Solstice Approaches-The Light is Already Shining in the Darkness

Last week I wrote a column about the Prologue to John, pretending I understood some of the deepest mysteries about it, and assuming I remembered the lessons learned while researching these verses for a college paper forty years ago. I asked the reader to imagine a light breaking forth in eternal darkness at the beginning of time, the birth of the Christ. I've been thinking about that this week and realize I made an egregious error.

As the days darken and we prepare for new light to break forth, the truth is abundantly clear, and in the words of Christ, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." But it can take a little time to think it through. Time spent meditating on the light shining in darkness can definitely be time well spent. It feels good to be attuned to nature!

Ancient stone monuments around the globe are arranged to align with the new light from the particular angle where it will appear at solstice. In England, Egypt, South America, ancient people made efforts to acknowledge and channel and honor the solstice. How can this be? How long did it take, how many lifetimes, to observe the celestial patterns and to plan and execute such monuments with precision? What kinds of brains did people have back then? Does modern man have such impulses?

We do, with our diminished minds, in our own humble ways. We have built our own monuments to the breaking light- shopping malls surging with energy at this season to prepare for the light breaking forth in darkness- Santa Claus rolling out of that dark chimney, bright white and red with his ho-ho-ho and his sack of bounty. It's a version of the light breaking out of the darkness. We're in tune with nature despite ourselves!

For those more subdued, the focus of the season may be the lighting of the Hanukkah candles or the thought of the radiant Christchild aglow in the manger. Festivals of new life and light occur over and over throughout the world's traditions. Still and always, light.

But the mistake I made was to ask you to imagine the light breaking forth in the eternal darkness. Suddenly. New.

If you truly think about it, you can mystically remember or realize that the holy light has been shining forever and ever. It's not that it suddenly breaks forth. It's that we become aware of it having been there all along, cycling through nature, renewed again and again throughout eternity in countless ways. We partake of it and, like in the Michelangelo fresco, receive the spark from the finger of God, and share in this life and in life eternal. We Christians say it over and over in the Creed and in our prayers, scarcely realizing what we are avowing, what some dim part of our most ancient collective brain still knows: that the light is always shining and has always shone in the darkness, that we are in a world without end. Forever and ever. Amen.