HUU Sermon Archives

The Winter Solstice:  Welcoming Back the Light

By Jennifer Spiller
December 17, 2006

At 7:22pm on this Thursday, December 21st, winter will begin and I must tell you, I am practically counting the minutes.  Any of you who know my complete aversion to cold weather might well be surprised by my fervent desire to dance and sing and shout, "Hurray! Winter is coming!"  And it is true, I'm not particularly looking forward to cold weather and snow, seized up muscles and frozen toes.  But I will be enormously thankful that we will have reached the darkest point of the year and that the light will begin to return.  My family and I have not been around much at HUU this fall.  There are lots of reasons, Chris' increased work schedule, the endless round of colds and illnesses that toddlers seem to pass along, or family obligations.  But if these things had happened in June?  You might have seen more of us.  And the reason for this is simple.  It is Fall and the light is dying faster and faster and my mood generally plummets along with sun.

I used to think this was unusual.  Nobody else I knew seemed to want to hole up in their house from Oct through Feb.  In fact, for many people, these are the busiest months of the year.  In school, there were always more projects due, more after school events, more more more of everything.  Christmas was always the bright point, of course, but I can't tell you how many times I finished classes and entered the Christmas break only to get sick, as though I had pushed myself in some way completely alien to my nature until I collapsed from the effort. 

In recent years, there has been a lot of press given to Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, as it is appropriately named, and people seem more aware of the fact that not everyone is affected by the turning of the seasons in the same way.  Not everyone is prostrate with depression, of course, but now that we can put some kind of scientific label on it, people seem more understanding of those who don't relish the Autumn months like their Fall-loving brethren.

So I know now that I'm not alone in how these Autumn months affect me.  But recently, I started doing some reading to put together this service and time and time again was struck by ancient rituals enacted all over the world that seemed designed to combat the very listlessness and depression I was feeling, while tacitly acknowledging the emotional and physical effects of this time of year that I experience.  It made me wonder how much  our modern life is out of tune with the natural world and what that might be doing to us. 

(From John Matthews book The Winter Solstice paraphrasing).

In 1897, a series of celtic bronze tablets from as early as the first century A.D. were discovered near Bourge in France.  These contained a sophisticated system of astronomical observation now known as the Coligny Calendar.  There is much work being done and still to do for us to understand these tablets, but they clearly relate to important lunar-solar notation.  The calendar is both seasonally and agriculturally oriented, with each month relating to the events that take place at that time, both in the natural life of the year, as well as that of the tribe.

Now here's the part that struck me: the titles of the months.  And please, and Celtophiles in the room, forgive me if I bungle these words terribly.

The November/December time is known as Dumanios, "The Darkest Depths"

The December/January time is known as Riuros, "The cold time"

The January/February time is the Anagantios, or "Stay-at-home-time"

Oh, if only I could tell people that I was just going to "Stay-at home!"

"Hey folks, it's the stay-at-home time!  See you next month!"

(note, the stay at home time is actually when I most want to leave home, so what is that about anyway?)  I get impatient for my sunny warmth and want to head to warmer climes.

Because the book this information comes from deals with Winter and in my procrastination didn't have time for more research, I do not know  the other names of the months, but I would be very interested to see how they denote the wheel of the year.  When from time to time I go on a spiritual reading binge, searching for ways to understand the world around me not intellectually, but emotionally, I always find myself drawn to Earth Based religions.  They seem to strike an emotional chord with me.  For instance it makes complete sense to me, that people all over the world have celebrations/festivals during the fall that deal with death--the natural world around them is dying, after all, or that the spring is about renewal. 

But I confess that Solstice celebrations have always escaped my understanding until now.  What, I always wondered was there to celebrate about the darkest day of the year and the first day of winter to boot?   To me it seemed like some sort of celebration of darkness.   Now, on some level I love the dark.  In fact, by nature I am a night person.  I feel like at night some veil is lifted and I become closer to my unconscious self, more tapped in to the creative urges that bubble and simmer below the surface.  At night it seems like I've taken the lid off the boiling pot and all of that stuff that  is cooking inside becomes available to me.   I like to write at night.  When I was designing, that is when my best drawing and painting happened.  For me, the darkness is like the space between.  The place between  our mundane thoughts where something opens up.  The nighttime is a larger expression of that—the place between our days if you will.  In a larger sense, the fall can be a creative place because of this—if a little scary.

So I have some understanding of those cultures who believe that the veil between the worlds is thinnest in this darkest time of year.   I think some of my sadness arises out of the fact that our modern world is not in tune with this.  Nature is going to sleep, entering the dreamtime as it were, but we as people become more awake than ever.  

Solstice celebrations in the western world have become hopelessly intertwined with the celebrations of the birth of Jesus over the past 2000 years, so that it is hard to separate the two.  No doubt most of us have heard a treatise or two on the pagan origins of Christmas traditions.  The holly and the ivy, the hanging of mistletoe, decorating with evergreens and candles, carolers and mummers, Father Christmas/Saint Nicholas, the giving and receiving of gifts, wassail bowls and yule logs are all traditions hijacked from the earlier pagan peoples of western Europe.  

