It’s the Winter Solstice, justification for man’s eternal hope and optimism, an important marker in the year’s cycle.
The sun still sits way off to the south, but its flight is checked, and slowly, slowly it will climb north again. However, days will continue to shorten until December 25, when the strengthening light at day’s end will begin to offset the tardy sunrise, which will arrive later and later until the end of the first week in January. By that time, we’ll have gained a quarter of an hour at day’s end. Regardless of the temperature and the calendar, we’ll know we’re on our way out of the long, dark cold, inching inexorably toward spring.
There was a darker time when this knowledge was not so certain, a time when northern men living in harmony with nature watched fearfully day by day as the sun slipped further and further away, cutting an attenuating arc along the southern horizon.
These people lacked our dubious knowledge and couldn’t take tomorrow for granted, so they must have been sorely pressed and terribly uncertain about what the future might hold. We might surmise that prayers and sacrifices were offered, promises made.
In time, supplication turned to celebration as the sun halted its slide and began to creep north again. There would be warmth again, and renewal and growth.
With the sun’s return came renewed hope and faith in the gigantic and constant rhythms of life, comforting and eternal, from summer to winter and around again, the secure fullness of a year.
