Comfort in the Longest Night
On Sunday, December 20, 2015, we shared our comforts through the longest night in worship. Not only did we reflect on the Winter Solstice, but extended the metaphor
to include the warmth and well-being
that holds us through the "dark nights of the soul."
Using this website, we collected reflections and images that hold and carry us through the longest night - share them with us below.
This month's image "Sun and Moon" is by Bear Shield.
Read Our Comforts
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The Shortest Day
by Susan Cooper submitted by Susan Kirk And so the Shortest Day came and the year died And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away. They lighted candles in the winter trees; They hung their homes with evergreen; They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive. And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake They shouted, revelling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us - listen! All the long echoes, sing the same delight, This Shortest Day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace. And now so do we, here, now, This year and every year. |
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DeeDee Jay
As I sit here eating a twice baked potato (a comfort) I think that the greatest comfort is having a friend that you can tell the truth to: Complain to when your life is bruised and to celebrate the joys when all is sunny. To be comforted (and comfort) through loss and indignity. |
Dorothy McKenna
I find comfort in singing. When I walk alone I sing. I'm, amazed that I recall lyrics of songs I sang in the 1940s. World War II era songs, hymns from the days that I attended the Methodist Church, and Gospel songs that I heard the years I lived in Chicago's Black Belt while in Nursing School. |
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Judy Harmer
A warm cup of coffee, snuggled under a brightly colored quilt while reading a good book. 
quilt by Terry Aske
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Rev. Matthew Funke Crary
Singing lullabies comfort both my sons and my soul in the longest night. |
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Sensory Intervention
by Ann Penton If you find me adrift, incoherent, one day when I’m older, and if you can’t get through with your usual loving talk or touch, please treat me, close-up, to slow-roasting turkey, or beef stew simmering on low, with baby carrots. Confront me with coffee beans freshly ground, then arrange for a gurgling percolator to send its wispy tendrils my way. One day, fry up some bacon, crispy, not burned. Bake yeast bread in my presence. Carry over a loaf, still radiant from the oven. Imagine my wink, my shy smile. |
In the Orchard
by Linda Pastan submitted by Ann Penton Why are these old, gnarled trees so beautiful, while I am merely old and gnarled? If I had leaves, perhaps, or apples … if I had bark instead of this lined skin, maybe the wind would wind itself around my limbs in its old sinuous dance. I shall bite into an apple and swallow the seeds. I shall come back as a tree. |
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Ann Rangos
During meditation I use the 23rd Psalm as one of my passages. Keith Green's revised lyrics of "The Lord is My Shepard" touch my heart and bring me great comfort in darkness and light. Gary Finke
One of my true comforts is settling in a nice chair in the morning and reading the Sports section of the newspaper. Con Nadeau
During a time of serious illness, this poem gives me great comfort: The Cure by Albert Huffstickler We think we get over things. We don’t get over things. Or say, we get over the measles but not a broken heart. We need to make that distinction. The things that become part of our experience never become less a part of our experience. How can I say it? The way to “get over” a life is to die. Short of that, you move with it, let the pain be pain, not in the hope that it will vanish but in the faith that it will fit in, find its place in the shape of things and be then not any less pain but true to form. Because anything natural has an inherent shape and will flow towards it. And a life is as natural as a leaf. That’s what we’re looking for: not the end of a thing but the shape of it. Wisdom is seeing the shape of your life without obliterating (getting over) a single instant of it. Text as published in Walking Wounded, Backyard Press, 1989 |
Loretta Carmickle
When I am feeling out of touch with nature, I go to Madera Canyon and find connection and comfort there, just sitting on a bench - or a rock - for awhile. Sandy Lefebvre
A reading from AA meetings. 
Winter Solstice
by Terry Rosenmeier Dawn The sun hides behind the mountains Cold The frost crusts the desert spines Quiet The critters huddle in their lairs Sun! The first fierce rays pierce 'cross the valley Light! The yellow glows 'round long icy shadows Hope! The earth swings back and we rejoice |
Reflection
Offered by Jim Hoy
Tomorrow, during the shortest day and longest night of the year I’m hopeful that the following days of lengthening, daylight hours, will also usher in needed “Hope”, as opposed to “Pessimism” in a world that has seemingly grown overly violent and bazar in recent weeks and months.
In viewing both our nation and world lately; I feel like I’ve been watching re-runs of the movie, “One Flew Over The Coo Coo’s Nest” starring Jack Lemon, where insanity or utter chaos ruled each succeeding day in the mental ward. In seeking to balance life’s realities between one’s needed sense of “Hope” against such growing “Pessimism” in recent days, I may find myself on the longest night, re-reaching for a book titled, “The More Beautiful World, Your Heart Knows is Possible”, written by Charles Eisenstein.
