Dec 13 | Magic Hour (Letters from the Coast)

Last week, I woke up early for some reason, and was privileged to witness a quietly exquisite thing: though it was 7.45am, the sun had only barely risen. A light coating of frost dusted each rooftop like icing sugar, and the place where the sky lay across the mountains had been painted light pink shading gently into violet and blue. From inside our apartment, everything seemed terribly quiet apart from a few crows or a gull in the distance.

Even the cat seemed to share in my awe. She stood at the sliding glass door of the balcony with one paw slightly raised to be let out, but when I opened the door she just stood there, staring, and so did I.

It’s not terribly unusual for the sun to be up so late only a week from the solstice, but as I rarely get up this early anymore, it’s not common for me to experience these hushed pastel hours. I refrained from turning on the lights for some time, opting instead for this computer screen and the seasonal LED strings I put up around the fireplace at this time of year.

Morning Prayer followed, and it only took ten minutes or so for the sky to begin to lighten further, to shade from pink to gold and to bring with it the more ordinary colours and sounds of the day, and a muted feeling of loss passes across my heart like a shadow.

There’s a reason the directors call it “magic hour,” that moment of perfect balance between night and day. Dawn. Dusk. Twilight – literally, “in-between light” – for some represents the sacred. Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla writes,

“We might have thought that the ambiguity of twilight would have made it dangerous or forbidden within Jewish tradition, since twilight marks the end of one day and the start of the next. But, in fact, our Sages determined that dawn and dusk, the in-between moments, are the best times for prayer… Jewish tradition acknowledges that some parts of God’s Creation defy categories and that these liminal people, places, and things are often the sites of the most intense holiness.”[1]

(By the way, if you were wondering why my first piece for “Letters from the Coast” was called “Dusk Child,” this is why).

As I contemplated this, I opened my email and saw I had been invited to a celebration of Şeb-i Arus by my Sufi friends. Şeb-i Arus, or “the wedding night,” is the name for the anniversary of the death of Rumi on December 17^th, where the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes celebrates the final union of Rumi and his beloved, the divine.

And how appropriate that it is celebrated only scant days before Christians around the world (at least those who follow the Gregorian calendar) celebrate the union of heaven and earth with the incarnation of Jesus Christ into the world.

In both of these celebrations, I mused, ascent and descent are merged into a sort of strange dance. Rumi, lover and poet, at once ascends to his Beloved, while his body descends to the earth in death. Christ, the one who comes among us, having overshadowed Mary by the work of the Holy Spirit (in a sense, descending to be made incarnate in the womb of the God-bearer, the Theotokos), also ascends from Mary’s womb, passing from holy darkness to thoroughly mortal darkness…and, eventually, the thoroughly mortal light of his first dawn and indeed his eventual resurrection.

Twilight is so much more than a time on a clock (or a set of questionable novels, heh). It represents a moment in which all things are held in balance, truly a Kingdom moment of unity, made all the more precious for its evanescence.

God in God’s grace has given us a taste of total balance, a model which, if we are willing, can colour our whole lives with its expectancy, its gentle pastels of longing.

 

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[1] Rabbi Elliot Rose Kukla, “Created beings of our own,” in Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, ed. Rabbi Or. N. Rose, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, and Margie Klein (Woodstock, Vermont: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2008), 219