Winter Solstice

     Sharleen presented some information on the Winter Solstice which just occurred one day ago. Also on the eve of the winter solstice, there was a complete lunar eclipse of a full moon. This is the first time this has happened since the 1600s. Unfortunately cloudy overcast here in the Midwest and other storms over much of the US prevented most from seeing this momentous lunar eclipse.

     December 22 entry from Pocketful of Miracles.

     Seed Thought: The time has come for celebration, for the Light has been reborn! The animals fell the stirringof the lifeforce deep within their dens. The seedsssssss begin to stir within the womb of Mother Earth, and we know that the cycle of life will continue for another year. Rejoice, for today the time of light is greater than the time of darkness. Rejoice, for today the Christ Principle is born within.

     Prayer/Practice:  Welcome the Divine Light today. Take a few letting-go breaths and relax into thte inner stillness. In the space above you and slightly in front of you, imagine Jesus, Mary, the Buddha, a Great Light or whatever symbol of the Divine you feel especially close to. Give thanks for the rebirth of the Light within yourself and in the world. Now imagine that a Living Light is flowing from the Divine to you, showering over you and entering through the top of your head. Let the Light penetrate all your cells, awakening them from their ancient sleep, and washing away any darkness that obscures the Sun withinin your Heart. See your heartlight, the Christ principle within, shining as bright as the star over Bethlehem. Allow it to grow brighter and brighter, uniting with the light of God, surrounding you in a glowing egg of light. Send the light out into the world with the Meta blessing.

"May there be peace on earth, may the hearts of all beings be open, may all be reborn in forgiveness, may all creation reflect the Glory of God."

Continue on (Read More) for quotes from the writing of all great spiritual traditions that relate to Light and Peace.
Christian:

Matthew 5:14-16
Jesus Christ when he spoke in what became known as the Sermon on the Mount. "You are the light of the world. A city on a mountain cannot remain hidden, and a light is not lit to be put under a corn measure. It is put on a stand so that it shines for all who are in the house Your light should shine for men like that, so that they see now your Being radiates and give praise to your Father in the heavens."

Luke 17:20-21
At T time the Pharisees asked him, 'When will the Kingdom of God come?' And he answered, 'The Kingdom of God does not come in a form which is outwardly perceptible. Nor does it come in such a way that one can say: Look, here it is, or there. Behold - the Kingdom of god is within you.'

Buddhism:
December 8, or the Sunday immediately preceding, is celebrated as the day that the Buddha achieved enlightenment."I Am Awake" from Buddhist Parables
When the Buddha started to wander around India shortly after his enlightenment, he encountered several men who recognized him to be a very extraordinary being.
They asked him, "Are you a god?"
"No,'" he replied.
"Are you a reincarnation of god?"
"No", he replied.
"Are you a wizard, then?"
"No."
"Well, are you a man?"
"No."
"So what are you ?" they asked, being very perplexed.
"I am awake."
Buddha means "The Awakened One." How to awaken is all he taught.

Hindu - Bhagavada-Gita Xiii:13-18
I shall now explain the knowable  , knowing whichyou will taste the eternal. Brahman, the spirit, beginninless and subordinate to Me, lies beyond the cause and effect of this material world.

Everywhere are His hands and legs, His eyes, heads and faces, and he has ears everywhere. In this way the Supersoul exists, pervaing everything."

"The Supersoul is the original source of all senses, yet He is without senses. He is unattached, although He is the maintainer of all living beings. He transcends the modes of nature, and at the same time He is the master of all the modes of matrerial nature."

The Supreme truth exists outside and inside of all living beings, the moving and thr nonmoving. Bevcause He is subtle, He is byond the power of the material senses to see or to know.
Although far, far away, heis also near to all."

Although the Supersoul appears to be divided among all beings. he is never divided. he is situated as one. Although He is the maintainer of every living entity, it is to be understood that He devours and develops all."

"He is the source of light in all luminous objects. he is beyond the darkness of matter and is unmanifested. he is knowledge, He is the object of knowledge, and He is the goal of knowledgre. He is situated in everyone's heart."

