DECEMBER, MOST EVERYONE complains, is far too dark.
The shortened days force us indoors.
The temperature dips uncomfortably low.
It feels foreboding.
To me, the darkness of this season is alluring.
It’s as if God is cloaking the world — or at least the northern half of the globe — in what amounts to a prayer shawl.
We are called to turn inward, to be hushed, to pay attention, to get less swept up by the rush, rush, rush of the holiday season.
At nightfall, when the last glimmers of light fade and the stars seem to suddenly appear all at once, it’s as if the caretakers of wonder have flown through the heavens sparking the wicks of a million candles.
And we, too, huddled in our kitchens or circling ‘round our dining room tables, we strike the match.
We kindle the flames.
We shatter darkness with all the light we can muster.
Today is the winter solstice, the day of the year when the Earth’s axial tilt puts the northern hemisphere at its farthest point from the sun.
Simply put, it is the shortest day of the year.
It marks that point in time when the shortening of days comes to an end, and our days begin growing longer until the summer solstice June 21 when they again begin to shorten, like the waxing and waning of the moon and the ebb and flow of the tides.
Before turning your focus entirely on the growing light, I’d like to encourage you to celebrate the darkness while you can.
For darkness provides us with a sacred landscape of discovery, of finding our way by engaging our deeper senses: The senses of the heart, soul and imagination.
For the fact is we live in a lightbulb world now: LED, halogen, fluorescent, incandescent — blaring, glaring, blinking 24/7, especially this month.
When’s the last time you tiptoed out your door to take in the sky show?
It’s there every night: the stars and the moon, waxing or waning, a night-after-night lesson in fractions and wonder.
December provides us with an invitation.
It’s as if God is whispering, “Please come closer and marvel at the gifts I’ve bestowed. Listen for the pulsing questions within, the ones that beg — finally — to be asked, to be answered. Am I doing what I love? Am I living the life I was so meant to live? Am I savoring or simply slogging along?”
Poet Mary Oliver writes that “attentiveness is the root of all prayer.”
She reminds us that our one task as we walk the snow-crusted woods or startle to the night cry of the barred owl is “learning to be astonished.”
Ever astonished.
Renaissance scholar and poet Kimberly Johnson put it another way: “I want to live my life in epiphany.”
So do I.
Maybe you do, too.
So let us unwrap the gifts that December brings us.
And in so doing, may we find that radiance deep down in the heart of the darkness. The darkness, our chambered nautilus of prayer.
The coiled depths in which we turn in silence, to await the still small voice that whispers the original love song of creation.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by five religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. The Rev. Kate Lore is a minister at the Quimper Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Port Townsend. Her email is katelore@gmail.com.
