One summer evening when I was about
fifteen I invited my friend Fred over, and I got my younger brother, and
dressed us all up in white sheets. My
mother had a couple of candle-lanterns as decorations around the house and I
put fresh candles in them and lit them, and led us out the back door into the
night. We made a little procession
across the hayfield behind our house, and down into a little gully where a
brook ran and where there was a grove of hemlock trees. We went in under the boughs, and sat down on
the bare carpet of needles. I hadn’t
received training as Druid, so I didn’t really know exactly what to do or what
to say. But I improvised a kind of
prayer or invocation to the Sun, and then we walked home. It was the summer solstice and I’d decided it
was an occasion one ought to observe.
That was during a time, in my teens
and early twenties, when I had lost interest in the churchgoing of my
childhood, and had not yet found my way back into more organized and authorized
forms of religious life, so I had to kind of make things up on my own. But as funny as that Solstice procession seems
to me now, I can appreciate what I was trying to do. Because I think that there is in all of us,
to one degree or another, a need to inhabit a holy world. And one form that need takes is an impulse to
mark points of special significance in the flow of time, in the cycles of
nature, and the turnings of our own lives, to lift those moments up into the
light and celebrate their meaning.
This is part of the work of
“religion”—to create openings in time, so the Spirit can enter the monotonous hour-by-hour,
day-by-day, week-by-week march of the mundane.
Religious rites are moments of illumination, revealing ordinary persons
and things as charged with holiness and power. Religions build temples, special places set
aside and consecrated for this work. And
they ordain certain people as priests, to specialize in the sacred words and
acts that bridge the gap between Heaven and Earth.
The letter to the Hebrews, like
much of the New Testament, is greatly concerned with that gap. And, as other
Christian writings do, it suggests that a bridge can only be built from the
other side. It says that the Son of God, through whom all
things were made, who sustains all things by his powerful word, and ranks above
the angels in glory, is the only effective priest for people like you and
me. Jesus is the bridge across the gap
between God and us because he came from God and became one of us. He embodied God in human flesh and blood. He underwent all the hardships that the world
holds in store for life in such a body, with its captivity in space and time,
its trials of patience and faith, its vulnerability to suffering and appetite,
and its inevitable death.
And by putting Jesus into this
light, the Christian religion makes Jesus’ whole life a rite, a sacrifice, a sacred
moment of illumination in history. The
whole career of his body, from birth, through baptism and fasting, and healing
with his touch, crossing the sea by night and feeding the multitude, raising
the dead, sleeping, weeping, eating, drinking, praying, suffering, dying,
rising, ascending, sitting enthroned in glory—this is our supreme symbol of
God. It is the bridge on which Heaven
and Earth meet and become one. And so we
lift that body up, we remember and re-tell its history, we hold it high in
religious rituals that make it visible, so we can see the light, and taste the
sweetness, and know the love and healing and meaning that continually flow out
of it for us.
The church cooperates with the priesthood of
Christ by telling the times of its life by the events in his. We begin every week with a celebration of his
resurrection. Every year we mark the
holy days and seasons that re-dramatize his story. That story is non-stop and fast-paced, and
the re-telling barrels forward with all the urgency and doom of Jesus’ brief public
ministry. But there is also a slower, deeper
tempo at the heart of the Christian sense of time. It beats to the rhythm of human incarnation, the
real time of conception and gestation and birth.
We all know about Christmas—how
could we not? But Christmas is only one
of a cycle of feasts that make every year the year of Jesus’ birth. Our guide around this circuit is the first two
chapters of the Gospel of Luke. Taking
them in the order of the book, the first is the feast of the Annunciation, when
the angel comes to Mary and she consents to be the mother of the Son of God. Then comes the Visitation of Mary to her
cousin Elizabeth, when the unborn John the Baptist leaps in the womb at the sound
of the voice of the mother of the Lord, and this is followed by John’s
birthday, with a feast day of its own. Then
comes the journey to Bethlehem, and the angels and the shepherds and the babe
in the manger. Another feast, on the
eighth day after that, is Jesus’ circumcision, by the tradition of his people,
and the giving of his name.
And today we hear how Jesus’ mother
and father came to the temple in Jerusalem, when he was forty days old to
purify Mary after childbirth, and to make an offering for the gift of their
first-born son. This requires a
sacrifice, and being poor, they bring two turtledoves. But the story never tell about any priest
that took the birds from their hands, or whether the ritual of sacrifice was
ever even made. Because it turns out
that the bridge to God in this story is the child they bring. An old man named Simeon, guided there by the
Holy Spirit, takes Jesus into his arms, and proclaims the sacred and
sacrificial meaning of his life. An old
prophetess named Anna, who is always in the temple, sees it too, and joins her
voice to Simeon’s offering of praise.
The effect of this, and all these
stories of the infancy of Jesus is to make his birth a revelation of God,
precisely because it is a human story. That
is the religious purpose of the writers of the gospels. Using stories and hymns from the Hebrew
scriptures as a model, the author of Luke imagined unforgettable characters and
scenes, and created a literary world for the Son of God to be embodied in, and
it rang true.
It rang true with the Hebrew
scriptures, and with the surviving traditions about Jesus. It also rang true with the real world of
ordinary Christians, with their experience of how God shows up in that
world. And later generations followed
Luke’s example and took their own intuitive leap, and found in Luke’s story of
the birth of Jesus the pattern of the solar year, the ebb and flow of the dying
and returning light. There is nothing in
the scriptures to suggest that Jesus was born at the winter solstice, but the
fruit of the symbol in the human imagination shows it to be true. And the same goes for the Annunciation at the
Spring Equinox, nine months before, and the Nativity of John the Baptist at
Midsummer, and this feast of the Presentation, at the Cross-quarter, half-way
between the solstice and the equinox, which we celebrate with Candlemas, a
festival of light.
A critical person might look at all
of this and see pure invention. He or
she might say that the Gospel and the Church have adulterated the story of
Jesus with fictional and pagan elements.
But I think that view is blind to the light that Simeon saw. If Christ is the supreme priest in the temple
of the Spirit, then there is no true religious symbol, no prophecy or sacred ordering
of time, that does not reflect him in some way.
His light goes out to the nations, for whom, as Simeon says, it has been
prepared “in their sight,” illuminating their myths and religious cultures,
their arts and sciences, from within. That
is our hope, who live by the revelation of his body—to see for ourselves the whole
world in the light of Christ, through whom it was created, and in whom it is
daily, weekly, yearly reborn—all of it sacred, all of it beloved, all of it set
free by the priesthood of God.
