Winter Solstice and Newgrange

It’s easy to feel how near we are to the winter solstice. The exact time of the solstice occurs this Saturday night, December 21, at 11:48 p.m., but we each have our own internal sense of reaching this turn. As the days grow shorter and the dark descends earlier there’s a twinge of dismay. We know better than to worry—the days will lengthen soon enough—but nonetheless we light candles and extra strings of lights to ward off the dark. The hustle and bustle can be a welcome distraction from that instinctive unease.

A dramatic marking of the winter solstice was built at Newgrange in Ireland around 3200 BCE. At the solstice sunrise, the first ray of light above the horizon pierces the center of a long, narrow passage, illuminating a small, womblike room deep within the structure. There is just enough space to stand along the circular stone walls surrounding the chamber’s main feature—an enormous stone basin resting on the ground. The shaft of sunlight at the winter solstice shines directly onto a spiral design carved into the far wall.

We hold much in common with those who built this magnificent structure. Though our culture has made huge advances in science and technology, we are reliant on the same earth and the same sun to give us life. With the growing dark, we are subject to the same ancient sense of dread stirring deep in the psyche. We may not believe that our rituals cause the sun to return, but we wait expectantly and experience a sense of relief when it does.

The festival of lights in this season is something we need, whatever our religious traditions may be. In the midst of it all, there’s a pagan soul within me that insists on marking the solstice. The winter solstice is the herald of the new year.

This year, I’m remembering the wide stone bowl that fills the chamber deep within the mound at New Grange. When I was there, I had the overwhelming feeling that the basin was a place to give birth.

At the solstice this year, I’m holding that basin in mind and asking: What wants to be born in the new year?

What question are you holding here on the verge of the solstice?

Echoes of Advent in the New Year

Despite my best plans it’s not until now, when we’re on the quiet side of the holidays, that I can fully appreciate Advent. I meant to spend those weeks leading up to Christmas with Kathleen Wiley’s wonderful book, New Life: Symbolic Meditations on the Birth of Christ Within. A good idea, but Christmas gains speed in December and my contemplative intentions scattered.

Ideally, Advent is a season of quiet waiting, preparing for the birth of God into the world and the birth of our highest self into being. The four weeks leading up to Christmas focus on hope, love, joy, and peace as we invite the divine child to be born in our hearts and in our midst. But it’s only now, in the silent nights following the holidays, that there’s time to reflect on how to claim those gifts and live them out in the new year.

Hope, love, joy, and peace speak to the deepest needs of our soul. We need them so much that we’re almost afraid to ask for them, much less trust that our longing will be fulfilled. Yet the message of Christmas is that our hearts’ desires will be met if we allow it. Grace truly abounds, if we can let ourselves be open to it. This is what we are trying to show our children through the gifts we place under the tree. But we forget that grace is ours as well. The tree itself is there to remind us of life’s evergreen gifts and the light of hope, love, joy, and peace.

Back in December, as the solar calendar wound down toward the longest night and the social calendar filled up with holiday festivities, the church calendar brought us through four weeks of meditation on these gifts of the Spirit. Now as the days slowly grow longer and the sun begins its return from the far point on the horizon, I’m ready to retrace the steps through those four weeks. We’ve turned from the innermost point of the spiral, and as we wind outward again into a new year, those mediations await like a trail of breadcrumbs. The challenge is to stay in touch with how these gifts are manifest in our lives, and to find a way to give them expression.

Hope, love, joy, and peace are ours. We don’t have to create them or earn them. We don’t have to craft them or bake them or buy them. They aren’t the result for a perfectly executed holiday, they are the gifts that make our imperfect celebrations beautiful. They aren’t a reward for a perfectly lived life, they are the compass that orients us in how to live. For the next few weeks, I hope to rewind my way through the lessons of Advent and consider how to carry its gifts forward into a year in which we desperately need them. I’ll be listening for the echo of those longings shouted into the canyon of Advent, as they reverberate through these quiet days and carry us into the new year.