Midsummer's Day - June 24

The old feast of Midsummer falls on June 24, halfway round the wheel of the year from Christmas Eve. Midsummer's Day is also the feast of John the Baptist, who is clearly associated with water and wellsprings. John the Baptist is noted for saying "I must grow less, he must grow more..." meaning that Christ's message of love and and the forgiving Presence at the heart of Creation must grow in importance, even overshadowing the words of John.

Midsummer and Midwinter are also the great feasts of the Druids, marking the turning points in the year as we slip back and forth from darkness in to light and back again. In Midwinter Darkness, we turn to light. The sun grows stronger. Paradoxically now, when the sun is at its peak of strength, lighting even the evening hours, the days actually begin to grow shorter. We head in to darkness.

I only recently made the connection to the dates assigned to the celebration of the Nativity and John the Baptist. "I must grow less...." The words of John the Baptist refer also to the sun. This is the season when the sun "must grow less".

John's mother Elizabeth and Jesus' mother Mary are cousins. John is six months older than Jesus, so if the Nativity of Christ falls at Midwinter, then John's birth must be Midsummer. But here is the question: Since the gospels were written before the Church decided to celebrate the birth of Christ at Midwinter, was the story of the sun's mysterious journey already there waiting to be discovered? 

December 8

My father-in-law married a second time. Joe was already out of the house, and we in fact were together, even though I was just a few months out of my teens. At the time it seemed like we were mature and worldly—which is funny, really, because basically we didn't know anything.

My father-in-law and his sophisticated Dutch second wife moved to Connecticut and settled in to the kind of country life that people from Manhattan think is country life, but really has very little to do with anything, except perhaps old movies and books.

Else had come from Holland in her twenties. When I met her she had just left a job at the Museum of Modern Art to marry and move to Connecticut. Being Dutch, naturally her parents were Dutch as well. Her father spoke presentable English, but her mother could barely speak a word outside of her native language. Mrs. Martinus (yes, Martinus is a Dutch name which honors Saint Martin) nonetheless managed to communicate. She could sew and make things and was very clever in this way. SInce I liked to sew and make things as well, we connected. The fact that my grandfather was also Dutch didn't hurt. Seriously, I remember liking Mrs. Martinus very much, even though we could barely communicate.

One day in early December, when the Martinuses were here for a long visit, Else took us both to a demonstration on handmade Victorian ornaments at the Wilton Garden Club. I was in seventh heaven—this was the kind of thing I had dreamed about people doing when I was growing up in Brooklyn. Something like this was the sort of thing I longed for, but had no idea where to go about looking for. The demonstrator gave out patterns for stuffed cats and birds to make for the tree. I couldn't wait to get home and try them. Mrs. Martinus was also enjoying the demonstration, which she managed to convey to me through little touches of the hand and smiles. She always reminded me of a sweet, purring tabby cat.

There was a luncheon after and we sat together. Mustering up her best English she was determined not only to make conversation, but to make contact with me. Very formally she spoke. This was a woman whose husband ate both sandwiches and even potato chips with a knife and fork, carefully cutting the sandwich in to even pieces. The Dutch then were a very formal people. They weren't too far away from sweeping decorative patterns in the sawdust they put down on their floors. Neither were they very far away from brutal Nazi occupation and being so hungry that they were reduced to eating tulip bulbs. This is, perhaps what made them so practical—think Amsterdam, if you know what I mean. Very formally, I'll say it again, she spoke. I could see her arrange her face and her posture as she balanced a tea cup in one hand. "Do you like fish?" she addressed her question to me. "Yes. I like fish" I responded. "I as well like fish" she informed me. We sat for a moment, very proud of our exchange. Then her face changed. The formality was gone and she addressed me once again. She carefully pronounced every word in this sentence, the only full sentence I ever heard her say in English. "When Else went to America—it was hard." With this one sentence, she somehow managed to convey to me her whole story. Her daughter leaving Holland, moving thousands of miles away, to a new land, a new country. The loss of it. Her sadness. In three carefully pronounced words, she managed to convey to me the most intimate story of her life. "It was hard." I still remember it as one of the most profound conversations of my life.

