Each week we celebrate that this community is an intergenerational one. We celebrate that no matter how old or young we are, we all have something to learn and grow in together. This time is our chapel for children of all ages.
Today we are talking about the Summer Solstice, but we are also talking about change. How many of you have heard someone say, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”? Maybe you’ve heard an adult in your life say something like this, or maybe someone in a show or movie. Sometimes when people say it, it’s because they feel like the things they want to change never seem to, and they don’t like the way it makes them feel stuck. But for many people change can be uncomfortable or scary, and I think we can turn this saying around to make change feel less scary.
“The more things change, the more they stay the same”. That could be something we say when we need to remember that things aren’t as new and scary as they might seem at first. The Summer Solstice can be a good time for us to remember that. Now if summer solstice is a new pair of words for you, all it means is the day when the sun is up the longest in the whole year. The days have been getting longer all year, and here in a couple days they will start getting shorter. It’s been that way for billions of years, and will be that way for billions more. So that’s given plenty of people plenty of time to notice how the seasons change, and how they stay the same.
Many people who honor the earth and its cycles, like the Pagan people in this church, find stories and lessons in the ways our world changes and stays the same each year. On the Summer Solstice, we know that the sun is up the longest, and from here to the end of the year the days are going to get shorter and shorter. Thinking about that can make some people sad or upset. But we know that in another year, we will come back around to the longest day again. That can make the change to come feel more comfortable. We know where we’re going is someplace we’ve already been.
This year, you might have had classes or teachers you didn’t like very well. And you might not be looking forward to doing math again next year, or English, or gym, or band. But next year, you might have lessons you like, or a new sport in gym, or a new teacher, and you might like that subject more this time. But even if you don’t, you also know that the school year won’t last forever, and at the end it will be summer again.
So when change feels scary or overwhelming, remember this. Remember to see what’s the same.
Thank you for listening to these words.
When our senior minister announced their resignation a month ago, I felt for a moment like I had been thrown out of orbit. Their announcement seemed sudden, and I know I’m not the only one who felt thrown off track. But on a personal note, it seemed even more shaking as it coincided with the retirement of my first minister, a very dear friend and mentor who began his ministry in Ames ten years ago. This cosmic alignment of sorts felt particularly shaking because I thought, soon I might not have anyone I could look to as a minister. I went to bed that night, and tried to sleep. I woke up and went to work that morning, and couldn’t focus. But slowly, I found my way back to the orbital track I had been on.
We are on the cusp of a year with a lot of changes in store. At yet, something about this feels familiar. When I first started coming to this congregation six years ago, our previous senior minister was preparing to retire, setting us down the path of another interim ministry. These cycles of events are remarkably different in their circumstances, and also remarkably similar. Which seems to be how the passing of seasons go. Summer Solstice, the long point of the year, comes and goes every three-hundred and sixty-five days, but each day that it falls on is a different variation on a theme. And I think that makes it a good metaphor to guide us through the changes of the coming year. As an astronomical event that comes and goes each year, the regularity of the Summer Solstice can help reorient us in the face of disorder, sorrow, or conflict. The stories, metaphors, and analogies that we can draw out of this time, out of any time, can help us get back on our tracks, and keep moving.
While familiarity can feel comforting for some, there may be others who are dreading how familiar this feels. Over the last few weeks, I’ve heard people express dissatisfaction with the ministries we’ve had over the last few years. I’ve heard people worry that we might find the ministries to come equally dissatisfying. And this I think is the first lesson that the Solstice can teach us. That time is in fact a spiral, not a circle. In the myth of the Wheel of the Year which some Wiccans celebrate, the Summer Solstice is a stage for cosmic conflict. Here, the god of the waxing year, the Oak King, fights the god of the waning year, the Holly King. In this sacred story, the Holly King wins, tilting the world back away from its longest days, and down the slow slope to Midwinter. And then, the Oak King will have his victory, and the cosmic cycle will begin anew.
This story seems to repeat itself year after year after year, changing about as much as the Sun does each Solstice. However, writing about another festival on the Wheel of the Year, Laura Marjorie Miller observes that this isn’t exactly true. In an article for The Elephant Journal in July 2013, she observed that:
“Paganism being cyclic, the ancient cycle then says that the god will be restored, rather like he is just going away for a few months on vacation. I’m going to be a heterodox Pagan here and say that is almost right… Instead of a circle, think of a spiral… The god who comes back is, but also is not the same god, just as the Phoenix who rises out of the ashes is and is not the same Phoenix, just as Gandalf the White is and isn’t any longer Gandalf the Grey, just as the New Year that arrives in January is not the same year as the old, just as the Doctor, when he regenerates on Doctor Who, both is and is not the same Doctor1.”
