Sundials
Rachelle Mee Chapman posts a really nice reflection on light, and invites her listeners/readers at the end to reflect on their own stories of light…letting the image roll around inside, doing what it will. The priming in her post combined with my recent thoughts on ritual made my mind go quickly here:
One of my most dependable childhood rituals happened every Easter. Easter mornings, before the sun was up (5:30? 6:00?), one or the other of my parents would open my bedroom door and say in that crazy mix of excitement and grovelly morning-voice, “He is risen!” This pulled me out of sleep and into clothes and car, and we’d drive – my parents, sister and me – to the neighborhood park.
On our way to the softball diamond, we’d often disturb the sleep of someone homeless, whose bleary-eyed blinks were met with the same exuberant greeting: “He is risen!” (The thought now makes me laugh out loud. What could they have thought we meant by that?)
We’d sit huddled on the bleachers and sing a hymn or two (at that time of day my dad an amazing bass and the rest of us willing warblers). One of us would read the story of Jesus rising from the dead. And pretty soon, that thing we came to see would happen.
Across the darkened city, brushing tips of trees and rooftops, beams of light would spill. We’d stare in silence til our eyes were glowing sun. “He is risen,” my parents said. “He is risen indeed,” we’d say back. And we’d sing another hymn about night and death and mourning getting changed into light and hope and life.
I love that ritual. I love all the things it symbolized, and the images it etched into my bones: of waiting for light, watching for it, honoring its presence when it comes and celebrating, even before it does, the hope and light of people through the ages. This is “redemptive hegemony” at its best, I think (as mentioned in my last post) – a choice, in a world where there is much darkness to recognize, mourn, and expect, to consciously watch for and celebrate the opposite.
I let my mind wander, after reading Rachelle’s post, from the bleachers of that diamond to the expanses of Uganda, where Carl Jung traveled midlife. In his autobiography (pp 266-9), Jung tells a story of ritual that happened there.
At the end of that palaver an old man suddenly exclaimed, “In the morning, when the sun comes, we go out of the huts, spit into our hands, and hold them up to the sun.” I had him show me the ceremony and describe it exactly. They held their hands in front of their mouths, spat or blew vigorously, then turned the palms upward toward the sun…
The old man said that this was the true religion of all peoples, that all Kevirondos, all Buganda, all tribes for as far as the eye could see from the mountain and endlessly farther, worshipped adhista – that is, the sun at the moment of rising. Only then was the sun mangu, God. The first delicate golden crescent of the new moon in the purple of the western sky was also God. But only at that time; otherwise not.
Evidently, the meaning of the Elgonyi ceremony was that an offering was being made to the sun divinity at the moment of its rising. If the gift was spittle, it was the substance which in the view of primitives contains the personal mana, the power of healing, magic, and life. If it was breath, then it was roho – Arabic, ruch, Hebrew, ruach, Greek, pneuma – wind and spirit. The act was therefore saying: I offer to God my living soul. It was a wordless, acted-out prayer which might equally well be rendered: “Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
To Light, to Life, to Hope, to Resurrection: yes, to these I commend my spirit, too. Like my own little family on those cold wooden bleachers, staring at the sun.
Jung writes more, and while I could give my own commentary on all the ways his words here speak to me as symbols, I think I’ll simply quote the words. If your soul wants to take them elsewhere, let that be.
The sunrise in these latitudes was a phenomenon that overwhelmed me anew every day. The drama of it lay less in the splendor of the sun’s shooting up over the horizon than in what happened afterward. I formed the habit of taking my camp stool and sitting under an umbrella acacia just before dawn. Before me, at the bottom of the little valley, lay a dark, almost black-green strip of jungle, with the rim of the plateau on the opposite side of the valley towering above it. At first, the contrasts between light and darkness would be extremely sharp. Then objects would assume contour and emerge into the light which seemed to fill the valley with a compact brightness. The horizon above became radiantly white. Gradually the swelling light seemed to penetrate into the very structure of objects, which became illuminated from within until at last they shone translucently, like bits of colored glass. Everything turned to flaming crystal. The cry of the bell bird rang around the horizon. At such moments I felt as if I were inside a temple. It was the most sacred hour of the day. I drank in this glory with insatiable delight, or rather, in a timeless ecstasy.
Near my observation point was a high cliff inhabited by big baboons. Every morning they sat quietly, almost motionless, on the ridge of the cliff facing the sun, whereas throughout the rest of the day they ranged noisily through the forest, screeching and chattering. Like me, they seemed to be waiting for the sunrise. They reminded me of the great baboons of the temple of Abu Simbel in Egypt, which perform the gesture of adoration. They tell the same story: for untold ages men have worshiped the great god who redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens.