-- Nietzsche
Meditation: a poem by Rebecca Parker entitled “Winter Solstice”
Perhaps
for a moment
the typewriters will stop clicking,
the wheels stop rolling
the computers desist from computing,
and a hush will fall over the city.
For an instant, in the stillness,
the chiming of the celestial spheres will be heard
as earth hangs poised
in the crystalline darkness, and then
gracefully
tilts.
Let there be a season
when holiness is heard, and
the splendor of living is revealed.
Stunned to stillness by beauty
we remember who we are and why we are here.
There are inexplicable mysteries.
We are not alone.
In the universe there moves a Wild One
whose gestures alter earth’s axis
toward love.
In the immense darkness
everything spins with joy.
The cosmos enfolds us.
We are caught in a web of stars,
cradled in a swaying embrace,
rocked by the holy night,
babes of the universe.
Let this be the time
we wake to life,
like spring wakes, in the moment
of winter solstice.
Reading: by Jack Kornfield from After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path (p. 3)
What is it that draws a person to spiritual life? From as far back as we can remember, we can each sense a mystery in being alive. When we are present with an infant in the first moments after birth, or when the death of a loved one brushes close to us, the mystery becomes tangible. It is there when we witness a radiant sunset or find a moment’s stillness in the flowing seasons of our days. Connecting to the sacred is perhaps our deepest need and longing.
Awakening calls to us in a thousand ways. …There is a pull to wholeness, to being fully alive, even when we have forgotten. The Hindus tell us that the child in the womb sings, “Do not let me forget who I am,” but that the song after birth becomes, “Oh, I have forgotten already.”
Reading: by the psychologist Rubin Naiman from Healing Night: The Science and Spirit of Sleeping, Dreaming, and Awakening (p. 120)
Like dawn, awakening is simultaneously a time of night and day, and, paradoxically, a time of neither night nor day… it is characterized by a kind of fuzzy awareness, as if one eye is fluttering to peer out at the world, while the other remains closed and turned inward.
…By nature, awakening is much like a birth. It delivers us, disoriented and languid, through a narrow passage from one world to another world. It invites us to begin sensing and moving, but ever so slowly. A gradual awakening carries us through a lush coastal zone of consciousness that holds immense... potential.
Reading: by Timothy Steels, a poem entitled “Toward the Winter Solstice”
Although the roof is just a story high,
It dizzies me a little to look down.
I lariat-twirl the rope of Christmas lights
And cast it to the weeping birch's crown;
A dowel into which I've screwed a hook
Enables me to reach, lift, drape, and twine
The cord among the boughs so that the bulbs
Will accent the tree's elegant design.
Friends, passing home from work or shopping, pause
And call up commendations or critiques.
I make adjustments. Though a potpourri
Of Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs,
We all are conscious of the time of year;
We all enjoy its colorful displays
And keep some festival that mitigates
The dwindling warmth and compass of the days.
Some say that L.A. doesn't suit the Yule,
But UPS vans now like magi make
Their present-laden rounds, while fallen leaves
Are gaily resurrected in their wake;
The desert lifts a full moon from the east
And issues a dry Santa Ana breeze,
And valets at chic restaurants will soon
Be tending flocks of cars and SUV's.
And as the neighborhoods sink into dusk
The fan palms scattered all across town stand
More calmly prominent, and this place seems
A vast oasis in the Holy Land.
This house might be a caravansary,
The tree a kind of cordial fountainhead
Of welcome, looped and decked with necklaces
And ceintures of green, yellow , blue, and red.
Some wonder if the star of Bethlehem
Occurred when Jupiter and Saturn crossed;
It's comforting to look up from this roof
And feel that, while all changes, nothing's lost,
To recollect that in antiquity
The winter solstice fell in Capricorn
And that, in the Orion Nebula,
From swirling gas, new stars are being born.
The Day of Awakening
A Sermon Delivered on December 21, 2014
By
The Reverend Axel H. Gehrmann
My nephew Nick and his wife Katie had a baby this year. Their first child, Soren, was born on August 14, in Portland, Oregon. The birth announcement they sent out has a few pictures of him that I love to look at: a tiny newborn child, peacefully asleep in his mother’s embrace, or snoozing on this father’s forearm.
It seems to me the image of a newborn baby conveys the miracle of life like few other human experiences. Something about it draws us in. Something fascinating, miraculous, and hard to resist.
