Category Archives: Great Wheel

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

The Longest Night of The Year

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Samhain                                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In my sacred world the holiday season has begun to climb toward its crescendo, or, rather, descend.  Would that be a descendo?  As I gradually shifted my view of sacred time from the Christian liturgical calendar to the ancient Celtic calendar, at first I celebrated Samhain, Summer’s End, as my foremost holiday.  It is the Celtic New Year, representing the end of the old year, too, Janus like, like our January 1st.   The growing season ceases and the long fallow season begins as Beltane ends, the season of growth and harvest.  I liked this simple, incisive division of the year, growth and rest.  Samhain also sees the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, between this world and the other world, between our reality and the reality of faery.  Life takes on a numinous quality around the end of October and the beginning of November.

In the years when I celebrated Samhain as my chief holiday I began novels then, ended projects begun in the earlier part of the year and thought a lot about ancestors and the delicate, egg shell nature of life.

Samhain still represents a key moment in my sacred year; but over time, as I worked with the Great Wheel, an expanded Celtic calendar that added Imbolc and Lughnasa to the solar holidays, equinoxes and solstices, my soul begin to lean more and more toward the Winter Solstice.  At some point, I don’t even know when, I began to look forward to the Winter Solstice as I once had to Christmas and after it, Samhain.  This was a quiet change, driven by inner movements mostly below consciousness.

Now the longest night has that numinous quality, angel wings brushing by, contemplation and meditation pulsing in the dark, taking me in and down, down to what Ira Progroff calls the inner cathedral, though for me it is more the inner holy well, that deep connection drawing on the waters flowing through the collective unconscious.  I’ve been to a few solstice celebrations, but none of them grabbed me, made me want to return.

I’ve become what the Wiccans call a solitary, practicing my faith at home, according to my own rhythms and my own calendar.  At times I’ve shared my journey through preaching at UU congregations or writing seasonal e-mails and sending them out, but now I write something on this blog and post it on the Great Wheel page.  Otherwise, on the Winter Solstice, my high holy day, it’s a candle and some reading, long hours of quiet.  This Tuesday.  The longest night of the year.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story

Midwest Radicals

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Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Worked on learning the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic.  This last one is also the name of a colon problem.  Not really.  But this is strange about it, periphrastic is a latin derivative from the Greek.  The actual latin equivalent is circumlocutio, to talk around something.  Do you see the irony here?

This goes to the work of translation and the ways in which literal renderings don’t always, in fact, often don’t, serve idiomatic English.

Also spent time today with Leslie Mills, the UTS intern for whom I have been supervisory clergy over the last semester.  She’s a young woman, growing into her sense of herself and her understanding of a very odd beast, the UU ministry.  UU gatherings mimic protestant forms, e.g. congregations, church buildings, clergy, Sunday worship, but have none of the underlying biblical or church historical rationale, at least in their Midwestern humanist incarnations.

It is a peculiar fact of Unitarian-Universalism that the true radicals in the movement are and have been in the Midwest for some time, since the early 1800’s as the east coast heresies of unitarianism and universalism followed the frontier.  In the time of Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his creation, the first World Parliament and Congress of Religions, the liberal faith tradition in the Midwest gained breadth.

In the post WWI years Minnesota and Iowa, respectively, Des Moines and Minneapolis in particular, became the center point for a non-theistic approach to the human condition, an approach focused on the human and the human experience, as it played out in this vale of tears not in the triumphant heaven of certain Christian beliefs. In this atheological turn the Midwest Unitarians gained depth.

(happy Minnesotans dancing around a local outdoorsman)

Now, in the first decade of the third millennium, the third thousand year period after the dramatic events played out in Palestine, the Midwest has come the front again, this time building on the humanist legacy, but moving the human from the center as the humanists moved God from the center.  In its place now the diverse world of pagan thought has put the natural world and our home planet within that world.  It has been, you might say, a Copernican revolution in metaphysics, moving first away from the heavens to the consciousness and lives of humans, then moving those same humans to a place in that world, rather than pride of place.

This dramatic, unusual chain of thought and faith experience makes the gathering places of those humanists now something other than churches, something different from the great cloud of witnesses, or the gathering of saints.  Just what they are is not clear, nor will it be for a while, I imagine, maybe decades, maybe centuries.  They may be unnecessary now, vestigial organs of the Christian traditions.  Or, maybe not.  Time.  Only in time will we know.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Humanities

Winter’s Loon

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Samhain                                       Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

It’s the best time of the year.  Ring a ling, ring a ling, ring a ling.  Yes, because the woods are lovely, dark and deep.  And because we have promises to keep.  It’s the best time of the year.

