On the Solstice, and on faith
Old thoughts with new resonance
As this sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible year draws to a close, I find myself preparing to return to the United States after a nearly four-month sojourn through our neighbor to the north. I’m trying to pay close attention to the signals my body and emotions are sending me about what that feels like. For many complicated reasons, I have to admit that it doesn’t feel great, and I’m gently sitting with what that might mean.
At the same time, the return has some joyous aspects: I’m going to see some beloved family, and spend holiday time that’s likely to be restful. More and more, I recognize that the people are most of what keep me in my country of birth.
In the midst of yet another whirlwind of packing (we’ve relocated every month since August), I’m pausing here to remember and share a piece of writing I did twelve years ago, to share with a lovely crowd on Solstice night. Last night the wheel turned again on the longest night, and while the sunset was completely obscured by cloud cover, I got to watch amid wood fires and steaming baths as gentle snow laced the silent pines outside Quebec City.
For a Solstice gathering I attended in 2010, we’d been asked to share stories or art on the theme of faith. At the end of 2012, I reposted the writing to my healing blog. By then I was at the start of a personal struggle that would end my marriage and begin a long healing journey for me. Reading it over now, it has some feeling of platitude about it, and certainly a lot of the abstraction I sometimes wrote with in those days, when I was often hiding my own deepest feelings from myself.
Yet I still find myself returning to it, this short and simple deconstruction and reclamation of a term that’s taken a lot of abuse and been brandished as a weapon far too often—even more since 2010. There are many, many more dehumanizations and violent acts I could add to my list of things people have done in the name of faith since that time, when I wasn’t yet writing about Black lives, or trans lives, or the erosion of abortion rights, or kids in cages, or the proliferation of mass shootings…I could go on. But at the same time, the need for the nail-biting kind of faith I’m talking about here as only increased proportionately.
Faith is a thing I also personally really need right now as I enter into some massive decisionmaking in the new year. As I discuss in more abstract terms below, faith to me is both simply and profoundly a sense of self-trust, a guiding star that stays present even when there’s no way to know the outcome. For some people it’s some form of god, but it doesn’t have to be; the power of faith lies not in its object but in belief itself.
In many ways, I think it’s what we all need right now, and what I’ve seen many people, including myself, losing in the face of our burning world. It’s understandable. Things are incredibly scary, and it’s honestly not looking great for us, like as a species, let alone as a nation. Despair sometimes seems to make a lot more sense than hope.
Nevertheless, here we are, just past the longest night. In this season, it seems to me, it’s less about making sense than holding tight.
Keep the flames lit, friends, and I’ll see you in 2023.
***
When I heard about tonight’s theme, I must admit I had a little trouble. Faith is a difficult concept for me, one of those virtues which, like “purity,” has had all the piss taken out of it by Christianity. Faith is George W. Bush following his gut into Iraq. Faith is Creationists who value their fairy tales over scientific evidence. Faith is what got the witches burned, kept the Crusades going for hundreds of years, fueled the Spanish Inquisition, took out the Twin Towers, impregnated and infected teenagers whose only sex education was abstinence-only, and defined people like me – female, bisexual, queer, pagan – as sub-human.
If you can do the hard work, though, of separating faith from its incredibly strong right-wing religious connotations, it’s actually an incredible tool of being human. Because faith, real faith, isn’t about blind belief in dogma. It’s about mystery. It’s about going forward with grace, when faced with the unknowable and terrifying. Faith is the holy communion of imagination and hope.
I’m a pagan woo-woo witch-identified skeptic. The founder of my own tradition used to say, “First perceive, then believe.” Of course, his doors of perception were open a little wider than a lot of people’s, and his perception allowed him to believe in fairies, spirits, gods and goddesses, energetic currents, blessings and curses. I’m only beginning to touch some of those things, and even when I perceive them, I’m still not sure I believe.
But I have faith.
Faith is what is left over when inquiry is exhausted, that thing that keeps us going when we Just Don’t Know. Faith is what allows us to turn the proverbial lemons into the equally proverbial lemonade; to keep trying when the damn thing has broken down fifteen times in a row but maybe if we switch these wires or kick it a few more times it’ll start; to wait and wait and wait because maybe this time, the Great Pumpkin will come. (The secret? If you wait long enough without eating or sleeping, he does.)
Faith allows some of you to light things on fire and swing them around your bodies for fun and entertainment, and others of us to look at a bare stage and make it into a world. In fact, faith is what makes most art – and all theatre – operate. For as the prophet Geoffrey Rush once said, “it’s a mystery.”
Faith is what allows a marathoner to get up Heartbreak Hill, a widow to get through her grief, a soldier to make it through the night. It’s what made our ancestors learn to wait for the bread to rise, the crops to grow, the game to return, the rains to stop. It’s the thing that lets us live in the terrifyingly simultaneous way that our human brains make us: one foot in the present, and one in the future.
Faith is what makes you able to love even when your heart has been torn out, stepped on, run over, and left on the side of the road to die. Faith makes you get up, dust your heart off, maybe wall it up a little better than before, but leave a window open a crack, just in case.
Just in case. Because we still imagine. And we still hope. And we still wait for the light.