Day 16 (Saturday 16th December 2017)
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| 16 - the average number of Christmas presents a UK child will receive. Winter gifts were given to family and friends long before the biblical story of Three Wise Men bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh was told. Pagan in Europe and the Middle East gave gifts on a number of occasions over the winter period, including the raucous Saturnalia on the 17th December, in honour of the god of agriculture, Saturn. People would drink to excess and give gifts of pottery and wax figurines, edible treats and candles. During the puritan times of Oliver Cromwell and the Pilgrim Fathers in America present giving at Christmas was banned because of its pagan roots. Christmas celebrations were legalised in the 1680s. People have complained about the increasing commercialism of the season over many years, in 1904 Margaret Deland, a journalist in Harper's Bazar, wrote "Twenty-five years ago, Christmas was not the burden that it is now, there was less haggling and weighing, less quid pro quo, less fatigue of body, less wearing of soul; and, most of all, there was less loading up with trash." This lead to the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, whose members included former President Roosevelt and Anne, the daughter of financier J.P. Morgan. |
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The Shadow is the Candle’s Son
In nature’s heart, a deep
silence reigns,
with bird-call, dog-bark,
with bird-call, dog-bark,
the sound of rain:
each sits gently, beside the
jet engine’s bite,
the sky is unmoved
by the easy-jet flight
As I sit I sense the ease
with which paradox rests among
the trees.
Bright light bears shadow on
its wings:
a still note spills from the moving string
a still note spills from the moving string
The brilliance and the black
are one.
are one.
The shadow is the candle’s
son.
Paradox, Chris Nichols (2007)
We live in a time of so much hashtag hate. So much effort poured into making clear that “we” are not like “them”.
Us and them - Pink Floyd
It’s a time of polarity, when much debate seems simplified into a Punch and Judy show of adversaries.
There’s only a thin shoreline for understanding to stand on. It’s washed to nothing when the contesting tides deny all space for meeting and curiosity.
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| Caribbean meets Atlantic in Bahamas |
Alongside the marketing and
merriment, Advent offers a deeper steadier voice, reminding us that this world
is a pattern of brightness and night. It
once marked a time of fasting and abstinence in the move towards the birth of
the light. The Christmas festival echoed the earlier solstice paganism of Yule,
celebrating the turning of the dark and the return of the sun.
Every one of us is a fractal
of this dance. Sometimes we can see only our own light. Sometimes we see only
the dark in others. Yet we are all of us both dark and light together.
The ceaseless cycles of one
season passing into the next reminds us that binary views mask something deeper,
of a greater complexity, woven of richer tones.
We can’t do good work, we cannot live well on this tiny earth, if we
assume to ourselves all of the light, and insist that some other is only an
agent of darkness.
Perhaps we can pause at this
time of the season’s turning to look beyond the identity dance of “self” as
“not-other”. Maybe we can take time to
acknowledge that we too have our darkness, that our most brilliant light also casts
a shadow. Maybe we can look at another
long enough to see the crack in the wall that keeps us from them, a crack through
which their light becomes more visible to us.
Every such act of seeing our
connection to another would indeed mark a turning of the season and be a cause
for cheer.
Yule 2017
