Choosing Awe
By: Hilary Dumitrescu
Tags: Mythology, Solstice, Religion, Advent

My husband and I both grew up in fairly rigid Christian churches. As parents, we chose to teach our kids to embrace and celebrate different ways of expressing faith. We’ve been lighting the candles of the Advent wreath: Hope, Peace, Joy, Love. Each week we take a few minutes to go around the table and talk about these ideas. We also point out that this wreath is an ancient symbol: this circle of growing light; ancient. We remind them that Carl Jung said that no man ever invented a symbol. Symbols, instead, arise out of shared human experiences.

We tell them about the time we visited Newgrange in Ireland, and stood in that tiny antechamber that my ancient ancestors built over 7 millenia ago. Before the pyramids, they built this stone structure so precisely that on this one day of the year, the Winter solstice, the sun shines through at just the right angle through a tiny slot in the roof to illuminate the room and halls for exactly 17 minutes. Magic or math? Why not both?

Religion, after all, is just a filter to allow us to think and talk about big truths. We use myths to try to put an explanation to ideas and experiences that defy our human understanding: death, creation, serendipity, tragedy, eternity. Trying to make any religion about literal truths is where things get sticky. I prefer to deal in metaphors exclusively when it comes to the divine. As Joseph Campbell said, “Mythology is poetry, and the poetic language is very flexible. Religion turns poetry into prose.”

But if you force me to examine the prose behind the poetry, I’ll still find more poetry. The awesome truth behind all holidays (holy days) celebrated by people around the world in December — the myth of the birth of the Christ child, or the myth of the seven nights of Hanukkah, or the myth of the awakening of the Buddha — is the miracle of that star, our Sun, and our exactly perfect relation to it at this time of year. As we both hurtle through space, our planet slings out further and further, until it reaches aphelion — the furthest point from the sun — hopeless, darkness encroaching, nothing but the chaos of space and cold ahead. Then suddenly (supposedly explained by Newtonian physics but miraculous nonetheless) it begins to circle back, following a path it’s followed for billions of years: stray, return, stray, return.

Are we not all, like our mysterious little planet, walking, perfect little miracles? Do we not all follow the same path as this little rock in space, sojourning out and far from our sources of warmth and light, struggling to return? Unlike our planet, though, our path is defined by free will; no Newtonian physics to keep us on track. We may wander so far that returning seems impossible and our orbit becomes a straight line to chaos and darkness.

The true miracle of this time of year is that we are here, on this tiny, spinning paradise in space, put here by God or physics or aliens, who knows? We are here. We will have a new year of increasing light and warmth, enough to grow our food and dance in the sunshine and have picnics in the grass and prepare ourselves for another slingshot towards oblivion.

Who knows what the future brings? I am content in this: we are here. The cycles of science and the laws of physics are here, undeniably unchanging. We can choose to be in awe of the them — create stories and poetry to celebrate them, heroes to embody them, myths to interpret them — or ignore them, choosing instead to keep stumbling around in the dark.

I choose awe.