Since the height of the summer season, we in the UK have been heading in one direction: to the deepest, darkest, coldest moments of winter. This week, we arrive. The summer sun has long since set and here we are at the Winter Solstice. Today, we invite you to ask what that brings up, for you.

Solstice has its roots in the words Sun and Stillness. At Winter Solstice, we arrive and pause … on the day with least sunlight. We experience the longest night of the year. We wait before the cold door of darkness.

How do you feel about winter drawing in? About breathing in frozen, frigid air? How do you feel as the low sun sets? What fills your thoughts as darkness lingers around you?

Darkness closing itself in around 2021 may feel appropriate or even welcome.

2021: we have walked a long and painful road.

2021: we have experienced darkness in our lives and all around us.

As it draws to a close, and the pandemic extends its hands into our lives again, the winter is experienced in new ways - in a sense of separation and ‘frozenness'‘.

Before those of us who are privileged hear the sound of hastily unwrapped paper, gleeful cries, the merriment of shared moments and settle into cosy houses full of light, we are invited to sit in the cold. We are invited into the darkness and mystery of ‘the death of the sun’. We are invited into a day with barely any light.

Can we find light and hope and God on a day like this?

We walk in the shadows of an extended dusk. We feel the chill in our bones and the frost in our lungs. We hold our breath in this liminal space between death and new life. We embrace Advent - a season of waiting, preparing, anticipating.

Is God here, in the darkest places? Where children are murdered by their carers; die of hunger; are hated from birth because of their gender, race, sexuality or poverty?

In Christianity, love endures through the cold winter and the dark days. God is constant in the Winter Solstice, as the sun hangs low. And in this season, we celebrate the ultimate protest against darkness - that which our windows’ twinkling fairy lights mimic - the baby Jesus, enfleshed light of the world.

Waiting to meet him, we may humbly pause in the shadows. Can we anticipate the cries of a baby, born into dishevelled darkness, dirt in a cave? It is very hard to understand. But there is no need for darkness to understand the light.

Tomorrow, we look for the dawn in eager expectation, for the light will surely come. Today, the darkness is here and we are invited to embrace it. It is the chosen entry point into the world, for the greatest of all lights.

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