Native American Prayer for Peace
Oh Great Spirit of our Ancestors,
 I raise my pipe to you.
To yourmessengers the four winds, and
 to Mother Earth who provifes for your children.
Give us the wisdom to teach our children
 to love, to respect, and to be kind to each other
so that they may grow with peace of mind
 Let us learn to share all good things that
you provide for us on this Earth.

Islamic Prayer for Peace
We think of Thee, worship Thee, how to Thee,
  as the Creator of this Universe;
We seek refuge in Thee, the Truth, our only support.
 thous are the Ruler, the barge in this ocean of endless births and deaths.

In the name of Allah, the beneficent, the merciful.
 Praise be to the Lord of the Universe who has created us and made us into tribes and nations.
Give us wisdom that we may know each other and not despise all things.
 We shall abide by thy peace.
And we shall remember the servants of God are those who walk on this earth in humility;
 and when we address them, we shall say Peace Unto Us All.

Jewish Prayer for Peace:
May the blessing of peace unfold and infuse,
 embrace and intertwine all of Israel and all the world.

Eternal wellspring  of peace --
 May we be drenched with the longing for peace
that we may give ourselves over to peace,
 until the earth overflows with peace,
as living waters overflow the seas.

May the blessing of peace unfold and infuse,
 embrace and intertwine all of Israel and all the world.
As we bless the source of life
 So we are blessed.






From New York Times

There Goes the Sun



By RICHARD COHEN

Published: December 19, 2010



WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. ... Pleasing, that idea. ... As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

Virtually all cultures have their own way of acknowledging this moment. The Welsh word for solstice translates as “the point of roughness,” while the Talmud calls it “Tekufat Tevet,” first day of “the stripping time.” For the Chinese, winter’s beginning is “dongzhi,” when one tradition is making balls of glutinous rice, which symbolize family gathering. In Korea, these balls are mingled with a sweet red bean called pat jook. According to local lore, each winter solstice a ghost comes to haunt villagers. The red bean in the rice balls repels him.

In parts of Scandinavia, the locals smear their front doors with butter so that Beiwe, sun goddess of fertility, can lap it up before she continues on her journey. (One wonders who does all the mopping up afterward.) Later, young women don candle-embedded helmets, while families go to bed having placed their shoes all in a row, to ensure peace over the coming year.

Street processions are another common feature. In Japan, young men known as “sun devils,” their faces daubed to represent their imagined solar ancestry, still go among the farms to ensure the earth’s fertility (and their own stocking-up with alcohol). In Ireland, people called wren-boys take to the roads, wearing masks or straw suits. The practice used to involve the killing of a wren, and singing songs while carrying the corpse from house to house.

Sacrifice is a common thread. In areas of northern Pakistan, men have cold water poured over their heads in purification, and are forbidden to sit on any chair till the evening, when their heads will be sprinkled with goats’ blood. (Unhappy goats.) Purification is also the main object for the Zuni and Hopi tribes of North America, their attempt to recall the sun from its long winter slumber. It also marks the beginning of another turning of their “wheel of the year,” and kivas (sacred underground ritual chambers) are opened to mark the season.

Yet, for all these symbolisms, this time remains at heart an astronomical event, and quite a curious one. In summer, the sun is brighter and reaches higher into the sky, shortening the shadows that it casts; in winter it rises and sinks closer to the horizon, its light diffuses more and its shadows lengthen. As the winter hemisphere tilts steadily further away from the star, daylight becomes shorter and the sun arcs ever lower. Societies that were organized around agriculture intently studied the heavens, ensuring that the solstices were well charted.

Despite their best efforts, however, their priests and stargazers came to realize that it was exceptionally hard to pinpoint the moment of the sun’s turning by observation alone — even though they could define the successive seasons by the advancing and withdrawal of daylight and darkness.