Within weeks of the baby’s birth, my brother and his wife sold their east coast apartment in Queens, and bought a west coast house in Portland, just fifteen miles away from the home of their son and daughter-in-law, and most importantly, their first grandchild.
And truth be told, the Gehrmann family here in Urbana is not immune. Elaine’s excitement is evident in the cute Christmas presents she thoughtfully selected for young Soren – the little doll, the picture book, the plastic toy. And though my role is relatively minor in the season’s gift-exchange – I wrapped the presents, and put the package in the mail – I realized after the fact, for me these simple acts meant a lot. And the small box I dropped in the mail – though the postal scale said it was only a few ounces - for me it was much heavier, it was packed with emotional weight and significance. As I pulled away from the post office, I felt both surprisingly exhausted and strangely elated.
* * *
Last week I was talking on the phone with my brother, who was once again gushing about the miracle and wonder of this child. A few days earlier they had had their first experience of being overnight baby sitters. Though still somewhat sleep-deprived from the experience - he and his wife took turns throughout the night attending to their grandson’s needs – my brother was still agog and aglow.
And I was reminded how watching a baby sleep has a remarkably calming effect. I don’t know why. Maybe it reminds me of when our kids were infants, and what a challenge it was to get them to sleep. When they were tired during the day or at all hours of the night, they cried and were cranky. And so I would work hard to calm them down, hugging them, jiggling them, singing to them. When they finally fell asleep, I was ready for a nap, too.
“Sleep like a baby.” That means to sleep peacefully and protected, without a worry in the world.
Scientists still don’t fully understand all the functions of sleep, but we do know that virtually every living creature needs it. We humans have evolved to sleep at night, when it is dark, quiet and generally safe. But cats, for instance, who are nighttime hunters, sleep for most of the day and are active at night. House cats can sleep more than 20 hours a day, with a series of short naps and lengthy snoozes. Birds sleep for very short periods, and only lightly. If birds slept as deeply as we do, they would fall off their perches.
According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, the sleep cycle of a newborn babe is very different from our own. Adults like to sleep eight hours solid, but babies sleep two or three hours at a time, wake up, eat, and then sleep some more, up to 18 hours of 24, equally divided between day and night. (Sleep: What Every Parent Needs to Know, Rachel Moon, p. xxi)
* * *
At this time of year when the nights are long and dark, I envy babies and house cats their many hours of sleep. And I imagine past times and places before electricity illumed our cities and streets and homes, when longer hours of winter and dark were inextricably linked to longer hours of sleep.
So, for instance, according to a civil servant who in 1844 examined economic activity in rural France, people all over the country, as soon as the weather turned cold, shut themselves away and practiced the forgotten art of doing nothing at all for months on end. From Flanders to Provence the fields were deserted; the towns and villages silent.
As the civil servant wrote: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food.”
And in the year 1900 the British Medical Journal noted how the peasants in the Pskov region of northwestern Russia cope with their winter weather. The Journal says:
“At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself... [and] …goes out to see if the grass is growing.” (“The Big Sleep” by Graham Robb, The New York Times, Nov. 25, 2007)
* * *
For the past six months the days have gradually been growing shorter, and the nights longer, and the sun’s path across the sky has slipped lower and lower. Those of us who are attuned to the changes of sunlight may have felt their own circadian rhythms shift with the season. Scientists say that women tend to be more sensitive to these things than men. But I think it is safe to say none of us are unaffected.
Today marks the turning point of this trend. The solstice is the shortest day, the day on which the sun’s descent is halted and reversed.
Today, as mythology reaching back to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Babylon and Rome put it, today we celebrate the birth of a new sun. Some of the ancient symbols and stories surrounding the solstice have been passed down from generation to generation, and are still with us today. At the time of Jesus, the Roman emperor was considered the son of the god Sol Invictus, the sun god. And so it is not surprising that similar associations found their way into Christian thought.
As theologians Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker write, in the minds of early Christians the sun in the sky and the Son of God were connected. The Day of the Lord, every week, was Sunday. The gospels associated Jesus with light, he was “the light of the world.” Early Christians “prayed in the direction of the sun, the east, which symbolized the “day of birth.” Churches… faced east, the direction of paradise, and baptisteries were often designed to have the newly baptized exit toward the east.” The fourth century bishop Basil the Great compared the sun to the Holy Spirit:
“It seems to everyone who enjoys the sun’s warmth that he is the only one receiving it, but the sun’s radiance lights up the whole earth and sea and dissolves together with the sky. In the same way the Spirit seems unique to everyone in whom [God] abides, but all of [God’s] grace pours down on everyone…” (Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire, p. 173)
* * *
On the solstice a new sun is born. A new year emerges. It is the dawn of a new day to which we have yet to awaken.
