Ah, summer solstice is here again. It has to be one of my favourite times of the year. I love these long evenings.. It’s10 o’clock PM, 23 degrees Celsius and the air is still. I sit out on the back deck nursing a favourite beverage taking it all in. The dark silhouettes of the trees starkly contrast against the sky as the afterglow of the day gradually diminishes in the west. Bats flit helter-skelter along the edge of the trees snapping up insects. I feel thankful to be alive and be part of it.

Sitting here in my reverie, I got to thinking about how Pagan festivals in pre-Christian times revolved around the cycles of the earth’s movement around the sun. To the ancients, the summer and winter solstices were two of the year’s most important times of celebration. The sun played a central role in these celebrations. In fact, many pre-Christian societies worshiped the sun as part of their religious practices. The sun was their god.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Worshiping the sun, the ancients worshiped something tangible, something that they could see, something that had a direct influence on their lives. They worshiped something that they had direct existential evidence of, unlike the unseen god of Christianity which came to replace their Pagan rites.

Three thousand or so years later, the sun is still the force that maintains life on this planet. Considering the scientific illiteracy of their time, perhaps it was perfectly logical that the ancients would practice a religion centered on sun worship. Without the sun, life would perish on earth. Can the same be said if we didn’t have the concept of a Christian god?