The Winter Solstice

On a Saturday Morning in June

His birthday is a few days before Christmas; December 21, I presume, although he never said for sure. I’m not really sure how the topic came up. We were talking, as we often do on Saturday mornings, small talk among once strangers who might now consider each other friends. Yes, we do. Of course. My birthday is in September. His was close enough to Christmas that as a child he never had birthday parties or special days set aside to celebrate his creation. He didn’t seem to mind, at least not now, 40 some years later. His mother would often offer him a deal: one larger Christmas present instead of two smaller presents, one for his day and the other for, well, the cultural seasonal celebration. He would take the deal. He was born, he said, in darkness. Actually, he was born in an airport in Dallas while his mother was traveling to Austin. But he said he was born on the darkest day of the year, the winter solstice. That seemed to mean something to him.

When he was three his parents divorced. His mother later remarried. She remarried while in jail. The image he recounted—I’m not sure he was there—was his mother holding her hand through the bars to join with her new husband, and a fourth child followed that union. He questioned whether he would even be alive today if he and his siblings had gone with his father. Now he has very little contact with either parent or the extended families from which his life branches out. We visit most Saturday mornings. He is one I look forward to seeing. We’ve made it a game that I teach him a word or two each week that I recall from my high school French. On this morning he spoke about his life and family more than he ever has to me. And he spoke about being born into darkness, on the winter solstice. He seemed to be light about this fact, though, that his birthday was a day of celebration for many, you know, Pagans… the ones outside of traditional, established culture. I expect this means more to him even now that he has been homeless for a few years. To know that amid the deepest darkness there is a celebration of… something.

This morning he asked me about my week, and I stumbled through the feelings of the last few days and questioning, once again, my demons. I am a medalist in self pity; despite my age and brief runs at maturity, I am still in prime form. He is speaking of being born into darkness; for myself, my tendency has been to exist in a shadow, to choose it, out of fear of the light, and who the light might truly reveal me to be, and a rotten, deceitful knowing—the lie—that I am not worthy of the gift.

There’s a freshness in his voice as he speaks of solstice, and the assurance that comes from knowing he was born on a day in which people the world over have found cause to celebrate. And here we are, in a church parking lot, where I come each Saturday morning to be present to him and others, and he and others come to get the gift of a sack lunch.

He seemed to think that it was the darkness that was worthy of celebration, and I certainly understand that. He is one apart from normal society, whatever that is, whatever the world tends to tell us is ‘light’, or, perhaps, ‘right.’ In this context, the darkness seems to suggest an alternative value system, one shunned by the world and the worlds dominant value systems, but one which is rooted in the world’s creation, and its creator: It is not the darkness that is dark.

Some say the children of darkness have seen a great light; their world and their lives will never be the same. Surely there is something solid, to be felt, and experienced in the saying. It must be more than just a metaphor. It has to be. The yearning for the light, and the new life it brings, the new life it sets apart from the darkness, is the common unity of solstice and Christmas. It is no accident the early Christians chose a day in late December to remember an event that probably happened in a different season. I don’t think it was necessarily done with a coercive intent, either. But then, as long as the empire we are building is our own, it’s hard to argue that our intentions truly were not coercive; empires, by nature, are coercive. I think—I hope—placing the fulfillment of the promise at the start of winter was, instead, a signification of some meaning beyond the geometrical phenomena of the cosmos and its real impact on human culture and existence and economics. It’s a sign. A sign of hope. A parallel sign to solstice, that the darkest day always, always yields to the next day which is a little less dark and a little more light. I believe this to be true, even as I linger in shadow.

That is, Christmas and solstice call to mind the same hope. In an early nomadic or agricultural world, the success of the harvest was everything. the success depended on the rain and on other elements of the environment. It depended on not only the regular cycles of nature, but on these regular cycles containing within them certain ranges of normal weather. Human prosperity depended upon our ability to secure enough resources during the growing seasons to get us through the off season. The world would cycle on, with some times of prosperity and some times of scarcity. Amid these cycles the days grew short in the autumn then lengthened in winter and spring. We knew amid the growing darkness that one day the sun would return; but what would those days bring? Would they be good days of plenty? In the face of certain uncertainty, the precise moment of turning, from a growing darkness to increasing light is liminal. In that moment, we express our hope for hope as a celebration. Solstice.

I think this expression of hope is rooted in a general human experience—not specific to that of a particular people chosen by God to be in a relationship with God. If that particular people were blessed to be a blessing to others, as the Judeo-Christian stories invite us to experience, then we are also being invited to discover God at the center of the machinations of the universe that sometimes bring abundance and other times scarcity. And if it is God at the center of these things, then we have a choice to make about God: Is God indifferent, or does God care? Or both? Of course it is both. God cares indifferently. That’s the only way to keep God as Other than human.

God does care. For the Pagan who had the wisdom and good fortune to find hope in the seasonal hinge of darkness to light, to the Christian who finds it in an unlikely, improbable, yet promised child. The seasons continue to pass. The seasons of the earth, the seasons of my life… the season’s of my friends life on the street. Humans continue to be humans, with Cains being jealous of Abels, Jacobs angling for unentitled blessings, to eleven brothers trafficking number twelve. Not much has changed. Oh, look… it’s summer again, and already the days are growing shorter. But the darkness will not last...

I had told my friend that I had spent some time this week wrestling with my demons. The voices that live inside me, that have made a home inside me because, well, at some point in time I welcomed them. At some point, beginning early in my life, I found them useful for protection, for company, and for a fool’s validation. How many Christmases did I enjoy without really opening up the gifted presence before me, shedding the darkness, and welcoming the light? Obviously, I’m working on number 50 now. But the choice is still before me. My friend looked at me, incredulous, as so many other friends have looked at me before, and the demons whispered in my ear, reaffirming my shame. Which one of us, exactly, is homeless?

Why do I listen to them? Why do I listen to them so easily? Why do I listen to them first?

I have seen enough, thanks be to the Light, to know I was created to dwell in it. I know enough of who I was created to be. I know, but do I know? With a sub-seasonal frequency and precision, however, the clouds come, the sun is obscured, and the shadows are cast. It feels cooler in the shade, and at times it is. It’s no place to live… what will I choose?

I shared with my friend these thoughts about the common unity of Pagan Solstice and Christian Christmas. He is one who has been marginalized—if not forgotten—by his family and society. A piece broken off, and lost, and perhaps not even missed. Yet, as long as he is so apart, there cannot be a whole. There is a wholeness found in completing a fractured unity, a wholeness that cannot come from choosing one empire over another, a wholeness that does lose pieces. Hope always aspires to, and hopes for, that wholeness.

We’ll talk again next week.