Rev. Ron Sala
December
16, 2001
One of my first memories of school was of arguing with my kindergarten classmates about Santa Claus. I was quite convinced there that no such person exists, but another boy was just as convinced he did. I don’t know what put us on to the subject, since it was only September. But there we stood, the Pure Rationalist and the True Believer, slugging it out in a battle of words. I pointed out how impossible it would be for one person to visit all the children of the world in one night. He appealed to Santa’s magical properties which allowed him to do the impossible. Neither of us got anywhere with the other.
I’m also reminded this time of year of something a friend told me a few years ago on a beach. He said that some 2,000 years ago the son of the Great God came down to earth. His birth was foretold in the stars. He was born of a virgin, in humble circumstances, on December 25th. He was visited by three wise men and shepherds. He grew up and performed many miracles, such as raising the dead, making the blind see and the lame walk. He cast out demons. At the end, he had a last supper with his 12 disciples. He was killed and ascended into heaven on the third day. His worshipers held feasts in which they believed they partook of his body and blood. They were also baptized. His religion became the most popular in the Roman Empire. His name? Mithra. Perhaps you thought I was talking about someone else. Jesus, maybe.
We talk about “the first Christmas” as being Jesus’ birth, but the Christmas holiday was not celebrated until the fourth century. The gospel accounts do not tell us when in the year Jesus was born. In fact, if we want to be biblical literalists for a moment, Luke writes that “There were shepherds abiding in the hills” when Jesus was born. It was the practice of shepherds in Palestine to come down from the hills when the rainy season began in October. December 25th, however, was the day of the Winter Solstice by the Julian calendar. In 274, the Roman emperor Aurelian, decreed that day to be the feast of Sol Invictus, the “Invincible Sun,” a title belonging to the Indo-Persian dying-and-rising god, Mithra—who my friend told me about on the beach. The solstice, when days started to become longer, was his birthday. Mithra was accredited with being pure good and granting eternal life. Every December, his devotees would wait in his shrines till midnight when they would come out and cry, “The Virgin has brought forth! The light is waxing!” Any similarities between the Mithra cult and Christianity the church fathers insisted was merely the devil trying to counterfeit the one true faith. Never mind that Mithra’s faith pre-dated Jesus’ by a couple hundred years!
Really, the coincidence of Jesus and Mithra both being born on December 25th shouldn’t surprise us. It turns out that the gods Attis, Dionysus, Osiris, and Baal were all born on that date.
As if that weren’t enough Winter Solstice holidays in the Roman Empire, there was also Saturnalia. Saturn was the God of harvesting, planting, magic, and mystery. His festival featured feasting, drunkenness, games, role reversals, and temporary freedom for slaves. The Romans believed Saturn to be a fat, jolly old man who carried a sack full of presents. And long before the first department store Santa, people were giving gifts at Saturnalia.
The Winter Solstice was not only important in Rome, of course. It has been and continues to be celebrated across many times and cultures.
In ancient Celtic Europe, the Druids celebrated Winter Solstice honoring their sun God and rejoicing his return as the days got longer, signaling the coming of spring. They brought a large log—the Yule Log—into an outdoor clearing and lit a great bonfire. Everyone sang and danced around the fire. All the noise and excitement was said to awaken the sun from its long winter sleep, hurrying spring on its way as the cycle began once again and the days grew longer than the nights.
In Tibet, the Dosmoche festival centers around a pole covered with stars, crosses, and pentagrams made of string. Dancers dress up in hideous masks to frighten away evil spirits for the coming year. Feasting and prayers fill the days and until the pole is torn down by the townsfolk.
In Germanic Europe, it was believed that Balder, the God of the sun, once ruled over an age of perpetual summer. This summer was guaranteed by his mother who had made every creature swear never to harm him. The one thing she’d overlooked, however, was the mistletoe, which, though tiny, had great magickal power. Loki, the trickster among the Gods pointed out this oversight to Hoder, Balder’s dark, blind brother. Hoder used the mistletoe to pierce Balder’s heart and send him to the Underworld. Thus summer ended and so it continues to end every year at the summer solstice. However, the very same mistletoe is a sign that Balder and summer will come again, since even though the trees appear dead, the mistletoe is evergreen.
Lots of people are celebrating the Winter Solstice these days. Some of them consider themselves Pagan, others not. Even the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and several Atheist groups around the country, each in their own way, have begun celebrating Solstice.