I’m no Christmas curmudgeon.  The lights and the cheeriness lift my spirits, too.  Yet it is not the lights toward which I drift, drawn in Frost’s New England sleigh pulled by a draft horse black as the snow falling is white.  I wander toward the woods, the dark and the deep.  In there, amongst the trees, far from city lights lies the reason for the season for me.

Each night for the last week or so I’ve heard my favorite sound of the season, the hooting of a great gray owl which lives in our woods.  I’ve never seen this bird and this may will be the child of the one I heard years ago.  The bass voice declares a confidence in the dark and the cold, an embrace.  The rhythm and the solitariness of the sound captures the winter dark as a loon’s cry distills the summer sun setting on a northern lake.

This is the carol for which my heart yearns; strange, in its way, since the great gray is the apex predator in our world, excepting, of course, the humans.

So, as you drink your Christmas cheer, crack the window a bit, listen. You might hear the voice of the woods, lovely, dark and deep.

Family, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

While The Cyber River Closed

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Samhain                           New Winter Solstice Moon

Midnight  12/6/10

Writing this on Word since I’ve had no internet connection for a few hours.  My limited number of tricks have not produced a link and I don’t have the patience for navigating so-called “customer service.”  George Orwell would be proud of the internet and internet services industry.

Kate’s cold continues with little sign of progress.  She suffers, complains about not liking to be sick, but otherwise Norwegian’s through it all.  She takes illness as a personal insult, something to be shrugged off if possible, if not, to work through and last something that requires rest and chicken noodle soup.  She’s in the latter mode right now.  Good for her.

We skyped tonight.  It’s Hanukkah so the grandkids had various gifts from doting grandparents and uncles and aunts.  The literal hit of the evening was an inflatable t-ball set.  Ruth took swing after swing, often swinging from her right shoulder and leveling at the ball.  She’s co-ordinated for 4.  Or, rather 4 and ½.

Her blond hair swirls, ringlets tumbling every which way as she performs couchnastics, a living room form of gymnastics that replaces gym equipment with the normal living room furniture.

My Latin is still here spread out on the desk beside me.  This Ovid requires slow, laborious work.  Look up words.  Figure out forms.  Check usage possibilities, verb tenses, noun declensions.  A lot of back and forth with books and pages of help.  I realized tonight that it’s a hobby, something I’m doing for fun.  Weird, huh?

Winter has snugged us up in the house, the furnace and insulation our best friends just as the AC and the insulation are our best friends in the summer.  I like winter because it provides all this darkness for desk work, darkness in which there are no outdoor chores.  Therefore, no guilt.

Commentary on the news, Friends, Great Wheel, Myth and Story, Woolly Mammoths

Nick

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Samhain                                       Waning Thanksgiving Moon

The Nick Caspers murder trial will not happen.  Nick decided to plead guilty to Felony A Murder, a charge that gives a chance at parole, as opposed to the Felony AA that he faced at trial.  That one carried life without parole.

As Woolly Paul Strickland said, we all have done things in our lives for which we were not brought to account, not so for Nick.  I share with Paul a hope that the judge will be merciful in his sentencing.  The extraordinary impact an event like a drunken fight in a small North Dakota town can have on individuals and families near and far makes me aware of the lives impacted by each person involved in our criminal justice system, victims and perpetrators alike.  On TV the criminal is often a bad person and the prosecution and the victims good people; in life, the shades of gray cover the just and the unjust.

Nick enters the darkest part of this long and unfinished journey in December.  There is, of course, the irony of his situation counterpoised to the holiday lights and Santa Claus and families gathered in churches singing Christmas carols.  Not so ironic, and perhaps more helpful, is the season seen from the perspective of the Great Wheel.  In December the earth reaches the point in its orbit, the Winter Solstice, when the darkness that has gathered strength ever since the Summer Solstice reaches its zenith on the longest night of the year.

The Great Wheel teaches us that the descent into darkness is never the whole story.  In fact, it shows us that even the darkest night bears within it the seeds of increasing light, an increasing light that will lead, in time, to a new growing season.  Owning the descent for what it is, a trip down into the underworld, but a descent that has a path leading back to the surface world, is a strong narrative for Nick and his next few weeks and months.

