For the past 30 years, Mount Auburn Cemetery has hosted an evening Solstice event, and it has become enough a fixture of the local holiday season in Boston that tickets for those nights sell out fairly quickly. What began as a simple candle-lighting ceremony has become an impressive light display outdoors and indoors, too, that evokes the grandeur of the celestial among the graves of the dear departed. The tickets that are the absolute last to go, if you find yourself nearby and hunting for some at the eleventh hour, are those for the so-called “Quiet Hours” at midweek, when the cemetery atmosphere is intentionally more subdued and might feel more suitable for those who are mourning, have sensory integration issues, or are trying to avoid to avoid larger crowds — for whatever reason. People do not mind wandering a cemetery at night, not with others, at least, but they do resist wandering it in silence. That phrase “quiet as the grave” can strike fear in some hearts. Not mine: I have long taken a certain solace in that sort of quiet. This year, I managed to get a ticket for one of these Quiet Hours at Mount Auburn, and last Wednesday, I wandered the graveyard in relative silence, through the dark, alone.
Now I should tell you that I spend an awful lot of time in that graveyard. The National Historic Landmark straddles the line dividing Cambridge from Watertown, and while its iconic entrance is in Cambridge, the vast majority of the grounds are in Watertown, where I live. They sprawl over nearly 175 acres and contain more than 10 miles of roads of paths along rolling terrain. In fact, Mount Auburn offers the largest contiguous open space in all of Watertown and arguably the loveliest. It has also become a marvelous arboretum that serves as a wildlife corridor through a densely populated urban area; on my walks, I encounter squirrels and turkeys who seem very much at home there. Because its cemetery gates are only minutes from my house, and because I like an outdoor stroll combined with a routine practice of Memento Mori, I spend several days a week there, walking hours and hours at a stretch, in good weather and bad. I know its landscape intimately and have watched as seasons change there throughout the year.
With the advent of winter, I have seen the arrival of yule logs and Christmas wreaths at a number of the roughly 100,000 gravesites in Mount Auburn. I have witnessed the trees drop their few remaining leaves and then stand with bare branches braving the wind and stretching upwards to catch the snow flurries just starting to fall. Under gray skies, I have seen several angels appearing with minimal fanfare amidst disappearing foliage, so many angels carved from marble and granite rising among the monuments and headstones, wordlessly heralding their tidings to the living as well as the dead.
Much earlier this year, near the start of summer, I officiated a burial service in Mount Auburn for a woman whose brother had died during the first year of the pandemic. It took the family quite a while afterwards to find a date when they could all gather graveside. Near the end of that service, she told me that they would need to find still another date when I could officiate for the burial of her father, who also died during the pandemic. We have yet to settle on one. Not too long afterwards, I received a call from a different woman who wanted me to officiate at a dual burial service later that summer for her mother and father, both of whom had died during the pandemic. Conscious of the grieving that those years of pandemic postponed, I apologized to her profusely, explaining that I would not be available to do it, since I already had a family vacation scheduled that week. This same vacation came to an abrupt end when my father-in-law died suddenly. My husband and I then needed to make hurried travel arrangements so that we could be at the funeral held in a Jewish cemetery far away.
In the decades since it began its Solstice observance, Mount Auburn has kept this practice constant: it has made votive candles available to nighttime guests at the cemetery. Inside one of its chapels, these guests are invited to light a candle in memory of a loved one they have lost. Last Wednesday, I lit one for my father-in-law, whose memory most assuredly remains a blessing. Placing it up on the cool stone altar, I thought of my husband, who was celebrating his very first Hanukkah without his father, and of my nephew, who would be celebrating his very first Christmas without his grandfather. The holidays are blue for many of us this year; that doesn’t mean that they cannot be illuminated anyway.
American poet Theodore Roethke famously wrote: “In a dark time, the eye begins to see…” In a dark time the eye begins to see, to see stars above and to shadows all around. And in quiet time the ear begins to hear — to hear those sounds beyond the silence, the murmurings of breezes and whispers of heartbeats and echoes of angelic tidings of comfort. Everything sighs: blessed are you who mourn, for you will be comforted. Whether of not we mark it at a service or in a cemetery, Winter Solstice calls upon all our senses and finally upon our grander and wiser imaginings to help us truly know and celebrate this world spinning on its axis — so that we may more fully inhabit it while we can, with its inevitable spans of darkness alongside its glorious spans of light.
In our country today, we have become accustomed to punctuating the holidays with many distinctive sights and smells and sound of the season — lights blinking, bells jingling, the works! The result can be a degree of sensory overload not entirely in keeping with the original spirit of the Winter Solstice. Something Mount Auburn does is invite visitors at its evening event to write a prayer or intention on a card and tie it with twine to a public display in one of its light-dappled chapels. I wrote down words from a Gaelic blessing that has been well enough circulated that a version of it appeared in our hymnal. You may recognize them yourself. “Deep peace of the shining stars to you! Deep peace of the gentle night to you! Moon and stars pour their healing light on you! Deep peace… Deep peace to you.” I hope that your holiday season this year contains a few quiet hours, at minimum, and that these allow you to connect with the deepest possible peace of this season in sacred silence, outdoors or indoors, alone and in good company, either or both. Deep peace — I wish that to every last one of you this Solstice: deep, deeper, and deepest peace.
The Reverend Dr. 
Happy Yule!