Between Two Summer Fires

I was a Methodist till I was 13, and after that I was an atheist, so when I watched the Wiccan videos about how to celebrate the summer solstice on June 21, it was with an odd detachment. Wasn’t the pretty girl on the video trying a little too hard, with her pale makeup and flower crown? Yet I consider a trip to the craft store when my sister-in-law posts a flower-crown picture on Facebook, because being able to share something is an important part of doing it.

Why stop with a flower crown? The bonfire traditions of the solstice are even more exciting, with groups of people walking between two huge fires and afterwards feeling purified by the flames. I think of summers spent at family reunions when my grandparents were still alive, when my somewhat conservative (yet probably progressive by the standards of his youth) grandfather would build a huge bonfire on his own rural property and my extended family would sit around it, drinking whatever was fun and doing sing-alongs.

The political division of the past year makes me picture two bonfires side by side. One is my grandfather’s fire, typical of a man born in the 1920’s who fought against the Nazis in the Second World War, believing so strongly in his Methodist religion that grandma not going to church (due to dementia, not a change in belief) gave him an uncharacteristic burst of anger. My wonderful and usually calm grandpa who knew how to chop wood and cut grass with a scythe shook his cane at my grandmother while I stood by in shock.

On the other side of the clearing are the Wiccans, celebrating Litha with their own bonfire, speaking in a way I will always think of as “New Age” even though many of them are even older than me. I can’t understand how many of them, having perhaps stopped believing in the religion they grew up with, had the persistence, will, ability and time to create this new mystic practice. I observe it from the sidelines like a wary ally, admiring their feminism but completely unwilling to join them.

My own solstice tradition would be, if these two hypothetical bonfires existed, to walk between them honoring them both, honoring my father and grandfather in remembrance of Father’s Day, and honoring my strong inner feminist as well.