In the form of Paganism known as Wicca, the Winter Solstice is called Yule, the Norse word for wheel. It is one of the eight spokes on the wheel of the year, or major holidays. Modern Pagans draw on various myths for the returning of the light. To some, the Divine Child is born from the Goddess. Perhaps this is the root of the New Year symbolism we see in popular culture with the baby beside the old man with his white beard and walking stick. To others, there is a battle between the God of the Waning Year and the God of the Waxing Year, though they’re really one in the same. To others, it’s the time that Demeter searches for her daughter Persephone. There’ll be no warmth or greenery until she returns from Hades. To still others, it’s a time of turning inward, in contrast with the outward orientation of summer. Maybe the traditional Christian calendar is in agreement on this point, with Advent to be set aside for reflection and preparation.
I used to live near the student housing for a state university. One day, during the week of Christmas, I went out for a walk. As I passed one of the fraternity houses, there were about a dozen young men out on the porch. One, I happened to notice, was completely naked. All he had to cover himself were his two hands, which he modestly kept strategically placed. The other young men seemed to be interested in what my reaction might be to their underdressed friend. I said Hi and told him that it seemed that Jesus wasn’t the only one with a birthday today. . . . He didn’t understand my reference to the type of suit he was wearing. It was about 25 degrees, and he had more important things to worry about. I just kept walking.
Reflecting on this experience, I thought, “What a wonderful statement of the season!” The holidays are meant to surprise us! Just when it looks like the sun is on its way out, it gradually begins to show itself more and more. It exposes its nakedness to our eyes. The celebration of its return is as primordial as our bare skin. It testifies that the natural world is not wholly separate from us.
The Gods and saviors of this world, no matter what we name them, come into the world as naked as this youth, bringing with them nothing but spirit. The same can be said of each of us: The spirit is all that we can call our own. The advertisers tell us that happiness is something that we can charge to Visa and MasterCard, but really it’s only us, our bodies and souls and the ever-changing richness of nature—and it doesn’t cost a dime!
Did that young man know that in stepping forth on solstice day, as naked as he was born, that he celebrated bodily the rebirth of the sun? Probably not. More likely, it was because he wanted to be initiated into the brotherhood of the fraternity by proving himself. In this way, he was not much different from those who have been baptized in water for Jesus, baptized in blood for Mithra, or who spent days and nights in caves to celebrate rebirth. He wanted belonging, and to secure it he was prepared to undergo the rituals of the tribe, no matter how strange they appear at first.
This time of year we all do unusual things, the origins of which may be shrouded in mystery. It’s part of our tangled human heritage. From it we draw our own meanings.
I no longer entirely agree with the position I took on Santa back in kindergarten. I find now that whether something is real or not may depend more on how we look at it than anything else.
No matter how we celebrate, it seems that we do need something at this time of year. It seems the least likely time for a holiday, with each day growing shorter and colder, each day the sun lower on the horizon. It’s now we feel the gravity of the curse of Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “Always winter, but never Christmas.” Whatever our religious tradition, whether by birth or by choice, or whether we profess a religion at all, we need something: candles, or evergreens, or gifts, or the smiles of children.
We’re all moving on the wheel this month, out of 2001 into 2002, out of the light and into the light, out of the warmth of summer into the warmth of summer. The world as we know it is about to end. We have to decide what we’ll pack for the new year and what we must discard. We leave behind the old comforts and the pains, and set to work on the mystery of what the new year will bring us and what we’ll bring it.
We’re moving and the future is tremendous, both in the common use of the word, meaning great, but in it’s other sense of making us tremble. We are moving and we don’t know what the future will be like.
We’re moving, and uncertain, but this is the season of light out of darkness, of rebirth, of hope. It’s a doorway through which we shall not return, yet it’s oddly familiar. It’s here to help us make the move from the gone world to the coming one.
When I was in high school, I was on the academic team. We were in a single-elimination competition with teams from other schools. All of us were anxious about how we would do. Something Mr. Perry, our teacher, said has stuck with me, despite its being something of a cliché. “Win or lose,” he said, “the sun will rise tomorrow.”
“The sun will rise tomorrow.” I don’t remember if we won or lost that day, but the sun did rise the next morning.
Perhaps that’s what makes Yule so powerful. You can count on good coming out of bad, on hope coming out of despair, on the sun rising the next morning, and a little earlier the morning after that. The solstice is a token of collective hope that allows us to scare our demons away, warm ourselves by the Yule log, find the strength to give again, make resolutions for the New Year, and enjoy the season, knowing it won’t last. It’s for all this and much more that we say, “Welcome, Yule!”