Darkness Into Light

Today is the winter solstice. It's a day everyone recognizes but few, starting with me, really understand. A friend suggested I look into it and I did. I finally gave up on my nerdy research when the details of spinning, circling and interacting objects in three dimensional space began to make my liberal arts head hurt.

Leaving wonky-sci aside, gratefully, let's look at what grabs people about this day: it's when we think/assume/hope daylight will begin to increase. Even though we're in the early reaches of winter, kind of a tough time up here near the 45th parallel, today we have a reason to think we'll see more sun and eventually, warmth.

When I lived in the tropics, there was little zeal for the solstice. Along the Mekong River in Laos, I could wander down to the banks and watch the sun go down over Thailand on the other shore, knowing that within 10 minutes on either side of 6:30 PM, I'd see the deep red and purple daily sundown show. The further one travels away from the equator, the greater the change in the timing of rising or setting of the sun, from month to month.

There's a lot in literature, art and religion -  the endeavors that make us human - about the transition from dark to light. The most striking, in my experience, occurred right after the torture and death of Matthew Shepard in 1998. My wife the Rev. Mary held a community service in her church with some other clergy. Over the years, her inevitable response to inexplicable tragedies was to simply open a space for people to be together to sort themselves out.

Matthew Shepard

For this service, the sanctuary was gradually darkened as the hate crime and its meaning were brought before the hushed crowd. Ultimately, there was a single candle burning on the chancel. For Mary, it represented the burning of hope in the darkness. Her message was that hope never goes away entirely, the darkness never envelopes us completely. Then gradually candles ringing the congregated people were lit as readings and singing told of the coming of the light: of knowledge and community and love. Power for the good.

Now on this solstice, coming more than a year after Mary's death and at the start of another crunchy stormy Maine winter, I'm filled with the message in that simple service from years ago - the light never wholly goes away, and it always comes back - to illuminate us, warm us, and hold us in a safe embrace.