If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that yesterday, December 21, was the winter solstice, the "shortest" day of the year (and conversely, as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night of the year"). Commemorated in any number of ways around the world, the winter solstice is the grand turning point of the seasonal year, the day and night on which time, or at least our perception of it, hinges.  It's the end of the light, yet its creation and genesis, too. Though we lose, we win, too, newly moving, ever so imperceptibly, to the greater light to come.
     As winter continues to bear down, most of us see at least some daylight.  Far to the north, however, well beyond the Arctic Circle, people see only darkness.  Yet do we "see" darkness?  Or do we just hear and feel it?  Though darkness seems to descend upon us, a obscuring gloom--in every way--light seems to well from within us, our spirits ineffably connecting with the illumination sparkling around us.  And we "see."
     I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through the darker days and hours, we come to understand that light is not what we think it is, illumination and no more.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that finds its richest expression in Jesus' words in the eighth and ninth chapters of John, "I am the light of the world."
     As someone in my atheist discussion said when I wished her a Merry Christmas, "Sweet Solstice"!