That Christmas Mrs. Martinus gave me a lovely little gift—two Kunstlerschutz animals. "Esel" and "Kuh" she said. Donkey and Cow, the animals who carried Mary and who were there when she gave birth. I don't remember any other gifts from that time, but I still have Esel and Kuh and they are displayed, without fail, even if I don't put out a creche.

On the night Else died Joe's father told me the story of why she had come to America. Apparently the reason she left Holland, to seek a new life and adventure in this country—in New York City, among the artists and museums. He told the story as if the life she might have led in Holland was a tragedy, narrowly averted. He expected me to understand. When Else was twenty her mother said "Soon you will be married too! I am so looking forward to it. We can meet every Friday and go to the market to shop for dinner together." I could see Mrs. Martinus saying this, happy at the thought of shopping with her daughter, exchanging recipes, teaching her to cook and make a home perhaps. After the abject horror of living through World War II, she was looking forward to the simple joy of having her family intact and shopping for dinner in a peaceful market with her married daughter. According to my father-in-law, the thought of such a life was enough to cause Else to flee both her mother and Holland.

It was hard.

December 6 - fragmented thoughts

Today is Saint Nicholas Day. The sun will set at 4:20 PM in Connecticut. It will set at 4:20 every day between Saint Nicholas Day and Saints Lucia's Day on December 13. After this sunset comes a little bit later. On the 14th it sets at 4:21. By the Winter Solstice, it doesn't set until 4:23. And on Christmas, after a four day rest in the sky, seemingly standing still, the sun begins its six month journey back north. 

On Saint Lucia's Day, on December 13, the oldest daughter in a Scandinavian family would wake the others, wearing a crown of lit candles. Who knows how this custom came about, but it seems like that crown of candles could represent the rays of the sun, on a significant day when the pattern begins to change. 

Personally, I don't worry about the story of the virgin birth. Lao Tsu was also said to have been born of a virgin mother—conceived by a shooting star, which isn't that far off from the truth, given that carbon and other minerals in our bodies were created when stars died.

It's funny. I know people really worry about things like the virgin 
birth and the physics of resurrection but these things never bothered 
me. Christ told us to love one another and that there's a loving, 
forgiving god at the heart of the universe. That feels like more 
than enough truth and good news to last me forever.

I do however firmly believe that Mary had birth pangs just like the 
rest of us.

December 4 - Vespers

In monasteries, time is measured not so much from sun to sun as  from prayer to prayer. Imagine a medieval winter. The hush of early evening. A cold wind blowing. People hasten to find shelter around a humble fire, the only source of light and warmth when daylight fades so quickly. Behind the monastery walls monks pad quietly in to a stone chapel, breaking their silence only to chant the evening prayers. This evening office is called vespers.

We do not have a monastery in our town, but we do have an abbey. The nuns farm, make cheese, work a forge as smithies and pray six times a day. They wear the traditional black habit and are cloistered behind screens much of the time, although from time to time we run in to them at the market or the hardware store. I once ran in to a nun at the health food store buying black cohosh for her menopausal sisters, and the blacksmith nun shows up now and again at life drawing class.

I stopped by the chapel this evening, nestled deep in the Bethlehem woods. Difficult to find, even in daylight, unless you know just where it is. Tonight when the bell rang at 5, as it does every evening, they ceased to be the blacksmith nun, or the cheese making nun as they padded softly in to the chapel to chant vespers. They chanted in one voice. Perhaps they shared one intention—I can't know this without looking in to their hearts, but I believe they must try, otherwise they couldn't be nuns. I sat in the shadows and listened to the Gregorian chant. Doing so I fell almost immediately in to a deep meditative state. I thought that I had been there for ten minutes, then looked at my watch and realized that forty had gone past. 

How strange that time in this cloistered abbey is so strictly portioned out by the offices of the day. Lauds at 6AM, Terce at 8, Sext at noon, None at 4, Vespers at 5 and finally compline at 7:30. I believe they wake in the night as well, for prayer and reflection. They live by the clock, but their chant allows them to transcend linear time.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGGo6I5v8i0

December 3 - Stars

Astronomers acknowledged today that they have miscounted the stars. There are probably three times as many stars as previously believed. Ah, scientists, always catching up a few thousand years later to the poets. Poets have always known that you cannot count the stars. Twenty years ago I sent out a Christmas card which stated "We are made of the same stuff as the stars. Look to the night sky. Greet your brothers and sisters."