The earth further complicates matters. Our globe tilts on its axis like a spinning top, going around the sun at an angle to its orbit of 23 and a half degrees. Yet the planet’s shape changes minutely and its axis wobbles, thus its orbit fluctuates. If its axis remained stable and if its orbit were a true circle, then the equinoxes and solstices would quarter the year into equal sections. As it is, the time between the spring and fall equinoxes in the Northern Hemisphere is slightly greater than that between fall and spring, the earth — being at that time closer to the sun — moving about 6 percent faster in January than in July.

The apparently supernatural power manifest in solstices to govern the seasons has been felt as far back as we know, inducing different reactions from different cultures — fertility rites, fire festivals, offerings to the gods. Many of the wintertime customs in Western Europe descend from the ancient Romans, who believed that their god of the harvest, Saturn, had ruled the land during an earlier age of abundance, and so celebrated the winter solstice with the Saturnalia, a feast of gift-giving, role-reversals (slaves berating their masters) and general public holiday from Dec. 17 to 24.

The transition from Roman paganism to Christianity, with its similar rites, took several centuries. With the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the fourth century, customs were quickly appropriated and refashioned, as the sun and God’s son became inextricably entwined. Thus, although the New Testament gives no indication of Christ’s actual birthday (early writers preferring a spring date), in 354 Pope Liberius declared it to have befallen on Dec. 25.

The advantages of Christmas Day being celebrated then were obvious. As the Christian commentator Syrus wrote: “It was a custom of the pagans to celebrate on the same Dec. 25 the birthday of the sun, at which they kindled lights in token of festivity .... Accordingly, when the church authorities perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival, they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be solemnized on that day.”

In Christendom, the Nativity gradually absorbed all other winter solstice rites, and the co-opting of solar imagery was part of the same process. Thus the solar discs that had once been depicted behind the heads of Asian rulers became the halos of Christian luminaries. Despite the new religion’s apparent supremacy, many of the old customs survived — so much so that church elders worried that the veneration of Christ was being lost. In the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo and Pope Leo the Great felt compelled to remind their flocks that Christ, not the sun, was their proper object of their worship.

While Roman Christianity was the dominant culture in Western Europe, it was by no means the only one. By millennium’s end, the Danes controlled most of England, bringing with them “Yule,” their name for winter solstice celebrations, probably derived from an earlier term for “wheel.” For centuries, the most sacred Norse symbol had been the wheel of the heavens, represented by a six- or eight-spoked wheel or by a cross within a wheel signifying solar rays.

The Norse peoples, many of whom settled in what is now Yorkshire, would construct huge solar wheels and place them next to hilltop bonfires, while in the Middle Ages processions bore wheels upon chariots or boats. In other parts of Europe, where the Vikings were feared and hated, a taboo on using spinning wheels during solstices lasted well into the 20th century. The spinning-wheel on which Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger may exemplify this sense of menace.

Throughout much of Europe, at least up until the 16th century, starvation was common from January to April, a period known as “the famine months.” Most cattle were slaughtered so they would not have to be fed over the winter, making the solstice almost the only time of year that fresh meat was readily available. The boar’s head at Christmas feasts represents the dying sun of the old year, while the suckling pig — with the apple of immortality in its mouth — the new.

The turning of the sun was perhaps even more important in the New World than the Old. The Aztecs, who believed that the heart harbored elements of the sun’s power, ensured its continual well-being by tearing out this vital organ from hunchbacks, dwarves or prisoners of war, so releasing the “divine sun fragments” entrapped by the body and its desires.

The Incas would celebrate the solar festival of Inti Raymi by having their priests attempt to tie down the celestial body. At Machu Picchu, high in the Peruvian Andes, there is a large stone column called the Intihuatana, (“hitching post of the sun,”) to which the star would be symbolically harnessed. It is unclear how the Incas measured the success of this endeavor, but at least the sun returned the following day.

Yet above all other rituals, reproducing the sun’s fire by kindling flame on earth is the commonest solstice practice, both at midsummer and midwinter. Thomas Hardy, describing Dorset villagers around a bonfire in “The Return of the Native,” offers an explanation for such a worldwide phenomenon:

“To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’ ”

So there is good reason to celebrate the winter solstice — but maybe that celebration is still touched with a little fear.

Richard Cohen is the author of “Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star That Gives Us Life.”