It's been in the 60s and 70s here in Denver. The snow from a couple weeks ago is all melted away. But back home in Iowa, my parents tell me it's been much colder and snowier up until this week. Like single digits colder. And that's properly winter to me. It's weather for staying in and curling up with a good story. It might be one you read or listen to, or one you tell, or one someone else tells you. It might be an old favorite, or something new.
Winter is a season for stories. This last week, our Jewish siblings and neighbors have been telling the Hanukkah story of the Maccabees resisting the Seleucid Empire, and the miracle of a temple oil lamp which burned longer and brighter than anyone expected. Later this week, we'll join our Christian siblings and neighbors in remembering and retelling the stories of Christmas Eve and the birth of Jesus. And many of our Pagan friends and family tell and remember stories about the rebirth of another son, the Solar Son.
We’re at the end of one year, one season, and the beginning of another. It’s a time to remember our roots. The stories we tell matter. They connect and reconnect us to who we are, and who we want to be. They have the power to shape us and shape our world. There is power in the stories we tell, and with that power comes responsibility. Stories can build worlds and destroy them, and not always in the ways we want. Stories have gifts that we can accept to enrich our life, or squander.
At the Winter Solstice, the Longest Night, there is a story some of my fellow Pagans may know. The author, activist, and Pagan Priestess Starhawk tells it through a ritual for Yule in her book The Spiral Dance. At Yule, the winter solstice, worshipers remember and relive a cosmic story. It's time for the rebirth of the Divine Child Sun, “bringer of hope and the promise of summer1.” Sun is reborn from the dying and transforming Dark King. Through the worshipers’ celebration, they bring Infant Light back to us. Light is reborn into the world, reborn from the transformed darkness. Darkness is dispelled. Darkness is something to dispel. But does it have to be?
The imagery in this ritual is powerful, visceral. It evokes ancient dreams and memories, of a time when winter meant dwindling supplies and immanent hunger. Hunger that only the sun and growing season could defeat and undo. But in the 21st century, our lives are different. Do we really need to be so afraid of the dark? Our world has changed, after all. Many of our ancestors lived through precarious winters. But what was true for them is not so true for us today. We have 21st century global trade networks, and technology to preserve food that our ancestors couldn’t imagine. These have transformed our relationship to winter. Light is no longer so closely linked with abundance. Darkness isn’t so easily tied to scarcity. Our world of light and dark has changed. Now these cosmic forces mean different things.
And yet, we persist in holding on to our fear of the dark. The fear, contempt, and weight many of us continue putting on darkness harms others. When I first started seminary, I got an early assignment to design a solstice ritual. I was excited. Winter solstice was one of my favorite times of year. I thought I had created something bold and fresh. I submitted it without another thought. My enthusiasm was misplaced, though. We discussed the assignment in class after we made our submissions. The professor reflected on the beautiful potential of the solstice. He also shared how painful he found our celebrations of it. The tried and tired imagery of vanquishing darkness stung him. Another cut alongside a lifetime of hurts from comparing darkness, Blackness, to the things in life we want to diminish and cast away. So many rehearsals of this season hurt him, a Black man in America. As he spoke I realized I had made a cruel mistake in my assignment. I tried to vanquish darkness, too.
Symbols are fluid, and that makes them both powerful and challenging. The meaning that the we find in darkness shifts easily from metaphors about the sun to metaphors about race. This fear of the dark and mixing of symbols is pervasive and harmful. The author of our wisdom story feels it, too. Lupita Nyong'o writes in the back of her book that,
“Much like Sulwe, I got teased and taunted about my night-shaded skin...While both Sulwe and I had to learn to see our beauty, I hope that more and more children begin their lives knowing that they are beautiful. That they can look to the beauty in the world and know they are a part of it2.”
So she set out to tell a new story, one where the gifts and beauty of darkness would get the recognition they deserve.
She wrote a new myth into her story, a new cosmic tale, but with old friends. The story within her story follows two of our oldest guides, Night and Day. We find out, nearly too late, that Night has gifts. The gifts of rest and restoration3 which the people of the world ignored and took for granted. The people realized they didn’t know what they had until it was gone – the opportunity to rest. I have to wonder if the people really did stop taking the gifts of Night for granted. Did they tell Night “thank you” with each passing shadow, or each time they went to bed at the end of a long day? Did they celebrate Night with song and ritual?
We may as well ask ourselves that. We have so many reasons to honor the dark. But what stories help us? There is power in the old stories, the wisdom of the ages, to be sure. But that power isn't absolute. Not every old story can touch what we long to touch. As I was preparing for today, I had a hard time finding stories and songs that honor the Dark like it deserves. Our opening words are one exception. Here in the Orphic hymn to Night, the poet remembers our Goddess as “the mother of Gods and mortals4.” She is “jet-black and starlit.” She frees us from cares and relieves us from the toil of the day. These words are a lovely way to honor Night and her gifts. But without their mythic context, they are incomplete. They hint at a myth, a story half-remembered now. However this myth went, however this story of a sacred beginning was told, it is now lost to us5.
Time spins on in its Spiral Dance. Perhaps it’s time for a new story. A Solstice Story that honors the Dark and her gifts. A story like this.
Daylight was so weary. All summer long she had been carrying the world like a stone in her pocket. Her long golden hair had touched the earth like the rays of the sun. She had tended crops and livestock, brought people joy and celebration, and all the noise and commotion you can imagine. And in the light of day, the people of the earth saw all the things they had to fix and tend and worry about. Daylight was always happy to help, but she was also tired.
So over the rivers she trudged and up the mountains she climbed. She stumbled westward, to the land of dreams, to her house just over the last mountain, underneath the horizon at the edge of the earth. Her sister Nighttime was there, waiting for her.
“Why Daylight,” said Nighttime, “You’re looking tired as ever!”
“It’s true,” she told her sister. She could barely keep her eyes open any more. “I am tired, and I need rest.”
“I can see that,” said Nighttime. “Say no more. Let me take that stone in your pocket that you’ve been carrying all summer.”
Daylight did just that. She set the stone in Nighttime’s hand, and laid down on the soft bed. Winter began as Nighttime’s cool fingers wrapped around the stone, which she put in her own pocket. On the other side of the horizon, past the mountains and rivers, the hem of her dark cloak blanketed everything. The buzzing of the world slowed and softened into a mumble. The earth began to rest as Nighttime brought winter over the mountains with her. Nighttime gave the earth and fields a chance to rest, to prepare themselves for the growing season to come. All the busyness, fret, and worry seemed far away as the earth settled in to a new season.
The stories we tell matter. Stories of rest matter to us, a people providing a sanctuary for spiritual growth. Stories that honor and celebrate darkness in all its forms matter to us, a people striving to become a multicultural, multiracial beloved community. We are not whole when we celebrate the beauty and gifts of some and dismiss the gifts of others. Our spirituality is incomplete without darkness's gifts. We need those spiritual gifts today, because our world is loud, troubling, and frantic. We need some rest this time of year. Our world urges us to rush past the gifts of darkness, headlong into a season of Holly, Jolly, sensory overload. So this Solstice, let's reclaim the gifts of the dark. Let's lay down what keeps us from rest even for a little while. Let’s rest. Peace, Khaire, So may it be.
1. Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess – Special 20th Anniversary Edition with A New Introduction by the Author (New York: Harper One, 1999), 198.
2. Lupita Nyong'o, author, and Vashti Harrison, illustrator, Sulwe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 49.
3. Ibid., 35.
4. “Mother of Gods and men,” originally. Orphic Hymn 3. To Night, 1, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).
5. Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin M. Wolkow, translators, The Orphic Hymns (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 77.