Like a breath I knew would come, I reach for a new day
“In the beginning, the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
The ancient Egyptians described the potentiality before time as “before there were two things”, and they described that primordial state as being formless, void, dark, and deep, and named it Nu or Nun, which means ‘watery’ or ‘inert’. Nun contains all possibilities and realizes, well, none of them.
The thing about the infinite sea of things that might happen is, of course, somewhere along the line, maybe something does happen. And then you have two things – Nun, and whatever it is that’s Some. Or, um, Sun.
There’s a moment where everything changes, where everything goes from what could be, maybe, if something only catalyses it, to where things start happening, that moment of transformation from maybe to yes. The Egyptians called it Zep Tepi, which means ‘the first time’, or ‘the first occasion’. It was their theological Big Bang, the first moment of light in darkness, of something actual in the potential. That point where the goo transformation in the chrysalis bursts open to reveal the butterfly that was possible.
There are a lot of stories about what really happened in the first time — one of my favorites has the first being as Bennu, the Egyptian phoenix, who sings the cosmos into being as the sun — but every single one of them comes down to that emergence of light from the darkness. The first occasion was the first dawn.
We are here today to celebrate the equinox, when the light of the year starts to outweigh the dark. The Egyptians did not celebrate the equinox, precisely— but at the dark of the moon in the fourth month of the season of Emerging (or as we might call it, ‘more or less March’) they celebrated the festival commemorating Zep Tepi, which strikes me as very deliberate. Around here somewhere, the song of creation has established more light than dark, more understanding than ignorance, a local bubble of reality in the middle of possibilities both awesome and dreadful. Around here somewhere, the something has won out over nothing, it has changed the world, it has made the world.
But, you might say, that is not a new day. That is an old day, the first day. It’s ancient history. But here’s the magic trick for you: every day is the first day. Every candle lit in the darkness is the first dawn. This is the principle of Egyptian temple ritual, where the priests at dawn would go into the holy of holies and … light a lamp in front of the god that lived there.
Every time we light a fire in the dark, we remember that the world was born, and it was good, and we conjure the power, the hope, that we can touch the power of the deeps in which anything is possible, and shine a light on it until it is real. Because the light of the first time happened, and it was good, when we reach for that new day, when we kindle a flame, when we light our chalice, we are part of the fractal iteration of goodness from the beginning, able to put our little light towards transforming the world.
I believe as Unitarian Universalists we have something of an intuitive grasp of the truth of this transformational power of the light that emerges. After all, our flaming chalice emerged from the Unitarian Service Committee’s need to have a symbol to put on documents for helping people escape Nazi Germany. When we looked for something to represent the change we wanted to make, we reached for the flame in the darkness.
The title of this reflection is drawn from the song “You Are the New Day”, originally composed by Welsh musician John David for his band Airwaves, but I know it from the a capella sestet The King’s Singers. The song was written in the depths of the despair of the Cold War, under the shadow of the Bomb, by a man engaging with the question of whether tomorrow would even happen, whether the consequences of the past will, as the lyrics say, slow worlds and end it all.
It is a prayer that the sun will come in time for dawn, for the renewal of the First Time that is in every light that emerges from the darkness, every time we sing to transform chaos and darkness into a new world like the Bennu bird, flying over the Nun.
Sung:
One more day when time is running out
For everyone
Like a breath I knew would come
I reach for the new day
Hope is my philosophy
Just needs days in which to be
Love of life means hope for me
Born on a new day
You are the new day
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