Into the Darkness and Back: Reflections on Solstice
Catherine Senghas
December 16, 2007

Reading:
The Shortest Day, By Susan Cooper

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us - listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
Welcome, Yule!

“And so the Shortest Day came and the year died, and everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world came people singing, dancing, to drive the dark away….”, and so our reading said…. Not just down the centuries but over several millennia cultures have appreciated and honored the cyclic changes of the sun, moon and stars, with varying understanding. Indeed there were once many cultures wherein people believed that their actions influenced the return of the sun. Rituals were developed and handed down from generation to generation. Agricultural societies depend on these cycles and these rituals were sacred.

Of course we now know the astronomical explanations. I am old enough that I was taught about these things in fourth or maybe fifth grade science class by having us children position ourselves at proportional distances from our science teacher’s big hand held work light, tipping our ping pong balls and fruit of different sizes, while we enacted the movements that resulted in the equivalent of solstices and moon cycles and eclipses. Today’s young students have slick computer generated models of interpretation, but it’s the same lesson—there is a scientific rational explanation. Any less magical? Any less a personal physical experience? I suppose it does make us realize we are less “in charge”…

We find ourselves entering the tunnel of December, approaching the winter solstice, with the shortest days and longest nights of the year. Besides being a time important to those who live and work close to nature, it is a time that many faith traditions associate with new beginnings and moments of great potential, great hope. If you think for a moment you perhaps can list many holidays and holydays that occur in December around the world on these themes. These can be days of joy, the sharing of beloved traditions and rituals in both family and community. Scholars believe that Christmas, the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, was actually moved from its true date to coincide with the Roman holiday of Saturnalia and other holidays of this time of year.

We tend to think of the winter solstice as a day, the day with the longest night or shortest day, the day when we turn a corner in the solar year, but it is actually a very specific moment. It is the instant when the northern end of the earth’s axis tips furthest from the sun and then stops and starts to tip back closer to the sun until the summer solstice, when it tips closest to the sun for an instant. Solstice is the moment when the movement stops, and solstice actually means “standing still.” At the same time that it is winter solstice for us here in the northern hemisphere it is summer solstice for the southern hemisphere. And from the earliest times people have wanted to know exactly when that moment is. My husband and I were living with our two children in Ireland from 1989 to 1991 and had a chance to visit an amazing place called Newgrange in County Meath, north of Dublin. Since that time significant preservation has been done, and there is now limited and very controlled access to the site, but in those days you could drive right out in the countryside, park at the edge of a muddy field, buy a ticket at the small visitors’ center, and walk right up to this enormous mound which was fairly recently excavated and restored. It was a Neolithic passage grave from roughly five thousand years ago, and had a most interesting feature. There was a roofbox above the doorway positioned precisely so that at the winter solstice a shaft of light would pierce the passage grave entrance all the way to the central chamber for just a few minutes. They have a lottery to get in at the time of the actual solstice, and people wait for years and years and sometimes the solstice is on a rainy day—great disappointment then I’ll bet! But you could just imagine those people from that civilization so very long ago figuring it all out so precisely because of how important that moment must have been in their agricultural society.

I had never thought much about solstices, perhaps less than I thought about, say, eclipses, until I had more direct physical experience of them. And for me, a physical experience of a natural event has an involuntary spiritual component that actually changes me. So I will tell you how I have experienced the solstice. For a couple of years in the mid 1980s I was living in Vermont, about ten miles from the Canadian border, on a hillside facing west overlooking Lake Champlain. Winters were dreary there because of the lake effect on the cloud cover, but we had the amazing gift of the view of full sunset every day that the skies were clear. In December we could see and mark on the railing of the deck outside the kitchen door just where the sun was setting. And we tracked the movement of sunset further and further south each day. Then the day would come, and of course we knew when, either on December 21st or 22nd, when it would turn and start to track back north again. Winters are long and cold and snowy at the Canadian border, coming about a month sooner than here in eastern Massachusetts where I grew up, and leaving about six weeks later. The way I figured this was by the timing of leaves falling and spring bulbs blooming. Stuck mostly in the house with an infant and a three year old, and heating with wood, I wanted to know when I was looking toward spring! That was really something to rejoice about, the sort of thing that would make you say, “Thank God!”

My other directly personal experience was in Ireland. You might not think of Ireland as being that far north, since the climate is somewhat moderate due to the Gulf Stream, but if you look at a map or globe you will see that it is actually on the same latitude as Hudson Bay. Besides visiting Newgrange, and thinking about those folks who built that passage that captured the moment of winter solstice, I experienced what the light was probably exactly like for them five millennia earlier. In late December the days are very very short. Imagine this—on Friday this week the sun will rise at twenty minutes to nine and will set a few minutes after four. The night will be more than twice as long as the day. Our children walked the mile down the road to school in the dark, and returned just shortly before the sun went down. And when the sun was up it barely cleared the housetops across the field in front of our house. The sunlight that did come through was at a very low angle and seemed very yellow. It was a very damp, rainy, chilly time and the air sometimes thick with peat smog.

