Summary:
It’s that season again. Jews observe Hanukkah as a celebration
of their victory over tyranny and persecution, while Christians celebrate the
birth of Christ and the salvation from sin that Christ embodies. At the same
time, both of these festivals have elements connected to the winter solstice when
the least amount of daylight is experienced in the northern hemisphere. But the
marking of time for humans is always connected to the configuration of
celestial bodies, and the discovery of a 10,000-year-old calendar in Scotland
is testimony to that connection. The sacredness of time is established as a
human response to the cosmic order evident in the configuration of celestial bodies
and a translation of that cosmic order into the flow of human events.
