Solstice, Pagan, Christianese / Advent Day 20

Solstice. The enormous machinery of our corner of the universe rolls, slowly, ponderously, into an immense pause. The shoulders of the earth have leaned as far back from the beckoning of the sun as they can without snapping the spine of astrophysics.

The temperatures have walked down the basement steps. Low minus-forties come up on my mobile thermometer, collecting data out the closed sunroof of the 95 Subaru as I streak across town to get the mail. More like "creak" across town. Emerging from the warm garage, the car undergoes a stiffening, the brakes, the steering, the springs, everything enters an instant ice-age, as motor-vehicle arthritis invades the car’s previous suppleness.

I feel like I’m a pagan on a Christian cruise. All the food, the sights, the evening caberets are in Christianese. And I have a little "christian/pagan" dictionary that I’m using to figure out what the natives are talking about whenever we put in to port.

I listen last night to St. Olaf doing their annual Christmas concert. Choral music at it’s liquid, stirring, gorgeous best. I was thinking, if I were a kid raised in a secular family, and suddenly, in college, I happened upon a hall filled with singing of this beauty and challenge, from a group of young people working intently together, all on the theme of the birth of the long-promised miraculous child, I would be unable to resist wanting to join up. Make poetry happen in my life too.

But maybe soon we’ll have a poetics of creation. We’ll have bracing stories that explicate the exquisite bending of the water-strider knees. We’ll hear sweet, lovely four-part harmonies singing the myusterious power of molten rock squeezing through cracks in the earth. We’ll see dancers and drummers incarnating the ecstasy of the sun creeping up on the far horizon of the shortest day of the year.

For now, on this cruise, everyone’s writing, composing, talking, humming, and performing in Christianese, at least within earshot. It’s a bully camouflage for the rank earning-and-spending that most of us really, on a daily basis, seem to be placing our lives on the altar of. Autnentic Pagans, like authentic Christians, decry the loss of faith – faith in the earth and its wonder, for one, faith in the teachings of Jesus to transform us, for the other.

But I do wish there were more Paul Winter Consorts honoring today’s Stonehenge moment – we’ve reached the midpoint of the the tunnel of darkness, and we’re seeing light at the other end. Doesn’t the Earth need Pagan Doctrine more than it needs more Christian Doctrine?