But as I was reflecting on winter solstice, in anticipation of this morning’s sermon, there was a much less concrete memory that kept chasing me and I had to track it down. I want to share it with you because I came away from my treasure hunt with a somewhat different understanding of the winter solstice that resonates with my Unitarian Universalist identity. Now please bear with me because this is a pretty secular experience—it’s about a TV episode. During that time we were living at the Canadian border there was a show on television created by Jim Henson, the Canadian, of Muppets fame. The show was called Fraggle Rock. There were different characters, some human, but mostly puppets of varying sizes, sort of like Henson’s puppets on the Muppet Show or Sesame Street. The episode that stuck in my memory these almost twenty years was called The Bells of Fraggle Rock. The episodes from that era are now out on DVD so I found it and watched it again. The main story line is about an annual ritual that these Fraggle creatures had. The legend that they all recite from memory goes this way: “At the heart of the rock there lies a bell. The bell must ring once every year, once every year when the rock slows down. If the bell didn’t ring the rock would freeze, the rock would freeze and stop forever.” The way the ritual works is that when the rock slows down, they have a festival where they all remember and celebrate the custom together with certain dances and songs, and then they ring their own little bells. And the Great Bell hears this and awakes and rings, too, although they don’t actually see or hear this, and all is well for another year. So it is obviously a solstice story, and told from the perspective that their ritual is what keeps their world from stopping altogether.

Now in this particular year, one of the Fraggle creatures, Gobo, a scientific and also doubting sort, decides that he can’t believe it unless he sees it with his own eyes, and he decides to go off in search of the Great Bell in the caves at the center of the rock. He has a conversation with a wise old soul sort of character, who offers Gobo various cryptic sayings, like “We see with our eyes, we know with our hearts,” and “Why do you want to look for something that is so easily found?” Gobo replies that if he finds the Great Bell and can see it, he can show everybody that it really exists and then the holiday will mean something. Another Fraggle replies that the holiday already does mean something. The wise old soul character tells Gobo that he will indeed find the bell at the heart of the rock, and offers another ambiguous saying, “The heart of the rock may be farther away than you think—then again it may be closer.” Off goes Gobo, after making the other Fraggles promise to wait for his return before ringing their bells. So of course, the rock slows down, no one celebrates, everything is freezing. The other Fraggles start worrying and wishing Gobo had decided to do this earlier. The wise one offers, “We do the things we have to do when we have to do them—not sooner, not later.” Eventually the wise one goes in search of Gobo, and they reach the cave at the center of the rock. Gobo opens the door and the cave is empty. He is bereft—“The cave is empty; it’s all a lie! There is no Great Bell!”

Gobo and the wise old character return to the surface and everyone has frozen still. Gobo is confused. How could this be if there is no Great Bell? How could ringing the bells—or not—matter? The wise one says, “Listen, and hear what I have to say for a change! Last year there was no Great Bell in that cave and the cold came and went just as it always has. What’s different this year?” Gobo realizes that the only thing different was that they didn’t ring their little bells. He starts ringing his bell and the Fraggles start to unfreeze. “It’s working!” Gobo says. “The Great Bell is at the heart of the rock, not the center of the rock—I went to the center, not the heart. The heart is here, here…. It’s our music that keeps the rock alive.”

I couldn’t make sense of the ending for a while, since once we have understood the solstice scientifically we don’t believe that our rituals influence the planetary activity. But I think this Fraggle story is a metaphor for all the times we must take our beliefs on faith, and the need to have rituals that support our shared journey. This story has the empty cave, the not seeing leading to not believing, looking in the wrong places for what gives our lives deepest meaning—something for everyone of varying theological stripes. Basically that’s where I think these winter holidays have evolved to in this era when we do understand the astronomy behind the solstice. These are times to stop and remember, take stock, join together, and then start again as the world opens up again for fresh beginnings. And this resonates with the first of the sources we Unitarian Universalists proclaim, as part of our seven Principles and five Sources, as the foundation of our living tradition. This source is named as “direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces that create and uphold life.”

And so, back to our original reading: “As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, and dearly love their friends, and hope for peace.” My wish, as we reach the solstice this week, is that each of us is moved to a renewal of the spirit, and ready to go forth in solidarity into the new year ahead.

Amen.