A Solstice Message
Delivered to High Street UU Church
Sunday, December 21, 2025
Starting
out this morning with “A Winter Blessing” by Rebecca Ann Parker.
In the shadowed quiet of winter’s light
Earth speaks softly
Of her longing.
Because the wild places are in tears.
Come, she cries to us
Kneel down here
On the frosty grass,
And feel the prayer buried in the ground.
Bend your ear to my heart
And listen hard.
Love this world, she whispers.
Distill peace from the snow
And water the cities
With mercy.
Weave wonder from the forest
And clothe grief
With beauty.
Rest in the rhythm of the turning year,
Trace the bending arc
Rounding the curve toward justice.
And vow anew to do no harm.
The winter trees stand watch
Haloed in the last gleams of the slanting
sun.
Glory sings here.
Heaven echoes the call:
Repeat the sounding joy.
Make your life an answer:
Bow.
Praise.
Rise.
When
I was an undergraduate, I took a class in existential philosophy in which we
read one half of the 589 page Macquarie and Robinson translation of Martin
Heidegger’s Being and Time. The book is credited with opening up the examined
life via Dasein, literally “being there,” much like Ram Dass’ “be here now” if
Ram Dass had lived between the world wars and joined the Nazi Party. It is, in
a word, a slog.
The
class met two days a week starting in January at 10 in the morning. That first
day, the professor walked in, turned out the overhead lights, and said, “If we
were really going to study existence the way this book presents it every
meeting would be at 5 o’clock in the morning on the winter solstice.” As that
suggests, it is a very depressing book.
Winter
solstice, part of the month-long holiday called Yule, has a somewhat deserved reputation
as the start of a long depressing slog toward the joy and sunshine of Summer
solstice, something to be gotten through. It is the longest night of the year followed
by the shortest day. It is also my thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Tomorrow
is my wife’s birthday. I planned it this way. I’m no fool.
Winter
Solstice is the day that marks when the earth is at its northernmost apogee
from the sun. Our orbit around the sun is not a circle but an oval, with
extremes at two ends. In the northern hemisphere are at our furthest away from
the sun and so at our coldest. In summer we have been traveling to the north
and then furthest in that direction, and so have arrived at the point where our
section of earth begins to feel its warmest. If we still have the patience to
observe it for the day, the sun seems to stand still on the horizon for about
six days at this time of year, rising and setting at about the same places.
This period of the sun remaining in place, which is what solstice means in
Latin, “sun standing still”, marks the periods when we can be certain we’ve
reached the end of the cold season and, because we are now facing the sun as we
return in our orbit, the days will become warmer. Although no one seems to have
explained that to January or February. This is the cycle by which we count the
days until winter.
Cycles
are important, not just for groups of people, deciding when it’s safest to
plant or recognizing when the coldest months are coming, but for individuals
too. We operate cyclically. Women’s bodies, of course, ovulate on a monthly
schedule, and there is research suggesting that men also have a cycle of
hormonal changes that happen every thirty days.
Things, like people and animals and plants, are born, live,
and then die. Then they rot and diffuse, or break apart, and mix with bacteria
and enzymes, which themselves live and die cyclically, to be born again,
perhaps as something else, and live, and die. Farmers know this. Keepers of
suburban composts are acquainted with it. The whole process describes a huge
circle that life as we understand it follows. We even breathe in and out
cyclically, although it’s so subtle we’re usually not aware of it. Take a
moment to recognize that you’re breathing now. Don’t concentrate on breathing
or hold your breath, just notice that you breathe in, and then breathe back
out. Consider too how many times you do this. The average person inhales and
exhales about thirteen times each minute. That’s seven hundred eighty times per
hour. That’s eighteen thousand, seven hundred twenty times per day. That’s
nearly seven million times per year. Over the course of an average person’s
lifetime, which is about sixty-eight years—that’s taking into account everyone
in the world, in the richest places where people live longest and the poorer
places where most people die youngest, you will breathe at least four hundred seventy-six
million times.
But that isn’t our only important cycle. Most of us wake up
at morning, go on with our day, and go to sleep at night. We eat food and drink
water, digest them for energy to move, and then expel them as liquid or as
solid. Even our moods operate as a cycle. We will be up, happy, exuberant,
experience that for a time, and then down, sad, depressed, experiencing that
too for a time. Some of us experience extreme periods of that cycle and
regulate it with medications; no one has a perfectly even, balanced experience
of no joys and no sorrows. We aren’t built that way. We’re meant to suffer and
enjoy, stress and relax. This is 8a part of what makes us alive, part of what
helps us experience life in all its aspects.
