Summer Solstice's Long Reach, Part 2

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Summer Solstice’s Long Reach, Part 2

by CynthiaW

Part One concluded with an exhortation from a Maya community leader to reject daily insanity and use our daylight hours to pursue harmony and transcendence. This concept is not unique to the Maya or to indigenous people more generally, but is part of the heritage of non-insane Western civilization.

The call for harmony, for love of neighbor, echoes St. John’s first letter, in which he wrote, “Yet, I am writing you a new commandment, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away, and the true light is already shining. He who says he is in the light and hates his brother is in the darkness still. He who loves his brother abides in the light, and in it (or him) there is no cause for stumbling. But he who hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes.” (1 John 2: 8-11)

One hemisphere’s summer solstice is the winter solstice, the day of most darkness, in the other hemisphere. This is a reminder that human flourishing and nature’s flourishing require balance. All relationships — emotional, biological, spiritual — suffer when one element, no matter how essential, takes over the space where a contrasting element is needed.

Nevertheless, the summer solstice and our desire for ever more light point to a spiritual reality outside the cycles of light and dark in which we pass our earthly lives. “God is light,” St. John wrote, “and in Him is no darkness at all.” (1 John 1: 5) Our souls know that we were made to be with God, in harmony with one another, in an earth and heaven where there is, somehow, no darkness.

In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis’s characters sailed east toward the rising sun. Beyond every land, they came to a sea that seemed to them to be made of light:

After that for many days, without wind in her shrouds or foam at her bows, across a waveless sea, the Dawn Treader glided smoothly east. Every day and every hour, the light became more brilliant and still they could bear it. No one ate or slept and no one wanted to, but they drew buckets of dazzling water from the sea, stronger than wine and somehow wetter, more liquid, than ordinary water, and pledged one another silently in deep drafts of it.

Finally, they reached an expanse of white lilies growing on the deep sea:

Whiteness, shot with faintest color of gold, spread round them on every side ... this last sea was very like the Arctic; and if their eyes had not by now grown as strong as eagles’ the sun on all that whiteness would have been unbearable. And every evening the same whiteness made the daylight last longer. A smell arose from the lilies ... sweet, yes, but not at all sleepy or overpowering, a fresh, wild, lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain and make you feel that you could go up mountains at a run or wrestle with an elephant. “I feel that I can’t stand much more of this, yet I don't want it to stop.”

In these passages, I can feel the author’s yearning for the connections with God and with others that our natural limits won’t yet let us experience. Like the apostles at the Transfiguration, who couldn’t stay on the mountain with Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, we are given at the summer solstice a glimpse through the veil between the natural and the supernatural, the time-bound and the eternal. Then the veil closes, and we have to start the slow descent to the darkest day, but we can be changed by the vision, like St. Peter, who wrote:

For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we heard this voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.

And we have the prophetic word made more sure. You will do well to pay attention to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. (2 Peter 1: 16-19)