It’s just about time for the Winter Solstice. From now thru Dec. 12, the sun sets at 4:28 pm in my neck of the woods. The darkest day of the year is still two weeks away (Dec. 21), due to the fact that sunset and sunrise cycles are naturally out of synch. I.e., we reach the earliest sunset time this week, but the latest sunrise time doesn’t happen until the first week of January. Still, it’s the sunset time that affects me most, in terms of mood. These are the “darkest days” for me, the days that weigh most heavily upon the soul.<\/p>\n
In keeping with that mood, let me quote a passage from Dag Hammarskjold<\/a>, the former UN Secretary General from the 1950’s and early 1960s’s. Mr. Hammarskjold was a public figure, but he also had a deep spiritual life. So I am taking an entity from his book “Markings<\/a>“, a collection of entries from of his own spiritual journal. Here is his entry for Oct. 12, 1958:<\/p>\n Day slowly bleeds to death Over the dead one are lit Ah yes, the silent stars twinkling throughout the long, cold night. Tiny sparks of hope in the long, vast, undefeatable blackness. It hurts all the more as I grow older. In the context of winter darkness and the fading light of the body (recall Dylan Thomas raging<\/a> against the dying of the light), one can appreciate Christmas from a very different perspective in their later years. The usual childhood and young adult response to the holiday is the joy of getting and giving gifts, a time of gathering and celebration. But for an aging man at the start of winter, the following passage from the Bible (Isaiah 9:2, NIV) seems to reflect the mood a whole lot better:<\/p>\n the people walking in darkness This passage is connected with the Christmas season because several Christian churches (Catholic, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist) use a segment of Isaiah 9 in their Christmas Eve readings. The real catch-phrase for Christians follows at Isaiah 9:6-7, i.e.:<\/p>\n For a child has been born for us, Isaiah was written many centuries before Jesus lived (around the 8th Century BCE), but Christians from the early church through the present day interpret this Hebrew scripture as a prophecy that was fulfilled by Jesus’ birth. <\/p>\n Actually, the prophet Isaiah was really not thinking of a situation akin to what happened with Jesus. In Chapter 9 and the chapters leading up to it, Isaiah was addressing the geopolitical situation<\/a> of his times for the nation of the Jews. In a nutshell, the kingdom of Assyria was expanding in power and rapidly dominating the nations of the middle-east. The Jews had already divided into a northern kingdom (Israel) and a southern kingdom (Judah), and Assyria had just swallowed up Israel along with neighboring Syria. Judah was still clinging to its independence, but things were not looking good. Therefore, Azah, the king of Judah, moved to ally Judah with Assyria, kind of like the Molotov\u2013Ribbentrop Pact<\/a> between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in 1939. You know how that worked out (I hope! If not — read up on Hitler’s 1941 Operation Barbarossa<\/a>).<\/p>\n Isaiah was essentially writing political propaganda, urging the people of Judah to reject this approach. Isaiah felt that Judah should maintain its integrity and independence, by trusting that God would protect Judah as he had delivered Moses in times past. Those “people in darkness” that he referred to were the Jews up in Israel, the northern Jewish kingdom, which had been conquered by Assyria. The “great light” was the hope and promise of deliverance of all the Jews, both north and south, through divine military intervention (i.e., seemingly unlikely success in battle against a strong foe, as in various other stories in the Hebrew Bible). The child “born for us”, the “son given to us” reflected the hope and faith that a great David-like leader who would deliver all of the Jews from the Assyrians was already alive, and would soon rise to power. <\/p>\n So, Isaiah could care less<\/a> about a savior who might be born many centuries later and who would die at the hands of the successor to the Assyrians, an even more powerful nation that would persecute Judah and Israel, i.e. Rome. Isaiah wanted real military victories in the present (or foreseeable future, anyway). And obviously, he could care even less about an old guy like me living in a totally different kind of world almost two millennia later, a typical old person of the 21st Century who gets to live longer than 95% of the people from Isaiah’s day, but who also gets to observe and lament the slow but inexorable decline of the body. <\/p>\n But still — maybe there is a basic underlying psychological theme that Isaiah and Matthew and Hammarskjold and the Christian lectionary, and even little old me, are touching upon. Something akin to a Jungian archetype,<\/a> perhaps like “the shadow”. We all long for hope in “the long night”, whether that be the oncoming night of our nations (e.g. the 8th Century BCE Jewish nation, or modern America under Trump), the gathering night of our bodies, or the dark night of our souls<\/a>. To be honest, I don’t think that I’ve experienced anything like the light of hope that Isaiah held out to his people (and hey, that light didn’t work out so great for the people of Judah either; about a hundred fifty years later, the Babylonians conquered them<\/a>). A great light has not dawned over the shadows in my life. But yet, those silent stars that Hammarskjold noticed still twinkle on. The last hint that death is not ultimately victorious has not yet itself died. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s just about time for the Winter Solstice. From now thru Dec. 12, the sun sets at 4:28 pm in my neck of the woods. The darkest day of the year is still two weeks away (Dec. 21), due to the fact that sunset and sunrise cycles are naturally out of synch. I.e., we reach […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,6,12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6930"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6930"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6930\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6955,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6930\/revisions\/6955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThrough the wound made
\nWhen the sharp horizon’s edge
\nRipped through the sky
\nInto its now empty veins
\nSeeps the darkness.
\nThe corpse stiffens,
\nEmbraced by the chill of night.<\/p>\n
\nSome silent stars.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nhave seen a great light;
\non those living in the land of deep darkness
\na light has dawned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\na son given to us;
\nauthority rests upon his shoulders;
\nand he is named
\nWonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
\nEverlasting Father, Prince of Peace<\/p><\/blockquote>\n