On The Blessedness Of New Beginnings

Homily for the Equinox, 2024.

Dearly Beloved,

Happy Spring Equinox to the Northern Hemisphere and happy Autumn Equinox to the Southern Hemisphere! On this holy day, so important in so many traditions, I feel moved to speak about new beginnings and their role in both our personal and spiritual lives.

As I have spoken of before many times, as pagans we partake in a naturalized theology. We understand that the majesty and the will of the Divine are revealed through the processes and cycles of the natural world around us, within us, and between us. We clearly see the Divine as the One in the wholeness of nature, in its seamless and infinite interconnectedness, and we also clearly see the Divine as the Many—the vast array of our beloved deities and the beautiful dance of the relationships in which we come to know Them—in the breathtaking variety of nature, in its endless dance of possibilities and interactions. As we participate in nature, we enact and live out the will of the Divine encoded as the Logos, the structuring principle of the universe, and as pagans we celebrate that Logos as revealed in the yearly cycle, the “wheel of the year”.

Within that wheel of the year, we have many important moments. We see nature turn gold and red and brown every Autumn as the leaves fall from the trees and the days grow shorter, and every Spring, nature unfurls itself in new joy and beauty as the nights grow shorter and our blood quickens in our veins. It is on this occasion, as the cycle of nature in my home, the Northern Hemisphere, turns once again to growth and striving, that I wish to speak on the blessedness of new beginnings.

What does nature teach us? What does the Divine wish us to see in the pattern of birth, life, death, and rebirth we see each year in the endless turning of the seasons, the endless cycle of day and night, the endless cycle of growth and decay?

All too often, we feel the pull of nature as an imposition; hunger, fatigue, the various intense impulses and drives of the body and the mind…they are often experienced as sufferings. We see and feel these sufferings each year in the cold and dark of Autumn and Winter, and each night we live out a shadow of that cold and dark time of year. Sometimes we get lost in these cold and dark times. We lose ourselves in the pain of death and forget the inevitability of rebirth.

But this is not what nature teaches us.

Nature reveals to us that every night, every winter, every period of laying dead and fallow, comes to an end. That the darkness transforms into dawn, that the cold transforms into warmth, and that death transforms into new life. Nature teaches us that every ending ends and gives birth to a new beginning.

So let those of us in the Southern Hemisphere remember that no matter how long and cold the nights of winter may become, that a new dawn waits in the turn of the wheel. Let those of us in the Northern Hemisphere turn, in love and devotion, towards the Sun and the warmth of the growing year. Let us embrace the rush of fresh growth as the wheel of nature turns and we turn with it. Let us, in joy and awe, embrace new life and the change and transformation that it brings. Let us embrace the blessedness of new beginnings.

Happy Spring and Autumn Equinox.

In love,

Soror Alice