I celebrated last Winter Solstice in a group of 40 people atop a 1000-foot-high hill, with 50mph gales, in a fiery sunset amid storm clouds. The scene felt symbolic of the blowing-down of familiar stability, but there was joy facing it in a community.
This group celebrates all the Celtic festivals with a mix of pagan and Christian ritual. We called in the directions – we drummed, danced, and shared a ‘hedgerow communion’. My friend Simon Lockett, a local Anglican minister, who led the communion, gave us this question: How will the healing darkness of winter allow the light to be manifested in the new year of our own lives, and to serve others?
Simon went on to say, ‘A Hedgerow Communion is a remembering of divine love embracing good darkness and overcoming the power of troubling darkness to become resurrected light.’ This idea of two kinds of darkness feels vital right now. For indigenous people, the dark was not sinister, it was simply what was as yet unknown. However, in our times there clearly is ‘troubling darkness’ too: it can feel like an overwhelming sea of self-interest, materialism, exploitation.
Each of us can choose to believe in our own light, our capacity to embody and radiate faith and hope in human kindness, even in a chaotic world. It helps us hugely if we can do this with others, and if we feel some form of connection to divine light, however we name that. You can explore all of this further on my website: www.soulresilience.net.
Humanity has faced plenty of dark times before now: what’s different is the scale of this crisis, its potentially terminal nature, and our shared global awareness of it. Surely part of the faith we need is the belief that this dark winter is an invitation to us to grow in wisdom and compassion, to choose to be lights in the darkness.