'The long nights of winter seem a long way away but they too, in nature’s natural cycle, will lead us to the light.' Photo: Harald Arlander / Unsplash.
‘At Midsummer we go from the wild joy of the resurrection to the insight of slow extinction.’
After sun: Sue Glover Frykman says the journey from Light to dark needs a little seasoning
With midsummer passed, the nights are again drawing in. In April, May and early June I savoured the spring, the enveloping warmth and nature’s colourful gifts. On Midsummer’s Eve my thoughts turned to the ramble towards the sweaty heat of summer, the fruits of autumn, and the black and white bleakness of winter. We were now at the cusp, where the light slowly becomes darker; the annual and inevitable rise and fall, to and from.
A column in Sweden’s Dagens Nyheter also took up the theme. Björn Wiman wrote about Midsummer’s Eve as the secular society’s real day of mourning – not Good Friday (Long Friday as it is called in Swedish), but Holy Saturday, when the climax has been reached and darkness and melancholy roll in. He saw Easter and Midsummer as opposites. At Midsummer, he said, we go from the wild joy of the resurrection to the insight of slow extinction, while at Easter we move in the opposite direction, from death to the hope of the resurrection. In that dualism is knowledge that needs to be affirmed, he said, because it says something important about our role as partners in creation. This potential, he wrote, is expressed in Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which shows that a world different from the one around us is possible. He pointed to the part when the choir, after a profound silence, changes from a crowd screaming at Jesus to a thoughtful, sculptural and quiet chorus of ‘Who has struck you in this way?’
Björn Wiman called this a miracle, in that it shows that another humanity is possible. We have the power to stop what is insane and say that it can no longer continue. When things are at their darkest, we can turn the darkness into light. But he pointed out that there is a thin veil between goodness and cruelty – a fragile margin between sympathetic humanism and furious rage – and that this dualism shows us the coldness and bleakness of winter and the promising warmth of Midsummer. Every year we can take part in the creation of our world. When the light culminates in order to slowly recede, we have the freedom and the responsibility to choose. The miracle happens, according to Björn Wiman, when we choose the right way.
Amid his own despair, George Fox came to the insight that ‘there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness’. In the last verse of ‘Walk in the Light’, we cheerfully sing: ‘“There’s an ocean of darkness and I drown in the night, ‘til I came through the darkness to the ocean of Light. And the Light is forever and the Light will be free, and I walk in the glory of the Light,” said he.’
These thoughts have led me to ask myself whether I am walking in or towards darkness, or in and towards Light. The days are still long and light here, and give comfort. The long nights of winter seem a long way away but they too, in nature’s natural cycle, will lead us to the light.
