Stars, Solstice and Holy Days

Holidays.

Or Holy Days?

Or both...

In a year where we mourn the loss of life for so many, and where some of us or our neighbours remain in uncertainty and fear, our need for a centred presence and for faith in the renewal of our world are greater than ever. We may feel the loss that sacrificing visits to see friends and family brings, and even though there is separation, we all stand together in the collective experience.

Solstice means 'sun stranding still’, and today we reach the shortest day of the year. Ancient traditions would gather annually and collectively imagine the ‘bringing back of the light’, and indeed believed that their collective presence was necessary for the light to return.

What do you feel when you look up at the night sky?

If we get a break in the cloud this week we’ll see Jupiter and Saturn align, forming, in effect, a very bright star in the sky. The revered Babylonian astronomers and astrologists who were ‘the three kings’ in the Christmas Bethlehem story may well have ‘followed’ a similar conjunction. Ancient peoples knew the skies.

I’m always struck with a sense of wonder when I see planets in the night sky. Do you? I love guessing whether a star is a planet or not, and my imagination leaps and dreams of what energy is moving on or beneath its surface, or that of its moons. 

On a soul level, the Winter Solstice is a time of awakening and illumination. In our bringing back of the light, we honour the world’s capacity to renew itself, and in so doing, are conscious of our own ‘inner sun’, our capacity for a renewal of heart, and of the collective patterns and traditions of ritual and worship that have bought us to this moment, this year.

We are reminded that life renews at its stillest point and particularly in the darkest hours.

And this week, just after dark and cloud permitting, we’ll see a bright light, low in the South Western sky, on the shortest day of the year.

The night sky isn’t in Tier 4. And it’s free to look...

Perhaps, take a moment to imagine yourself a ‘Magi’, a revered Babylonian theologian or cosmologist, with a life of work behind you, perhaps leaving a family…

To follow a star.

That must have been really important.

What does that mean for you right now?

To follow a star…