Waking up isn’t as easy as it sounds, Rubin Naiman says. In our efficient world of time management, packed schedules, and shrill alarm clocks we often experience waking up as a sudden jolt. Using a mechanical metaphor we may imagine ourselves “rapidly rebooted or switched back on.” But this is not necessarily the best way to start a day. It is no coincidence that “sacred traditions around the world encourage a more measured, prayerful, and mindful approach to morning,” he says.
On some level we know that awakening is a gradual process. That’s why, when we are dragged out of bed early and expected to be alert, we might say, “I’m not awake yet,” or “I’m still asleep.”
As Naiman sees it, our need to awaken gently is often “misunderstood, disregarded and even disparaged.” The fuzzy awareness we have at dawn, no longer asleep and yet not quite awake, is often called “grogginess” – a word reminiscent of an English rum drink. The implication is that if we are feeling groggy, we should snap out of it, and speed up the process of awakening – maybe with an extra-strong cup of coffee.
If we want to explore the spiritual possibilities of awakening in earnest, Naiman says, we should be attentive to the intricate and subtle process of how we slowly come to our senses. He says,
“Too many of us awaken in a manner similar to the way we were born. It is less a natural childbirth, more of a forceps delivery. Or a caesarian section. Less an emergence and more an emergency. If the process of awakening is the birth of our day, then morning is its early childhood, a critical developmental phase in the life of each new day. How we awaken, how we posture toward morning establishes a powerful psychospiritual trajectory for the remainder of the day. We can ignite and launch ourselves like a rocket ship – a rude awakening. Or, inspired by dawn’s new light, [we can arise gently, mindful of a new day] vibrant with sacred possibility – a good morning.” (p. 122-123)
“A good morning gradually orients us through newness,” he says. “It casts a fresh light on everything and everyone emerging from night. Although most things may appear unchanged, we sense that they have been subtly remade by the night. And we are new as well.”
Clarissa Pinkola Estes describes this process as reflected in myth:
“If you could lay your eyes upon the most fire-hardened, most cruel and pitying person alive… at the moment of waking you would see in them for a moment the untainted child spirit, the pure innocent. In sleep we are once again brought back to a state of sweetness. In sleep we are remade. We are reassembled from the inside out, fresh and new as innocents.” (p.126)
* * *
In the Buddhist tradition, a story is told of when Siddhartha Gautama attained enlightenment. His unusual degree of spiritual awareness was evident to people who met him, and they didn’t quite know what to make of it. They asked him: What are you? A god? A saint? A guru? A wizard? An avatar? An angel? Gautama simply replied “I am awake.” That’s what the word “Buddha” means: awakened one.
What does it mean to be awake? The Buddhist teacher Lama Surya Das describes it like this: it means to awaken from “ignorance and delusion, confusion and suffering.” It means to awaken “to an authentically greater life of truth, clarity, freedom, peace, and deathless bliss…: a full awareness of who and what one is and one’s true place in the world.”
When we are awake, Lama Surya Das says,
“everything changes, yet nothing changes; we discover what has been there all along, obscured by our conflicting passions, emotions, illusions, and attachments. Transforming oneself transforms the world. To save one soul is to save the whole world. No one can do all the good that the world needs, but the world needs all the good that you and I can do.” (The Big Questions: How to Find Your Own Answers to Life’s Essential Mysteries, p. 129)
* * *
To live a life of health and wholeness, we need to learn how to sleep deeply, and awaken fully. We need to pay attention, and be fully present in those moments when life’s mystery becomes tangible: the moment of an infant’s birth, or the moment when the death of a loved one brushes close by.
Awakening calls us in a thousand ways. Within each of us there is a pull toward wholeness, a longing to be fully alive, a longing we too often and too easily forget.
But today, on this solstice day of awakening, let us remember. Along with Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Jews, and Sikhs – and scientists and secular humanists – let us be conscious of the time of year, and may we enjoy its colorful displays.
May we find comfort as we look up into the starry winter night, knowing that while all things change, nothing is lost. And that, this very moment in the Orion Nebula new stars are being born.
May we be stunned to stillness by beauty, and remember who we are and why we are here.
We are caught in a web of stars, cradled in a swaying embrace,
rocked by the holy night, babes of the universe.
May this be the day
we wake to life.
Amen.
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