We are nearly at the winter solstice, the sun is at its lowest and the winter freeze has begun.

And yet we acknowledge the greatest spiritual feeling that we encounter in contemporary culture; although they are not equivalent festivals, the Hindu Diwali is just passed, Jewish Hanukka, the festival of lights, is celebrated on From Tuesday 16th and the Winter Solstice celebrations of many earth centred faith traditions will be held next weekend.

The darkness reveals something essential to the human condition, our awareness of the spiritual realm. This is something which I think bears repeating; The darkness reveals something, the darkness illuminates something essential to us if we are religious, something we hear in the great 139^th psalm

‘Even the darkness is not dark to You,
And the night is as bright as the day.
Darkness and light are alike to You’.

In our discovery of God, in our discovery of who we are in God and who God is in us, darkness is as powerful – or more powerful than light.

compare

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.            Tao te Ching

In our spiritual understanding nothing is hidden by the darkness, nor washed out by the light.

in her poem The Uses of Sorrow, a poem she subtitles with the admission that the poem came to her out of the darkness of a dream. Mary Oliver speaks of the gift of darkness.

Self recognition comes in the dark mirror, the hidden, alternative, shadow-self, the hard experience or bitter time, which reveals to us so much more than the photograph of our idealised self, taken in plain daylight.

I paired her poem this morning with the sequence from Matthew 2; the gift of Myrrh that enigmatic gift of funeral oil that is brought to the birth of a baby, that gift of darkness, the recognition of human fraility and of the inevitability of death as a present reality in all our lives.

It is the darkness out of which it comes thats gives the festival at mid-winter so much emotional resonance, and why it can sometimes be so very nearly unbearable.

This spiritual time of year is a real time of reckoning is it not? Its a time against which all our travails can seem most heightened and with hindsight always appear a little heroic and unreal, every family ‘s collective memory will tell you of the times when the bad weather hit and the powercut came, that endless wait in casualty, disastrous breakdown or whatever crisis you care to remember will always seem more dramatic, more compelling in the context of this festival because it comes in the almost unrelieved dark and bitter cold. A time that make s such great demands on our reserves of strength and courage.

It is against this backdrop that the star rises, and  a growing sense of the immanent possibilities of the new day stirs within us: in the words of Unitarian theologian A. Powell Davies:

“Let us believe in the hope of Christmas: that sometime there shall be a world in which man’s inhumanity to man is ended: a world of goodwill from which all cruelty is gone: a world in which the prophecies have found fulfillment, in which nations are at peace and hatred and strife are known no more.”

its a subversive vision written by this most gentle churchman all the way back in the 1950’s.

The rabbi AJ Heschel reminds us

“Prayer is nothing if it is not Subversive”.

Our spirituality must in these dark days be courageous; the word courage stems from the same root as the french word Cour – heart; so to be courageous is to be lead by the heart.

When we follow our heart we live in a way which is holy, which is congruent with our deepest integrity and which is “lit from within”. A spark of inner spiritual fire which is kindled in our hearts is what Meister Ekhardt that most wise 13^th century mystic described as “the place where God and the soul touch”.

And so it is here in the deep midwinter when we can experience something beyond the order of our own lives and on the level of the Eternal. Today we lit candles of hope for the time ahead to remind us of the true spiritual nature of the season, and to guide us through the darkest point of the year to the new year beyond.