As those farmers and composters understand, nothing new is added to the universe. Physicists have determined that there is exactly the same amount of matter existent today as there was instants after the Big Bang. So nothing is created out of nothing; everything is made up of elements of something that already existed, usually in another form. Astronomer NeilDeGrasse Tyson—has he reached a point at which he can be called a public intellectual yet?—has said,
Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.
Here
are some cosmological terms that Neil deGrasse Tyson would use to describe the
process of winter solstice. I’m not going to explain them because I don’t
understand them, but what I want you to hear is the music in their very words.
Celestial navigation. Ouranioi. Heliostasis. Circumference. Parallel.
Perpendicular. Obliquity of the Ecliptic. Heliacal circle. This comes about as
close to the ancient music of the spheres as we can get.
A
person dies and rots and becomes parts of grass and flowers, bees carry off the
sweet stuff of flowers to make honey, and the honey is eaten by bears and
wolverines as well as people. This is how the universe is transmitted from part
to part to part. One huge, endless cycle. A movement from solstice to solstice.
Where I’m from when we near this time of the year, this
“shadowed quiet of winter’s light,” what we expect is snow and ice, the scrape
of shovels on driveways and the roar of plows on the road, the warmth of parkas
and mittens. As I remain here I’m becoming more acclimated to late-blooming camelias
and magnolias, the hardy contingent wearing sweatshirts and socks with sandals.
I’ll never reconcile myself to the sound of lawnmowers and leaf blowers. But in
both places the axial tilt of the earth is the reason for the season.
When we celebrate Midwinter what we’re celebrating is the
death of the former year, the former cycle, and the birth of a new one. It is,
almost always, a time that brings excitement and hope. What will I do differently
this new year? What will change around me? I say almost always because for many
of us the new year holds no more hope than the dying one. Our conditions may
not change, our lives may not get better, the circumstances we live in may not
alter.
What we do is hope. Hope can be a verb, a doing word, as
much as a noun. I hope the new year changes things. Stereotypically, darkness
is seen as bad, as depressing, as the thing we want out of. We hope for the
sun. Midwinter celebration was seen as the summoning by the people of the sun.
We’d preserve the light we had and use it to kindle the light and life we hoped
would come.
There’s no denying the sun feels good on our bodies. After
all, it’s the warmth I chased down here, the opportunity in December to lie on
my hammock in the backyard. Recently, during the cold snap at the beginning of
the month, as I was doing laundry I realized with a start how many pairs of
shorts I’d worn just in the two weeks around Thanksgiving. Six. Six pairs of
shorts.
Solstice is
important to me too because, as Dr Robin Kimmerer of the Citizen Potowatomi
Nation has said, "Winter is a teacher of vulnerability." This
year has not lacked for lessons in vulnerability and I have no doubt winter
promises to bring more, probably harsher, lessons. As religious columnist Elizabeth Dias (behind a paywall) points out, for most of human history and
even for many humans today, winter is a period when simple survival is the aim.
"Winter is a primal time of death and loss, and a time for grief. It
reminds us that darkness, not only light, is part of the recurring rhythm of
what it means to be human...The great irony of winter is that the moment
darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the
winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter."
Yes, I love the sun and warmth. I love to stretch my limbs
searching for that feeling of well-being in my body I get from the tingle on my
bare skin. But the cold and dark has its place too. Parker reminds us “prayer
[is] buried in the ground.” It might be cliché to refer to seeds right now, and
I like to avoid cliché. But it’s true, seeds need the dark and the cold and
moist, and we do too.
“Love this world, she whispers,” as if we need to be
reminded of our reliance on and our responsibility to it. Perhaps we do. It’s
easy to get caught up in everyday life, just getting by, and ignore such a
little thing as a turn of seasons, especially one so far off in terms of the
cosmos. It’s not a crime, not even a moral one, to forget to pause a moment in
the hurly-burly of this season with Hannukah, Christmas, Diwali, Kwanzaa coming
fast and furious on each other and recognize that the cold nights are now
shorter, the warm days are longer. There’s no reward to it other than the
momentary noting that, at least in this, all is right in the world.
Ultimately, today is not about light, it’s about noticing
light. Not about change but recognizing change. But seize on it. Like a candle,
allow it to warm you and even to guide you. Of such small things are greater
things built.
