Permeated with commercial hustle and cultural bustle, the days before Christmas are ferociously busy. It’s a time of almost continuous activity. Christian and non-Christian alike bake cookies, decorate homes, put up trees, exchange gifts, send cards or email and socialize until it seems every available minute has been filled.
Not only is the season the busiest of the year, it’s also the noisiest. The decible level of life rises perceptibly as carols and seasonal songs blare in grocery and department stores. Television and cyber-pitchmen hawk their wares with increasing fervor, and impatient horns fill shopping mall parking lots with the honking of a thousand demented geese.
Even at night, in bed, the noise ebbs and flows in the form of incessant internal questioning. ”What have I forgotten?” “ Who will be offended if…?” “Can we afford to. ..?” ”Will there be time for…?” All the while, children nag and adults grow snappish. By Christmas Day, many are ready to throw out the tree with the wrapping paper and get on with it. Eleven additional days of Christmas, stretching on to the Feast of the Epiphany, seem a horror. Who needs more Christmas when we already are exhausted and drained?
Everyone knows a Scrooge or two, cynics who describe these seasonal excesses in terms that range from “evil” to “pathetic”. Obviously, they are neither. The gathering of family and friends, the joy of worship, the exchange of gifts can be sheer delight. For most people, the pleasures of Christmas are worth every minute of pressure and every ounce of energy they require. But as we anticipate our celebration, it’s worth pausing to remember we prepare in the context of a world far older than our customs and far larger than our plans. It is a world that travels an ages-old path and turns on an ageless axis with no regard for human intent and purpose. It is a hidden world, but imperfectly so. It can be searched out and surprised, and it can reveal itself in unexpected ways.
I experienced that hidden world one Christmas holiday in England. After a brief stop in London, I went on to spend a week in Wiltshire in order to celebrate Christmas at Salisbury cathedral. I stayed at a wonderful inn and came to enjoy long conversations with the innkeeper and his wife. They were cheerful sorts, bubbly and accomodating, just as keepers of inns should be. Best of all, they were full of advice and ideas to make my English sojourn perfect.
When they discovered I hadn’t planned to make the trek to Stonehenge (“that pile of rocks in a pasture”, as another guest put it), they were aghast. “But you must go to Stonehenge!”, they implored. Laughing, I asked if Stonehenge wasn’t better visited in summer. Giving me a look I’d learned to translate as, “Now see what this poor, benighted American is saying”, they replied yes, the summer solstice is more famous, but the winter solstice has its own good qualities. “For example”, they said, ”in the dead of winter there are far fewer tourists to clog up the roads.”
On the slightly ironic basis of “fewer tourists”, I agreed to make the trip with them. As we traveled, they told me a bit more about solstice. The winter solstice marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year. The sun appears at its lowest point in the sky, and its noontime elevation appears to be the same for several days before and after the event. Following the solstice, days grow longer and nights shorter. The word itself, “solstice”, comes from the Latin solstitium, a combination of “sun” (sol) and “a stoppage” (stitium). However, legend says that at the very moment of solstice, it is not only the sun that stops. If you are in a silent place, with a quiet mind and a stilled heart, you can hear the earth catch her breath and pause, as she waits for the sun to turn and move, beginning his ageless journey toward the spring.
Charmed by the legend and intrigued by the science, I’d become truly interested at last in exploring the “pile of rocks in a pasture”. We arrived at Stonehenge not at the precise time of solstice, but on the day after. What crowds had gathered were gone. There were no ticket-takers, no vendors, no guides. There was only emptiness – a cold sun shining through high, thin clouds, cold gray rock and winter-singed grass dusted with snow. There was a wind that sighed, and a single bird, circling above the plain.
The silence was so complete I could hear my heart, beating in my ears. A sense of presence, profound and palpable, gripped my heart. Anxious, no longer certain I was alone, I turned to see who might have come up from behind. There was no one there. There were only the rocks, the sky and the hush of wind, singing across Salisbury plain.
Every year as the darkness deepens, as the days grow shorter and the sun hastens his journey toward the solstice turn, I remember Salisbury Plain - the stones, the silence and the song. My first experience of that deep and richly textured silence was not my last. I have come to understand that my experience was not dependent upon the stones of an ancient culture or the shades of a people lost in time. A sense of presence, a conviction of deep connectedness to the larger world in which we live is intrinsic to the nature of life itself. It is part of our birthright, and there is no predicting when, or where it will appear.
When the mystery of connectedness does surprise us - whether in a snowstorm-emptied New York street or a mist-shrouded grove of Redwoods, whether at a baby’s crib or a parent’s grave, whether in an empty classroom or an overflowing church, whether near a dawn-touched shoreline or the familiarity of a suburban yard, its nature is unmistakable, and the poet’s words apply:
If you came this way
Taking any route, starting from anywhere,
At any time or at any season,
It would always be the same: you would have to put off
Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead; the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot ~ Little Gidding
There will be no Stonehenge in my travels this year, no moment of wonder in the emptiness of a wind-swept English plain. But the sun is lowering in the sky, and soon enough solstice will arrive. If we are wise, we will find a bit of space, a little emptiness, some moments of silence in the midst of our celebrations to embrace its coming and its promise. As we ready our hearts – as we prepare a room built of those moments of solitude and silent attentiveness that so often elude us – then as surely as the sun stops, and the earth breathes, and the cold wind sweeps the plain, we will experience the joy which has embraced this world. It is a joy which does, quite truly, bring heaven and earth to song.
