Winter Solstice

“As the nights grow longer and all of nature seems to sleep, the rebirth of the sun draws near. The Winter Solstice, in the northern hemisphere at least, is a time of crackling fires, faery lights in the trees and deep, silent rest. Now is our chance to look within and enjoy spiritual hibernation, peace and renewal. The seeds of our future, resting in the rich earth, need this period of stillness, as do we.

This modern holiday season can also be a hectic time, when the stresses and strains of life keep us locked away from nature and more natural ways of being. The Winter Solstice, when the world appears to stand still, can serve as a moment out of time, an opportunity to reconnect with our own souls once again. As we mark the descent of the seasonal wheel and the height of the year’s darkness, we realize that the light and warmth of the sun will soon be returned to us…

If we now go within, into the deep caves of our own psyches, our instinct to seek quiet and warmth can lead to our regeneration, allowing us to enter the new year with renewed vigour and enthusiasm.”

From The Magical Year by Danu Forest

International Human Solidarity Day

“Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitariness and pride of power and with its pleas for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offence, shock the world far more than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favour of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906 – 1945), executed by the Nazis for his stance against them, quoted in Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

“”People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.”
George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

Our long-standing beliefs – whether they be about the scientific nature of reality and temporal time or about our spirituality – have a tendency to become hidebound and static, comfortable and unchallenging. When we encounter situations and things that push at the boundaries of our comfortable enclave of belief, we have two options: we can totally ignore the challenge, safe in the belief that we are right, or we can enter into a temporary suspension of disbelief while we entertain the possibility that things are other than we have believed them to be. The suspension of disbelief is something that happens every time we attend a play or a movie: we lose all sense of separation between audience and performer as we see the story unfold before us, as we become immersed in events and protagonists. At the end of a moving performance, movie, or novel, we leave the world of that story and return to our own reality again.

The strongest challenges to belief are the things that we experience: experience is a great changer and shaper of belief because it gives us pragmatic knowledge that offers tangible and physical proof, even though its workings are often mysterious to us – we know what we experienced even though it may be “unbelievable.” This tells us that our perceptions are informing and changing belief. Sometimes the facts that we experience in our very body are so overwhelming that we have to enter into a suspension of disbelief, behaving “as it” they were true in order to accommodate the experience.

What is challenging your beliefs right now? Analyze the challenge using both sets of senses – physical and spiritual – to understand the experience.”

From The Celtic Spirit: Daily Meditations for the Turning Year by Caitlin Matthews

Image: Illustration from George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, 1920 edition, by Jessie Wilcox Smith

“The Beloved is in me, and the Beloved is in you,
As life is hidden in every seed.
So rubble your pride, my friend,
And look for Him within you.
When I sit in the heart of His world
A million suns blaze with light,
A burning blue sea spreads across the sky,
Life’s turmoil falls quiet,
All the stains of suffering wash away.
Listen to the unstruck bells and drums!
Love is here; plunge into its rapture!
Rains pour down without water;
Rivers are streams of light.
How could I ever express
How blessed I feel
To revel in such vast ecstasy
In my own body?
This is the music
Of soul and soul meeting.
Of the forgetting of all grief.
This is the music
That transcends all coming and going.”

Kabir, 15th century India

“Nature offers us a thousand simple pleasers – plays of light and color, fragrance in the air, the sun’s warmth on skin and muscle, the audible rhythm of life’s stir and push – for the price of merely paying attention. What joy! But how unwilling or unable many of us are to pay this price in an age when manufactured sources of stimulation and pleasure are everywhere at hand. For me, enjoying nature’s pleasures takes conscious choice, a choice to slow down to seed time or rock time, to still the clamoring ego, to set aside plans and busyness, and to simply to be present in my body, to offer myself up.”

Lorraine Anderson, nature writer

“He to whom time is the same as eternity, and eternity the same as time, is free of all adversity.”

Jakob Boehme (1575 – 1624)

Image: Eternity by Shirley Jones

“O Miracle of Dawn,
Radiance from the heavens!
With joyful silence,
I receive soft light of a new day,
light born from earth’s turning.
O Medicine of Dawn,
healing are your morning rays.
I lift my face toward
the ointment of your splendor
as I become a morning prayer.
As Morning Blossoms,
I go forth to meet the great shining,
the dear unfolding of the day.
With the fading night
I begin a sacred dance
in the arms of your shining.
Encourager of Morning,
Soft glory of the new day,
I am tasting the joy of being awake.
Let your face shine on me
that, I, in turn may shine on others.”

Macrina Wiederkehr, OSB (1939 – 2020)

Image: Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn, Vilnius

“”Look at the birds in the sky and the lilies in the fields. Look at the sea anemone, at the humble protozoon and at the Omega Centaurus: they all do neither sow nor reap; they do not have warehouses or bank accounts or life insurance policies!

You forget that Someone at every moment takes care of every sinew of your body, controls the circulation of your blood and the functioning of all your glands. And you seem convinced that some small problem of your daily life can be solved by no-one in the universe but yourself!”
Ernesto Cardenal

We look at nature and find many lessons. Few creatures need warehouses, bank accounts, or life insurance to live full lives. Even our bodies work for nothing and do a pretty good job of things. With a cosmic awareness, we rediscover how interdependent we are with the whole history of the universe. We realize that beings are caring for us even in the toughest times.”

From Christian Mystics by Matthew Fox

Feast Day of St Lucy

“Flame of love
Irradiate my heart.
Flame of beauty
Illumine my soul.
Flame of wisdom
Exalt my mind.
Flame of courage
Impassion my will.
Flame of peace
Steady my being.”

Andrew Harvey

“The mystical will always be with us – the more it is discovered, the more inexplicable it will become. The new movement, the signs of whose progress can be detected everywhere, will express all those things that for a generation have been suppressed – the whole of that important mystical facet of human nature. It will give free expression to all those subtle nuances that hitherto have only been hinted at in hypotheses. A whole mass of things that cannot be rationalised – new born thoughts that are still not properly formed.”

Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944), painter, born on this day

Image: Mystical Shore by Edvard Munch