Sunday, June 15, 2008
A war on the Summer Solstice
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- Learning to love the Smart Road
- The wrath of Blacksburg
- Gmail isn't suitable for public records
- Candidates and their parties
From the RoundTable blog
I ran into one of my Wiccan friends this morning.
* * *
Are you going to Blacksburg's Summer Solstice Fest on Saturday?
"No way."
I figured you would be all over it.
"That display of out-of-control political correctness? No thank you."
What are you talking about?
"I'm talking about an event that ignores the reason for the season. The Summer Solstice has been a sacred day for millennia, but people think it's just an excuse to party."
Well, it's not like there are that many pagans around anymore.
"There are more of us than you think. Wicca is the fastest growing faith in America. Besides, Western civilization was founded on pagan ideals. We live in a pagan culture, even if you and your friends in the conservative media try to whitewash it. When was the last time a newspaper ran a serious story about Beltane? Never. It's all insipid stories about church choirs."
Now you're just being silly.
"Am I? The ancient Greeks were pagans. And all they did was spin their beliefs into democracy and the foundations for modern philosophy, literature, mathematics, physics and more. Yet modern secularists with no sense of history ignore the gods and goddesses. 'Solstice.' The word itself embodies faith. Sól was a Norse sun goddess."
You're not saying ...
"That's right. We need to put the Sól back in solstice. It's 'Have a stellar solstice,' not 'a great summer.' I'm boycotting any store that insults my faith like that."
But ...
"There's a war on the solstice. People who preach tolerance never show any for traditional faiths. This Blacksburg thing is just the latest insult."
There's a solstice ceremony the night before. The Womenspirit group at Blacksburg's Unitarian Universalist Congregation is organizing it. They're going to do a circle, dancing, singing, maybe a fire. It won't be Stonehenge, but it will give Wiccans and such a chance to celebrate.
"That's great, but that's a private ceremony. If downtown Blacksburg wants a public solstice event, it shouldn't cleanse it of all sacred significance. That sort of secularization is responsible for the rapid moral decay in America. We need to get back in touch with the pagan values at the core of our culture."
You know that the woman organizing the downtown event is one of the leaders of the Womenspirit group, right?
"She is?"
Yep. Laureen Blakemore is an event planner for Downtown Merchants of Blacksburg. They're sponsoring the festival to compliment Steppin' Out, which doesn't come until later in the summer. She's not about to forget the significance of the day.
"She's sold out to the secularists."
Not really. She recognizes that the pagan ideals embodied in the solstice appeal to a wide audience. "It's certainly not something we'd want to scare people off and say it's a pagan festival," she told me. "It's more than that. It's a celebration of the season."
The solstice is about ideals, not any particular ceremony, god or goddess.
"Which solstice ideals do 20 tons of white sand, a tiki bar/beer garden, flea circus and oyster slurping contest embody?"
For starters, they embody the joy of the solstice. It's a day for celebration, the longest day of the year when we enjoy the sun's warmth as the long winter shadows are in full retreat.
Blakemore put it well, "It's a time to do something good for the Earth and thank the Earth for everything it does."
The celebration of life will include groups presenting information on sustainability, the farmers market, a sundown 5k race with proceeds going to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and a cooking competition with a $1,000 award provided by Bollo's and Gillie's restaurants to the charity of the winner's choice.
And there might still be some pagan elements. Blakemore is looking into a drum circle at the festival to go along with all of the other live music and performances.
"Well that all ... that all sounds pretty good. All right, I'm in."
Great! Let's go celebrate some nature and enjoy 15 hours of sunlight.
"I guess we'll always have the Winter Solstice, anyway. There's nothing to conflict with that pagan holiday."
Oh, when is it?
"Right around Dec. 25 every year."
Christian Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