Mikki and Pete, Nick’s adoptive parents, Nick, Jim and all the South Dakota folks:  we’re with you as you make this journey.  You don’t have to go it alone.

Aging, Art and Culture, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities

The Value of Increasing Darkness

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Samhain                                         Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

The daylight is gone, twilight has fallen and night is on its way.  Now that we have entered the season of Samhain, the leaves have vanished from the trees and the clouds, like tonight, often hang gray in the sky.  Samhain means the end of summer and in the old Celtic calendar was the half of the year when the fields went fallow while the temperature turned cool, then cold, hope returning around the first of February, Imbolc, when the ewes would freshen and milk would once again be part of the diet as new life promised spring.

In between Imbolc and Samhain lies the Winter Solstice.  The early darkness presages the long twilight; it lasts from now until late December as we move into the increasing night until daylight becomes only a third of the day.  This has been, for many years, my favorite time of year.  I like the brave festivals when lights show up on homes and music whirs up, making us all hope we can dance away our fear.

The Yamatanka mandala at the Minnesota Institute of Art gives a meditator in the Tantric disciplines of Tibetan Buddhism a cosmic map, brightly displaying the way to Yamatanka’s palace grounds.  In the middle of the palace grounds, represented here by a blue field with a vajra (sacred thunderbolt) Yamantaka awaits our presence.

In the Great Wheel as I have come to know it, we visit Yamantaka on the night of the Winter Solstice, that extended darkness that gives us a foretaste of death.  Our death.  On that night we can sit with ourselves, calm and quiet, imagining our body laid out on a bed, eyes closed, mouth quiet, a peaceful expression on our lifeless face.

We can do that, not in suicidal fantasy, but in recognition of our mortality, our finite time upon the wheel of life, awaiting our turn as the wheel turns under the heavens carrying us away from this veil of samsara.  If we can do that, we can then open ourselves to the thin sliver of light that becomes more and more, as the solstice marks the turning back of the darkness and brings us once again to life.

When we can visit Yamantaka’s palace, sup with him in this throne room and see death as he, the conqueror of death sees it, we are finally free.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Humanities, Myth and Story

Holiseason: The Sacred Walks Among Us

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Samhain                                           Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

Holiseason has gotten underway with the usual signs:  bare trees, halloween candy going stale in the bowl, Santa Claus and Christmas music showing up well before Thanksgiving, a few turkey related cartoons.  The concentrated portion of holiseason begins with Thanksgiving and runs with little stopping through January 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany and the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas.

Now, we have signs and symbols, little in the way of active celebrating, but a sacred nimbus began to spread out as Samhain festivities came and went, a nimbus that extends over this difficult, cold, darkening period, drenching us in the depths of our own lives and in the collective life of our friends, family and community.  This is a two month plus stretch of the year that cries out for alone time, time to explore what constitute our deepest values, for together time to reaffirm our love and our regard for each other, for gifts and lights and merriment. Let Fezziwig’s feast start early this year.

I wish you the best of this long and roller coast time, a cup of good cheer, a smile and a moment or more of reflection, even meditation.

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel, Memories

My Friend

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Samhain                                                   New (Thanksgiving) Moon

Thursday night around 9 pm I went out to the mailbox to drop The Book of Eli in the mail back to my buddies at Netflix.  It was not a cold night, a slight chill, but the night was clear.  From nowhere in our house can we see the eastern horizon, neighbor’s houses and woods block our view, so it came as a surprise to me to see an old friend there when I opened the mailbox and glanced to my left.

Orion’s brawny left shoulder and his glittering belt had begun to emerge.  Back a long while ago, the winter of 1968 and 1969, my last year in college, I worked at the magnalite corporation as a week-end night watchman.  I had a round leather clock with a shoulder strap and a key hole and every hour I had to walk a circuit in the factory, find a key hung from a metal chain, insert it in the clock, turn the key, remove it and move on to the next station.   I had no protective duties, rather I served at the leisure of magnalite’s insurance carrier who insisted on hourly inspections when the plant was empty.

When I was not on my ten-minute round, I spent time in the guard shack at the entrance to the parking lot.  I often divided my time between studying and dozing off since I had the 11:00 pm to 7:00 am shift, but when I left the shack for my rounds or to wake myself up, Orion was there.  Being in a large factory complex alone, at night, on the weekend, is lonely duty.  I liked it for that reason, but I found Orion’s presence companionable, and it gradually grew into a friendship.  He and I could talk.  We both stood watch in the night.

