The Coldest Evening of the Year: Some Thoughts on Light, Dark, and the Winter Solstice

Today, December 21, 2013, is the winter solstice, the shortest day and consequently the longest night of the year. After this, it gets better.

The Roman Catholic Weekday Missal, noting this fact, assigns the reading of the fifth O Antiphon, as the Alleluia before the day's Gospel reading. In the original Latin it begins, "O Oriens," which the Missal translates as "Come, Radiant Dawn." The rest of that version goes:

splendor of eternal light, sun of justice:

shine on those lost in the darkness of death.

The daily meditation explains that, "We think today of the earth's need for more sunlight and warmth. Christ is the sun sending out rays of justice, holiness and grace. What the sun does for our planet, Christ as the Sun of grace does for the kingdom of God." It then tosses in a final thought: "And in our souls also there is still much darkness which cries out for the helping, healing rays of Christ."

This puts me in mind of another reference to the astronomy, if not the theology, this day involves. In "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, the narrator speaks of halting his one-horse sleigh "Between the woods and frozen lake/The coldest evening of the year." This poem has moved me deeply since I first encountered it in high school. Not long ago I wrote a (too-) lengthy analysis of it in which I noted that it amounts to a proto-suicide note in which only a sense of duty to life's ongoing rhythms prevents fruition.

What I did not see at the time is the essential hope hidden in the now-more-than-ever-seems-it-rich-to-die tone of the piece. It is "the coldest evening of the year," the solstice, the nadir; if the speaker holds out through the night, things will get better.

The whole thing put me in mind of a line from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." As the prison camp work crew stands stamping and shivering at morning roll call one man, a defrocked naval officer, speaks up. "'It's always coldest at dawn,' the Captain explained. 'Because that's the last stage of the loss of heat by radiation which takes place at night.'" The narrator adds that, "The Captain liked explaining things. . . .The Captain was clearly going downhill. His cheeks were caved in, but he kept his spirits up." It gets better - even if it doesn't.

The poet Malcolm Guite has also pondered the place of the fifth O Antiphon in his sonnet, O Oriens, available in his wonderful book "Sounding the Seasons." His own translation of the original begins, "O Dayspring." I have no Latin, but just feeling my way by the Braille of cognates I'm pretty sure "oriens" links to "orient," the idea of light dawning in the east. Guite invites the reader to ponder even the razor-wire gleams of this day's retreating dawn,

As though behind the sky itself they traced 

The shift and shimmer of another river

Flowing unbidden from its hidden source; 

The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

In other words, "It gets better," not just because the sun won't sling us out of orbit so that our light and warmth appear to retreat into an irretrievable south, but because all light springs from what Gerard Manley Hopkins, in "The Habit of Perfection" calls "the uncreated light." 

Frost's narrator ascribes ownership of the winter wood to an absentee landlord whose "house is in the village," and who does not much care one way or another if a lone traveler chooses to lie down in the drifted snow and fall into his final sleep. Guite instead hears a voice which insists,

“Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream 

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,

Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking”.

It will be darker and colder sooner and longer tonight than ever before, but rejoice: It will be darker and colder sooner and longer tonight than ever again. Advent's little Lent lasts only three days longer. The Sun of Righteousness rises with healing in his wings! The Dayspring will shine forth!