But before the modern Christmas season, there were other traditions, some of which are still carried out all over the world.  In Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, Australia, and the Americas there are man-made structures going back to the ancient world and beyond that light with a special brilliance on the winter solstice.  To ancient peoples, the sight of a shaft of light with laser-like intensity moving slowing along a prescribed path must have seemed like magic.  If any of you have seen he original Indian Jones movie, you may remember a moment where the sun is used in an ancient structure to mark a point on a map.  In the movie, it feels like magic as well, even to our modern eyes.

The Zuni and Hopi peoples of North America had rites celebrating the solstice.  Amazingly, many had plates fixed to their walls that were illuminated only on the winter solstice.  As in many other cultures, masks and dancing were integral to the festivities.  The Romans and Egyptians also incorporated this celestial event into their religious observations.  In china, under the old monarchy, Dec 22 was a day that the emperor led the annual sacrifices to the Gods in the temple of Heaven in Peking.  It is still a Holiday in Hong Kong.  To this day, huge bonfires roar on Mount Fuji, in Japan around Dec 22, to welcome back the sun, which is the symbol of their country.  In Taiwan, as in many other places in asia, the solstice time is a time to honor the dead, our revered ancestors.  Special foods are prepared, and a midwinter feast is served.  Many of the rituals are remarkably similar to those of Western Europe.  Across the world, our way of recognizing and honoring this time is remarkably similar, as though in our collective unconscious we all require the same psychological balms to ride through the dark of the year and people everywhere seem to want to thank the sun for coming back.

Many of the ancient rituals involve dancing, masks, merrymaking, feasting,  performing ritual plays etc.  There is a lot of revelry, wildness, casting off of reality and pretending to be other than we are.   In a little token to that spirit, I put together a little altar here with items representing some things that I am thankful for at this time of year.  The candles represent light, of course.  The little dog statue stands in for both the Spiller family pet, Data the wonder dog, and all animals everywhere.  This picture of Lily and Ada represents children and in my mind children are always symbols of birth and renewal, the eternal promise of a better future.  The evergreen and holly represent the natural world which never dies.  The twigs represent the natural world in seeming death, the spark of green life hidden inside, biding its time and waiting for spring.  The glass of melting ice, a reminder to myself that the cold won't last forever. 

 I tried to come up with something we could do here today as a form of celebration, but I just didn't see getting everybody up and dancing in a circle, although anyone who wishes to (following the service) is certainly welcome.  But I thought we might try something simple which is to perform a litany for the Winter Solstice.  In many ways it is similar to our Joys and Concerns, if a little simpler. Basically, someone says something for which they are thankful or joyful and the rest of us shout, "Blessings and Praise!"   I know many of us are painfully aware of all that is not right or good or well with the world in the present moment.  Many people are sad this time of year, missing out on the seemingly proscribed by society joy and goodwill of "The Season."  So before I move on to the contemplating the joys of the season, I'd like to take a moment to remember that though we welcome back the light, darkness of spirit still resides in the world, and for all those who are intimately affected by war and poverty and cruelty, many of the joys we express are conspicuously absent in their lives.    Let us hold in our hearts the hope that these joys will one day soon be present for all.

And now to begin!

For the return of the Sun… Blessings and Praise!

For the gifts we give and receive…  Blessings and Praise!

For Children everywhere… Blessings and Praise!

For Sunsets and Starlight…  Blessings and Praise!

For Fabulous Feast Days… Blessings and Praise!

For those who cook them… Blessings and Praise!

For the gifts of friendship… Blessings and Praise!

For animals everywhere… Blessings and Praise!

If you have something for which you are joyful or thankful, please share it with us at this time…

Thank you all!

Now I have a few children's books about the Winter Solstice,  since I was looking for the simplest explanations as a way of talking to my daughter, Lily, about this time of year. These books stressed that for ancient peoples the time approaching the Solstice was a fearful time, that many of the ancient rituals of midwinter were created to try and lure back the sun, or protect themselves from evil spirits.  While true in theory, this explanation seemed to completely miss the point of how these celebrations affected the practitioners.  Kindling lights in the darkness lightens our spirits as well as our surroundings and the darker the days, the more we need the glow of light in our lives, which was the message I was searching for in these children's books.

One in particular left me feeling pretty dry.

It summed up a series of  explanations about various cultural celebrations throughout history with this paragraph.

People in the United States and Europe still mark the winter solstice.  But for many reasons this time of year does not seem as frightening to us as it did to our ancestors.

Today, when the earth is bare and brown and the cold vanilla taste of winter is in the air, no one worries about the darkness or the whistling wind.  People simply turn on the lights, pour themselves a cup of hot chocolate, and go about their business.

Scientists now know why the days grow shorter in winter.  The seasons are caused by the changing position of the Earth in relation to the sun.

Well, ta dum.  Thrusting aside for the moment the fact that not everyone in the world has the luxury of nice electric lights and hot chocolate, this seemed like a pretty flippant dismissal of a lot of ancient traditions. 

So I decided to rewrite the ending a bit…. my prerogative as a mother. 

"Nowadays, we know the sun will return, that we will not be left in perpetual darkness.  But that doesn't mean we shouldn't honor its return, or celebrate the gifts it brings. The eternal gift of light from the darkness, and the life that light engenders is always worth celebrating.  On behalf of all the plants and animals and sun-loving people everywhere, I'd like to shout "Hurray! Hurray!"  "Joy on High!" 

Come this Thursday, the Light is coming back.

Blessed be.