Are you ready to enter a sacred time and space?

For many of us here in the West, the the time for the celebration of light is about to begin

It has become fairly common knowledge that the time chosen for Christmas, as it was first celebrated in what is now Europe, was originally a pagan holiday centred around the Winter Solstice. It is easy to imagine how frightening that longest night of the year must have been to the humans of those days, and how wonderful it must have seemed when the very next night was a bit shorter and the blessed, light-filled day a bit longer. It was evidence for them that the sun – just as it had every year before – would ultimately be victorious. Fires that had been built against the encroaching night, then flared in celebration. 

When the early Christian priests tried to impose their birth-of-Christ beliefs on those pagans, they chose the better part of valor and plunked their Christmastide celebration down on the season of the solstice celebration.

But if this cosmic demonstration of the return of light was all there was to it, the main spiritual traditions of the world would not each have some form of celebration of light. And they all do. Just to name some, Christians have their lighted Christmas trees; Jews their Hanukah candles, and Sikhs, Jains, and Hindus all take part in versions of the festival of lights called Diwali. Buddhist light lanterns symbolizing the victory of enlightenment over darkness on various occasions; Muslims have Hijrah, a celebration of light, that commemorates Muhammed’s escape from religious persecution by emigrating from Mecca in the 622 CE, and Islam’s Sufis say that God is Light.

The great mystics of the spiritual traditions say a great deal about light. Some, like the Sufis, say that the Divine is light, and virtually all of them describe their mystical experience as being suffused, one way or another, with light. For example, the enlightened 14thce Kasmiri yogini (a female yogi) Lal Ded writes about her union with the Divine: 

“In the dark recesses of my soul
I seized upon Him and held him fast,
Then I diffused the inner light,
(and within, without, all was Light.)”

This spiritual emphasis on light – on cherishing light, on celebrating light – is trying to tell us something: There is something holy about light, and although we, in our limited human consciousness, may not totally grasp its entire significance, it benefits us greatly to approach each and every celebration of light with conscious awareness and with a sense of the sacred

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

As I will be having major surgery next week, I probably won't have a newsletter out for a while. My goal is to put one out in January, but don't be surprised if you don't hear from me till around Valentine's Day! Any wishes for a speedy recovery are appreciated.

In the meantime, wishing you Happy Holidays!

UPCOMING EVENTS