In it, Eisenstein acknowledges that “Hope” has a bad name among certain teachers. On the one hand, Hope seems to suggest that wishful thinking distracts us from a sober assessment of reality and fosters unrealistic expectations. The philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche put it this way when he declared that “Hope” is the worst of evils because it prolongs the torments of man”.
Eisenstein alleges that, “in the language of “Spirituality”, ‘Hope’ implies a person’s rejection of the present moment but then adds that one should not be so quick to dismiss concerns within the human psyche. He adds that so often, people hope for absurd things that block their experience of the present truth and thus their ability to respond to it, hoping that problems will go away simply by ignoring them”.
He hypothesizes further that the energy underpinning hope is the belief that all is going to be OK”; and in a way, that’s true; not because our worst ‘fears’ won’t come to pass, but rather because we become reconciled to them after they do emerge. Hope shows us a distinction, but also a vast territory of despair, which can lie between both “it and us”. In the darkest despair, a ‘spark of hope’ lies indistinguishable within us; ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news”.
However compelling the cynicism; a childlike idealism lives within each of us, always ready to believe: always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh new eyes; surviving, despite infinite disappointments in the darkest moments of resignation.
In the old paradigm, our participation in the struggle has been half hearted, for part of our energy was seeking something outside the world, as we know it. Within the logic of the old story, hope is a lie; a hallucination of something impossible. But Hope actually stems from our innate idealism; our heart’s knowledge of a more beautiful world. Past beliefs’ that told us a more beautiful world is not possible, were in conflict with a ‘Heart’ that told us such things are attainable.
It is only when the scaffold of one’s old beliefs’ collapse due to a different understanding of reality and causality, that Hope no longer needs to cloth itself in the absurd. A new story of the world gives practical expression to the Heart, knowing that that which we call ‘Hope’, becomes authentic optimism. Past, unreasonable, hope is thus transformed; pointing us toward something that is true. This ‘new story’; because it embodies a different understanding of reality; also transforms understanding of what is practical. Heart and Mind need no longer be at odds. No longer will we believe in the illusion that Heart, Spirit, and Mind are separate conscious entities.
Offered by Jim Hoy
Tomorrow, during the shortest day and longest night of the year I’m hopeful that the following days of lengthening, daylight hours, will also usher in needed “Hope”, as opposed to “Pessimism” in a world that has seemingly grown overly violent and bazar in recent weeks and months.
In viewing both our nation and world lately; I feel like I’ve been watching re-runs of the movie, “One Flew Over The Coo Coo’s Nest” starring Jack Lemon, where insanity or utter chaos ruled each succeeding day in the mental ward. In seeking to balance life’s realities between one’s needed sense of “Hope” against such growing “Pessimism” in recent days, I may find myself on the longest night, re-reaching for a book titled, “The More Beautiful World, Your Heart Knows is Possible”, written by Charles Eisenstein.
In it, Eisenstein acknowledges that “Hope” has a bad name among certain teachers. On the one hand, Hope seems to suggest that wishful thinking distracts us from a sober assessment of reality and fosters unrealistic expectations. The philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche put it this way when he declared that “Hope” is the worst of evils because it prolongs the torments of man”.
Eisenstein alleges that, “in the language of “Spirituality”, ‘Hope’ implies a person’s rejection of the present moment but then adds that one should not be so quick to dismiss concerns within the human psyche. He adds that so often, people hope for absurd things that block their experience of the present truth and thus their ability to respond to it, hoping that problems will go away simply by ignoring them”.
He hypothesizes further that the energy underpinning hope is the belief that all is going to be OK”; and in a way, that’s true; not because our worst ‘fears’ won’t come to pass, but rather because we become reconciled to them after they do emerge. Hope shows us a distinction, but also a vast territory of despair, which can lie between both “it and us”. In the darkest despair, a ‘spark of hope’ lies indistinguishable within us; ready to be fanned into flames at the slightest turn of good news”.
However compelling the cynicism; a childlike idealism lives within each of us, always ready to believe: always ready to look upon new possibilities with fresh new eyes; surviving, despite infinite disappointments in the darkest moments of resignation.
In the old paradigm, our participation in the struggle has been half hearted, for part of our energy was seeking something outside the world, as we know it. Within the logic of the old story, hope is a lie; a hallucination of something impossible. But Hope actually stems from our innate idealism; our heart’s knowledge of a more beautiful world. Past beliefs’ that told us a more beautiful world is not possible, were in conflict with a ‘Heart’ that told us such things are attainable.
It is only when the scaffold of one’s old beliefs’ collapse due to a different understanding of reality and causality, that Hope no longer needs to cloth itself in the absurd. A new story of the world gives practical expression to the Heart, knowing that that which we call ‘Hope’, becomes authentic optimism. Past, unreasonable, hope is thus transformed; pointing us toward something that is true. This ‘new story’; because it embodies a different understanding of reality; also transforms understanding of what is practical. Heart and Mind need no longer be at odds. No longer will we believe in the illusion that Heart, Spirit, and Mind are separate conscious entities.