It is true. We were born from the same stuff as the stars, and we carry ancient stars within our bodies. I can't remember which character in a science fiction story always referred to human beings as "carbon units" because our bodies contain so much of this element. Now we know that carbon was created in the heart of a star, long, long ago. The iron that carries oxygen through the rivers of our bloodstream was created when a star died. 

Lao Tsu was said to have been conceived by a shooting star which sparked life in his virgin mother. How closely this mirrors the truth of our origins. Elements from the stars sparked life in a virgin, sleeping earth in to life and more importantly, in to light. 

Before we could look at stars through a telescope, many cultures carved the sacred spirals in to stone and wood. In this photograph of stars, taken by the Hubbell telescope, pay particular attention to the little galaxy, down in the right hand corner. It looks exactly like the spirals on the stone which marks the passage in to Newgrange in Ireland.

December 2 - The Presbyterian Brownies

Over the Thanksgiving dinner table I learned about a quiet uprising in a small Presbyterian community in upstate New York.

The gentleman who told me the story was happy to be married to a woman who baked cookies for him every day. I could tell that he felt particularly blessed in life, enjoying something most men only dream of in a wife. He lives his life with the awareness that at any moment, a home made cookie is there for the taking, should he so desire. He clearly felt that he had hit the jackpot when this cookie-baking woman agreed to be his wife.

When my mother was a child, the church still frowned on dancing, card playing and certain practices which I will not go in to here. There were even certain flavors which the church seemed to frown on, although the law had not been codified. The Methodist Church embraced vanilla, lemon and peppermint, unless of course the recipe was "too rich". The only time chocolate made an appearance was at church suppers, when we were served a brick of van-choc-straw flavored ice cream after we had cleaned our plate. Even then the full effect of the chocolate was diluted by the vanilla and strawberry.

I still remember the Friday evening my mother brought a batch of cupcakes, frosted with mocha icing, to a church event. I had, literally, never experienced mocha before—I didn't even know that it was a possibility. The cupcakes themselves were predictably white, but the hint of coffee in the chocolate frosting tasted decadent, forbidden, possibly even roman catholic. I savored that cupcake, eating it slowly as we watched John Wayne in "The Alamo" projected on to a white sheet hung in the church basement. I can tell you exactly what I was wearing (the navy blue sweater with the angora collar) and where I sat (front row on the floor) when I ate that cupcake. Ignoring the stern admonitions of the adults, I snuck up to the refreshment table under cover of movie-night darkness and took a second cupcake. Despite what I had been told would happen if I ever took a second cupcake, I didn't get a terrible stomach ache, although I am aware that I still may have to "answer to God" for what I did.

But enough already about my childhood in Brooklyn. What's going on with the square-dancing, cookie-eating Presbyterians?

I can't sugar-coat this. I learned last Thursday that brownies—nay all forms of chocolate—have been OUTLAWED in at least one upstate Presbyterian Church. A claim has been made that the crumbs are impossible to get out of the wall-to-wall carpet. The gentleman-whose-wife-bakes-cookies told me this story. He still looked shell-shocked, as if he can't quite comprehend what has happened in his church. He told me that his wife, in an attempt to circumvent church law and appease the powers that be, had even gone so far as to actually invent a "drop-brownie". Instead of baking her  brownies in a pan, which produces a crunchy edge, but dark crumbly middle, she painstakingly drops the brownie batter in measured spoonfuls on a cookie sheet, thus eliminating crumbs. But even this offering was rejected.

Contemplating the prospect of never eating chocolate in church again, she was moved to speak. "The drop brownies are SO SMALL you can put the entire thing in your mouth. There are NO CRUMBS if you eat them properly!" she said. But even the lovingly conceived drop brownies fall under the heinous ban on chocolate forced on the people by an unthinking church hierarchy. This was just too much. The cookie-baking wife looked at me conspiratorially and said "I don't know what I'm going to do. I feel like a rebel..."  I looked her in the eye and responded "Well, maybe you'll just have to nail one of those drop brownies to the church door..." Much to my surprise, they got it.