This Sun crossing the northern part of our horizon is both the same Sun that crossed our horizon a year ago, and yet different – its atoms another year older and closer to their eventual dissolution into other celestial bodies. This Solstice is the same as last year’s, yet different, with different weather, different world events, different people. Whatever new ministry our church engages in will be unquestionably different from whatever came before, no matter how similar it may feel, or we may feel. Great astronomical events like this one help ground us in the cycles and passage of time. Amid unfamiliarity, they can center us in and remind us of familiarity – making the uncertain more bearable.
These cycles of time can help us see the ebb and flow of life in other ways. As a spiral, a coil, we watch the arcs of time that we think are distinct overlap with each other. As Rev. Lynn Ungar writes in our first reading2, “But isn’t that just the way of things?...The loss of a job feels like the world is crashing to an end, but turns out to be the seed of a new career…And of course, the endings, middles, and beginnings all overlap.” Few events in our lives are truly as stand-alone or isolated as they seem in the moment. That’s not to say that the pain or the grief or the apprehension that we feel from this moment don’t matter. Instead, it’s to say that every event in our lives is connected to a multitude of others – some beginnings, some endings, and many middles.
This moment can feel like the saying, when one door closes another door opens. Except this door is a foot off the ground, sideways, and on the other side of the house. It’s not necessarily what we wanted, or where. We’re not even sure right now that we’ll fit through. It’s different, and not where we expected it to be, but still a door, a way through, nevertheless. This moment can lead us to notice what else is around us, now that the big door we expected to walk through is closed. Where are the other doors? Where are the windows? Where are our strengths, here in this room, here in this congregation? While we may grieve the departure of our senior minister, now is also the time to turn to and support the ministers that have been beside us this whole time.
Perhaps now, more than ever before in the last year, we need to take this lesson wherever we can get it. Taking a step back from our present moment and reorienting ourselves in the larger cycles of time, or congregational life, can help us regain our equilibrium as a community. This grander perspective is I think the third lesson the Solstice can teach us. In the heat of the moment, especially in the midst of great changes, we might find ourselves fixing our gaze rigidly on our own small arcs of the sky. I certainly thing this is what Louise Glück cautions her readers against in our second reading3. We can readily comfort ourselves in a conviction that we alone have the answer our world needs – some singular solution that could fuse us into a whole, some enlargement of ourselves – but for what? To be single in the eyes of heaven?
Again, it is not to say that our individual perspectives are without merit, or value, or impact. But it is to say that our individual appraisals of the situation are important and that they exist alongside and intertwining with so many other individual appraisals of the same situation. Sharing community with one another asks us to recognize our own needs and the needs of others simultaneously. To recognize that these can’t exist outside of the context of one another, if we are really going to be this close together, for this long. The Solstice will come and go, and we will each make something slightly different of it. But if we are going to commit to being together for the long haul, we can’t get lost in the weeds of those slight differences.
So what do we make of this? Returning to my story at the beginning of this sermon, do you want to know what got me back into orbit? Being in community, here in this place. Meeting with the other members of the interim search committee and hearing their hopes and dreams for our congregation helped get me back on track. Realizing how much we minister to one another has helped ground me again. Each of us have unique gifts and insights that we bring to this community that can strengthen and grow it.
There’s not even anything that uniquely qualifies the Summer Solstice to teach us this lesson. And yet, as the herald of our year’s longest days, it’s an obvious marker in time. And I also find it conveniently placed a week after our minister’s last Sunday in the pulpit. Although our present moment is full of uncertainty, we can also find familiar contours in the spiraling arcs of times before. This new year is different from any other, and yet unsurprisingly similar. As we move forward, let’s remember that despite all our trepidations and anxieties, there is nothing new under the sun.
1. Laura Marjorie Miller, “A Lammas Mystery: Sacrifice & Transformation of the Heart”, The Elephant Journal, July 31, 2013, https://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/07/a-lammas-mystery-sacrifice-transformation-of-the-heart/
2. Lynn Ungar, “Summer Solstice,” Patheos, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/uucollective/2012/06/summer-solstice/
3. Louise Glück, “Midsummer,” in Poems 1962-2012 (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 276-277