SAINT JOHN'S NIGHT, JOHN, FIRE, LIGHT & A FACE
If you're planning to celebrate Midsummer tonight, try noticing this - right around when the bonfire has burned down far enough that it no longer roars, and people just stand there looking into it.
The evening won't truly darken at this time of year. The light hangs on far past what we're used to. As if the day forgot to stop.
It's John's evening.
That is. The Baptist.
He said one thing back when he lived long ago, which the sun has repeated every single year since.
"He must increase, I must decrease".
From this night onward, the days grow shorter. Half a year later, at the other fire, at the Birth of the Child, it turns, and the Light increases again. The sun keeps John's word.
It wanes after him who pointed, and waxes after Him he pointed toward.
And that's precisely what the fire is. For John was not the Light. He came to bear witness to the light. The bonfire on his evening, tonight, is the same - not the Light itself, but something pointing toward it.
A flame confessing something greater than itself.
And yes. There was fire here before us.
Long before the church's arrival, people lit bonfires at the year's turning points, and they were right about something we shouldn't dismiss - that the turning matters, that the short night is not nothing, that darkness must be answered. For that sense was true. But the fire did something different in their hands. It was meant to ward. To keep out the powers they believed walked in the bright night, to cleanse the fields, ensure the earth was fertile.
The bonfire was an action directed at the world.
Force sent out against the night.
And there, between the two kinds of fire, runs the line.
Not between fire and fire, for the flame looks the same. But in what the flame is for. One compels, the other confesses. One wants to do something about the night, the other wants to say something about it. One reaches for a power, the other points to a Face.
The old fire reached toward the light without knowing its name. It saw rightly - that the year turns, that light means something - and grasped for a power, because it hadn't yet met a person.
Christianity didn't take the fire from them.
It gave it someone to point toward.
So when you stand there looking into the Flame, notice whether there isn't something in you that answers it. For a spark has been placed in Man, not lit by ourselves, but struck into us from the Beginning - the same Light, only carried in a Face. We call it the Image. That we are made in likeness with Him, not as copies of a power, but as mirrors that can cast the Light onward without ever being it ourselves.
For that's where the fire becomes you. A mirror doesn't make light. It turns light. It receives and passes on. Which means the moment it turns away from the source, it goes black - not because the Light disappeared, but because the mirror stopped pointing.
That's how the Spark is in us. It doesn't shine by itself. It shines when it turns toward what it was lit from. And that's the entire difference between the fire that wards and the fire that confesses.
The one that wards wants to own its Light and defend it.
The one that confesses knows the Light was given, and that it only remains in a Person as long as the Person passes it on.
That's what happens when you turn toward the Light instead of making yourself into it. You don't become less. You become transparent. What shines through is no longer your own, and precisely because of that, it stops flickering.
You were not Created to be the Light - only to let it shine through.
So.
Now you have something to think about later tonight - if you haven't had one too many draft beers and steaks in the summer sun. As we northerners tend to do. 😊
Enjoy it.
🔥❤️🔥🪽
