Solstice 2024

Yesterday was Solstice. This seems like a year when it's important to mark it.  The darkest point in the year.  And a quiet point.  A shadow has descended on many of us.  The backdrop of what the last few years mean--politics, climate (physical and social), religion--looms behind us. A friend's annual holiday party deferred.  Just couldn't do it this year. Conversations about the overtones.  Gallows humor.  And an eerie quietness.  The contest is over.  In the venues where we expect contestation--the ballot box, Congress or state houses--there are not opposing forces arrayed on the field. In our personal lives we're turning off the news, tuning out the politically charged comedians. 

We usually celebrate Solstice in the frame of the light will come, the days get longer from here.  I don't know that we can really expect that in our climatic, political, and social darkness.  A friend yesterday who was a teenager in the 1950s said it reminded him of that decade, but not.  There is not a good sense that a counter-trend is on the way.  It seems more likely that we are in for a long haul.  I've also been reading Anna Seghers' Transit, picked at random from a literal pile of to-be-read books.  It's about more or less internal refugees in Marseilles in the Winter of 1940-41, after the German victory in France. The previous order is broken, and individuals are cut loose to find a way out into an amorphous space, or caught cycling in the liminal space.  It's not completely analogous historically, but she captures the quality of the world being an anteroom to something not understood.    

This year, at this moment in history, Solstice is about recognizing and living into this moment, the time of darkness.  This Solstice may last a long time. 

So we light a fire. The fire tonight is not to remind us of the full force of summer sun, but to bring out the light and flames that we can summon in this moment.  

In church today, my pastor preached on hope. There was a time when I loved the passages on hope, particularly Romans 8:24-25: "Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience." The idea that we don't have foresight and through-sight made so much sense to me. When we try to spell out the desired/necessary outcome and future, we move away from hope. But today listening to Zach, my feeling was that I am much less interested in Hope than in Revelation.  I don't have a strong sense that through our efforts we can push our society and community to take care of those who are weak, and keep our systems of authority and power from being on a constant search for people to punish. There isn't really a future state I see myself waiting for.  I think we've arrived at the future. In the last few months people have commented on how negative I am. I think something bad happened, and it won't be reversed soon. Some trends will continue in this direction. But I'm OK. I'm content. We can now look at where we are with clarity and just deal with this.  

I believe this encourages us to be in our current moment intensely, attentively.  What do we find there, when we look this closely? Revelation of everything God has to offer. The Second Coming has occurred. It has occurred since the Resurrection. There is not an after-life--after-life, past-life and now-life are here and now. Everything God has to bring is here.  Now.  Our job is to see it and coax it into visibility.  To build a fire and tend it.  This can devolve into Cultivons notre propre jardin fatalism, but it also allows us to fulsomely embrace the places and moments when communion blooms and not dismiss it because the over-weaning power of demonic forces stays in place. Moments of mutual aid.  Spaces outside the fallen political structures. Glimpses. Festivals. Sabbath. 

The fire in my backyard is not (or not just) a harbinger of a better time later.  It illuminates and vitiates the present time.  The fire is warm. It leaps. 

The blessing of Solstice is that it gives us time to find the elements of redemption in our current moment.  To slow down, get quiet, listen, and tend. To be here.  Sure, longer days of sunlight will come.  But don't rush it.  We need to learn Solstice-time practices.