I don’t know if you believe in Christmas, or if you have presents underneath the Christmas tree. But if you believe in love, that will be more than enough . .
It’s in every one of us to be wise. Find your heart, open up both your eyes. We can all know everything without ever knowing why. It’s in every one of us, by and by . . . (from John Denver)
It is Solstice. Winter is arriving within this hour, even as I write. As I settled down under the Christmas tree to write in the predawn darkness, I briefly checked my email, and received two dear and touching letters from friends that made me cry. If they are reading this, thank you. You made me feel less alone.
“The darkness drops again. But centuries of stony sleep were wakened by a rocking cradle. And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. . .” Without looking it up, this is how I remember the haunting words in Yeats’s poem, one that he wrote in the aftermath of the First World War and in the midst of the 1918-1919 flu pandemic as his pregnant wife lay critically ill.
Those words always come back to me as associated with the Solstice darkness somehow. The eeriness of similarity in societal conditions is especially striking this year with our current pandemic and unsettledness. What we in our Christian perspective have come to call a Divine Birth really did “rock” the world. Historical figures estimate that the defense of Christianity has been responsible for as many as 80-100 million deaths over the centuries, and on the other side of the coin, it is estimated by some counts that there are over 100,000 Christian martyrs every year in our present day world.
Regardless of the accuracy of these devastating statistics, surely, if only a fraction of it is true, we can do better than this.
My sister and I were speaking of brilliant scientist and scholar Stephen Hawking yesterday over tea. And in our attempt to understand even a fragment of his work, speculating on the probability of life elsewhere in our universes . . . Certainly, but not life as we would ever know it, according to Hawking. We went so far into the realm of possibilities that we were even imagining another planet “peopled” with viruses such as Covid as the primary intelligent life form. And if so, come to our planet Earth to finish us off before we destroy everything millennia have created on this beautiful planet? The stuff of which science fiction is made, but just maybe . . .
Dark mutterings for tea, but highly appropriate for Solstice. We CAN do better than this. Please. Tonight is the highly anticipated Jupiter Saturn “Christmas Star” conjunction. Wise Men possibly followed that same “star” two thousand years ago to honor a new beginning, a new possibility . . .
It’s in every one of us to be wise . . .