In This Season of Returning Light
I must say I’ve never written a blog post as a holiday greeting before.
You can thank the weather here in north-central Indiana.
I’ve been thinking about some kind of greeting to my friends at Digg and CenterLeft for a month or so now — but everything really gelled this afternoon, as I caught myself thinking that this holiday season, more than any other I remembered in my 41 years, had to be one of those most likely to provoke a “Bah! Humbug” reaction. There certainly are many more chances to get caught up in negativity. The economy stinks. We buy less, we feel more selfish, less generous. Here in Indiana, the weather is atrocious, dark and cold even by Indiana standards. (We’ve been between -5F and about 25F for the last month, and in the past few days, we’ve been WITHOUT power as much as we’ve had it.) Not exactly what I want to feel in this season.
Sure, the tree’s up, even decorated with the new environmentally-friendly LED lights. We definitely have more candles deployed this year. (Thanks NIPSCo) And I’ll be the first to admit, as someone with fairly fierce Aspergers/HFA, I simply don’t FEEL any holiday, so my sense of holiday spirit should hardly be used as a yardstick. (A Festivus pole, maybe.)
But no need to get caught up in all that stuff, I reminded myself — I’d hit something better. It’s helped me stave off the humbugs so far, and I realized that writing what I’m about it just wasn’t an option. Not so much to help myself — I did that this weekend. But in the hopes that SHARING the surprise holiday gift I discovered under my own (mental) tree will help others.
I never thought that a weekend largely without power would give me anything positive. (I gain a whole different vocab during even ten-minute outages.) But this weekend’s outages reminded me of two simple things: at the end of every dark period, there’s always light, and we tend to appreciate that light MORE, having had it taken from us by force. I appreciated it enough that I spent a good bit of time reflecting on light this weekend — eventually realizing that the ten-day stretch from the 21st of December to the 1st of January would play host to at least four “festivals” of light.
We hear this called the Season of Light so glibly, and so often, that we rarely pause to consider WHY.
AS I thought about the religions I know fairly well, I realized that for at least four of them, light plays a central role. As I compared the role light plays for all of them, something else emerged: a theme that can be applied to something special in the lives of most everyone likely to be reading this.
The Druids. Solstice, at least as it’s been brought across to me, is a time of inspiration, of conception. We’re not out working. We’re inside, talking, thinking, “breathing in”, after all of our expenditures of energy in the previous three seasons. Equally important, Solstice celebrates the sense that the sun will be returning, along with Spring, longer warmer days filled with greater potential.
Christianity. Christmas is filled with light, some natural, some tacked on. There’s the star, leading wise men. Christianity’s Jesus proclaims himself as “the Light of the World.” And while the many of the lights associated with Christmas itself source themselves from extra-Christian practices, they remain part of a brilliant celebration. In the end though, the celebration is of the appearance of a singular light at the end of a long period of darkness. This light signals a complete change in practice — indeed, in the order of things (amusingly enough, from an order that feels much more conservative to an order that feels far more progressive).
Judaism. Chanukkah [the Festival of Lights] centers around a Menorah — and the legend that our G-d miraculously stretched a tiny bit of oil to provide light for eight nights. Now there’s hope. One of the things Chanukkah celebrates, aside from the miracle itself, is the sense that the miracle provides just enough cover for the Jewish people to purify the resources (oil) they’d need to continue their religious existance. The Jewish people, coming out from under rulership completely alien to the values they held dear, were given exactly what they needed to begin observing those values once again.
Kwanzaa. I’m less of an expert here, but I do understand the basic meaning of the kinara. Boiled down, the three red candles on the left represent struggle, while those on the right represent future and hope. (I realize that each individual candle has its own meaning as well, but it isn’t my intent to focus on those here, much as I want to …) Again, light traces the journey of a people — not automatic, but instead by means of hard work, from struggle and enslavement to a bright future and hope.
I think you see the theme I found myself building on Saturday evening, and perhaps you even see where I’m headed.
Over the coming four years, the going may be ugly, costly. But we have caused to be — we have called into existence — a transition as great as any ever imagined. By changing who we are — by changing how we thought about the process — we have begun a transformation. We can celebrate, true to the spirit of this season, that the darkness will never be complete.
We will have our OWN festival of light to celebrate for years to come. Perhaps this time, unlike after other victories, we’ll use festivals for what their intended to do: codification of what a group with a common aim has learned. Perhaps we can use the time when we’re focused — as the druids of old, on the return of light to our physical world — to reflect each year on the ‘inspiration’ that is Barack Obama. Not the man. Not even the policies, since I doubt any of us are going to agree with him anywhere near 100%. But the transition to our thinking, to our characters, to our willingness to transform, to RETAKE, even, the political process of the United States.
The ability to bend what seemed to be an inevitable path of darkness back in the direction of at least one more season of light, of warmth, of productivity, of the values we treasure as a progressive people.
Whatever feelings I may or may not have, may or may not be able to generate, for the holidays in progress throughout this month, whatever concerns I may have against the returning light, I can indeed find joy in my heart that the darkness WILL END. And unlike the various dark periods endured by the peoples at the heart of Druidism, Judaism, and Christianity, there is no deity changing the course of events for me. We, ourselves, have changed that course.
May you all find some ray of light this Holiday Season, this Season of (Returning) Light.
You worked hard enough for it.
Happy Holidays indeed.
Now where’d I put my figgy pudding?
Comments