to transform the world…usher in the Beloved Community?
I gave up my crystal ball years ago. Because like you, if I had known a guaranteed path to Beloved Community…we would have arrived there long ago…
But I do believe that we must do at least these things. That if we do not…the worst of the world we knew…and even worse than that…will become the norm …and that would break all of our hearts and far, far too many of our bodies.
Perhaps the discipline that is most called for in this season…is the discipline of holding our hearts and our minds open…doing the very best we can…and preparing ourselves for the birth of new hope…even surprising new hope. Hope we have not been able to imagine before.
Because miracles can happen…the sun rose on the day after the Solstice at Stonehenge…and the days began to lengthen…
Every precious child born is another possible redeemer…
Our task…it seems to me…is to make ready the way…
Theresa Soto writes: “The chalice is a reminder that what flame
we keep inside us cannot light the way.
The light must spill to shine.
The thing you must be is yourself. …And together, we [can]chase away the sickness, the secrets, and … open the possibility that the future [can be] a space for growth.”
To open the possibility that the future holds…
Perhaps there has been a blessing….a complicated blessing I grant you…but a blessing in this pandemic…
Perhaps it may be forcing us back onto knowledge we had forgotten we knew……
The wisdom that all we have is one another…really…
All we have to live through these dark days and the uncertainty of what will follow.
All we have is one another if we are to emerge prepared…if we are to emerge ready… to work toward morning.
Prayer
Will you pray with me?
Spirit of Life. God of darkness and of light.
We are people of faith.
We have lived through these difficult days
Suffered so many losses
Felt the world we knew slipping away.
And we will live through these liminal days
While we wait for possibilities
To present themselves so that the love
We feel within us and around us can begin to shape
A new world in which we want to live.
We are people of faith…and faith is not
For the faint of heart.
Be with us and we promise to be with
One another…
We have seen the sun set
Help us direct our gaze now to the beauty
Of the night sky in these long nights
May we be unafraid of the dark
May we be ready to welcome the dawn…together
Amen
Topics: Devotion