Since those days, now 41 years ago, each fall when Orion rises, I greet him as an old friend, a true snowbird, one who returns when the snow comes and leaves as it does.  My old college friend has come for his annual months long visit.  And I’m glad.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

Samhain: 2010

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Samhain                                                    Waning Harvest Moon

In the ancient Celtic faith Samhain (October 31) and Beltane (May 1) were the only holidays.  W. Y. Evans-Wentz gave a folklorist’s account of that faith in his first book, . Evans-Wentz wrote this amazing work, little known in spite of his later and famous first translation of the Tibetan  Book of the Dead, after wandering several months through the Celtic countryside, staying in the villages and modest homes and listening to these stories as they were told around fires of peat, voices passing on a tradition and whiling away the dreary winter months in a time before electricity.

Think of such a time as the cold begins to bear down on us and the leaves have fallen, the vegetables brought in from the garden now lying in their dark storage.  Imagine if those vegetables and what grain might be stored as well, imagine if they were your food, your only food, for the next five to seven months.  Though the Celtic winters were not as severe as the ones here in Minnesota, they were just as fallow, the earth no longer yielding fruits, all hope of new produce gone until late spring.

It’s easy for me to imagine this because I harvested the last of our vegetables yesterday.  I would be in a panic r if we had to survive on the few carrots, beets, potatoes, onions and garlic we have stored dry.  Yes, we have honey, canned tomatoes and some pickles, but even for the two of us, we would have to be almost magicians to live off this amount of food.  At best we would enter spring mere shadows of our October well-fed selves.  As supplements to our diet, our stored food is wonderful, a blessing; as sustenance alone, it would be meager.  At best.

Among the Celts this was, too, a time when the veil between the worlds thinned and passage eased from the Other World to this one and from this one to the Other World.  Like the Mexican Day of the Dead, celebrated on the same date, it was a time when ancestors might visit.  To keep them happy their favorite foods and music and dress would be available.  The Celts also believed that, in addition to the dead, the inhabitants of faery could come and walk among human kind.  They might steal children or lure unwary persons back across the veil, back to the world of faery where time passes so differently than it does here.

We have the faint memory of this holiday today.  The costumed remind us of the strange and often scary entities of the Other World that flit, often unseen, among the living on this night.   The jack o’lanterns have descended from the Samhain carved turnip (a rutabaga to us in the U.S.) which, when lit with a candle, glows yellow, much like a skull.  The carved turnip and the parshall were put on or near the lintel (sound familiar?) to keep those roamers from the Other World at bay.

On a personal and spiritual level this can be a time to consider the past growing season, Beltane as the Celts called it.  What came to maturation in the last six months?  Have you taken time to harvest and store up the fruits of those efforts?  It can also be  a time to consider the fallow and bleak time ahead, Samhain.  While Beltane might be the Baroque or Rococo time of year, heavily decorated with lots of shadows and light, winter is the minimalist season, a time when the canvas might even be bare.  Then we might confront our world as a Mark Rothko painting, an inward time, of seeing the other as it resides in our Self, or going down to the well of the collective soul and replenishing ourselves for the year ahead.

A paradox rears itself here.  A paradox most neatly stated in the observation by certain Western thinkers that September 29th, Michaelmas, the celebration of the archangel Michael, is the springtime of the soul.  Thus, as the growing season wanes and finally extinguishes, we follow Persephone under ground, down into the cathedrals of our own souls.  There we can recharge oursSelves in the deep waters.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

Harvest Moon, For Me and My Gal

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Fall                                               Full Harvest Moon

What a great moon in the southern sky.  As I drove back from St. Paul, after sheepshead, the night had grown chill.

On the way in the full harvest moon hung high in the east behind a scrim of cirrus clouds, casting a pale circle, surrounding itself in a nimbus of moonlight.  On the east, the full harvest moon, and on the west, the skyline of downtown against the late twilight sky.  Skylines have their own beauty, a fragile outline in light of daytime sturdy buildings.

We had a sixth tonight at sheepshead, a friend of Roy’s in from Appleton, Wisconsin.  The dealer sat out and we played our usual five man game.  Dick Rice came away the big winner.