Our readings this morning tell us:
Do not rush the coming of the sun.
Do not crave the lengthening of the day.
We are called to pay attention.
Celebrate the darkness. Here and now.
We are called to pay attention.
In recent years, this work of paying attention to the cycles of the earth has become my most meaningful spiritual practice. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I’ve been in enough meetings with y’all where I get to hear about all that the shifting seasons bring up for you. I love hearing about things you notice on your daily walks, updates on the changing leaves you watch outside your windows, and the harvests from your own gardens.
So when I set out to write this sermon, I realized that what I’m preaching is not completely new and radical. As a whole, I think Portlanders are a people pretty in tune with the cycles of the earth around them. I have just as much to learn from you as you do from me.
Let’s try something different today, then. Let’s think of this as the start to a conversation. Rather than me standing up here, presuming to be the expert, I invite you to hear my reflection on the coming winter so that maybe it will prompt your own. And then we can talk about it: over email, or next time we see each other. Ok?
Let’s take a deep breath together.
What does this season mean to you?
What does it call you to do?
What traditions do you bring to it?
What emotions come up?
How does it feel in your body?
We are now entering what my seminary community called “The Season of Light,” a time of numerous holidays and festivals that help us enter this time of winter.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the season of anticipation before Christmas in the Christian calendar. Tonight will be the first night of Hannukah, the Jewish festival commemorating the Maccabean revolt against the ruling empire that led to the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. The Hindu festival of light, Diwali, is a couple of weeks behind us, and the Solstice (also known as Yule) is a couple of weeks in front of us.
As nights grow longer, and the sun rests lower in the sky each day, we humans have developed traditions that remind us to light lamps, gather together by the fire, make music, and feast. We try to practice gratitude and generosity.
There is real wisdom here. It’s taken me a long time to understand this. In my extended family of origin, consisting of Unitarian Universalist, Methodist, nondenominational Christian, and Jewish relatives, we always celebrated a pretty secular Christmas (sometimes rolled in with a little bit of Hanukkah if the calendar lined up that way). We’d eat ham and casseroles, and sweet potato pie, go for walks together, play games, and give presents.
It was tradition, yes, but I struggled to understand what deeper meanings these celebrations brought, why they were important to us. As someone who has never identified as a Christian, and who is tired of seeing the commercialism of this season growing worse every year, I am stuck feeling like a grinch sometimes.
But, I’ve never wanted to give up the gathering and the feasting. And I’ve never failed to be brought to tears singing “Silent Night” in a dark sanctuary lit up with candles. So, what’s going on here?
It feels like these practices are a part of my body, like they help me to be more human. There is something greater in them than the specific cultural trimmings I’ve grown up with.
This is the first lesson of this season: it calls us to come together, to find miracles to celebrate, to light fires, to make space for another seat at the table, so say “yes,” and “thank you” to the gifts we’re given.
I know many of us are facing yet a second holiday season of traditions turned on their head, of the mourning and the creativity necessitated by this long pandemic time. And, many of us went through this long before the pandemic, needing to re-evaluate how it is we move through this season as a result of some other major loss. Yet others still, were never well served by these traditions, or the way our families of origin enacted them.
I hope that most of us, by this point, have learned that we can still lean into the wisdom of this season without re-enacting it the same way each year. We don’t have to eat the particular foods, watch the particular movies, or sing the particular songs, though all are tools available for us if we choose. There will be people missing from our tables who we bring in spirit, and we can live generously without focusing on commercially produced material goods.
This is why earth-centered traditions imagine time moving like a spiral, or a coil. We turn round and come back to a place that looks like before, though it’s always a little bit different. Each new winter can remind us, viscerally, of winters before, yet it has new things to teach us.
And I want to share a thought about the whole “good tidings of comfort and joy” thing. There will be times, whole seasons even, when it feels like there is little in our lives to celebrate. Maybe we can reach toward comfort–but joy?
And, whose idea was it anyway to cram together all the joy for a long and difficult season into just a couple of weeks at the beginning?
These are a couple of the questions I’m still wrestling with.
I’ve known that in cultures and times more closely reliant on the agricultural seasons, winter has always been a season of scarcity, when the year’s harvest was put to the test, when there was a real risk that there wouldn’t be enough for everyone to last through to the next growing season. What does it say about us that we kick it off with a big feast, a symbol of abundance?
There is something beautiful there: making space for joy, togetherness, and full bellies though we do not know what the coming months will bring. It speaks of a commitment to life, a faith that the sun is slowly returning, though we will not see its fruits for a long time. It is a joyous assertion of love and frivolity, before settling down for a time of hibernation.
This brings us to the second lesson of this season: winter is a time for rest, for grounding, for dreaming and germinating.
For this work, I always come back to the metaphor of the seed. The reading Tom shared this morning starts us there. Noble writes:
Do not be afraid of the darkness.
Dark is the rich fertile earth
that cradles the seed, nourishing growth.
One of my great teachers in life has been Dr. Vandana Shiva. After college, I spent some months living and working on her farm outside of Dehradun, India, where seeds are the star of the show. Her organization, Navdanya, means “nine seeds.” The interns there are called Bijaks, meaning “seed sowers.” And the seed bank housing hundreds of strains of traditional rice and other grain seeds was the centerpiece of the operation. It was at Navdanya that I began to more fully understand seeds as sacred, powerful, and the starting place for food sovereignty.
To grow most produce, you (or a seed company) must set aside some amount of the previous year’s harvest to be used as seeds, to be planted at the right time next year to grow big and plentiful. Really, it’s a simulation of what seeds know how to do on their own. They are the germ of new life at the heart of each fruit. They grow heavy, dropping to the ground, blowing off in the wind, or moving where animal co-conspirators take them. And then they wait, until conditions are just right, to sprout.
For a seed, winter is this time of resting, waiting, and readying.
Reverend Doju Freire, a Brazillian Zen nun writes,
“With their ancient and inherent memory of life, seeds possess and show us many virtues. They have the ability to wait for the right moment to move, as great masters of patience; they know how to soften and welcome the necessary light and heat to evolve themselves, as wise teachers of life. Seeds know how to softly open… they know how to silently work in harmony and total gratitude, as humble spiritual masters.”
If we imagine ourselves to be seeds in the winter, we might learn more about patience, about softening to warmth, about silent harmony and total gratitude. These are the virtues I am trying to lean into this winter.
There is this sad fact that the Western imagination has long seen darkness as symbolic of evil, pain, isolation, and death. We see some of the worst manifestations of this thinking in the violence of racism, and there are more subtle things lost in this narrative too.
By turning to the wisdom of the seed, we can try to shift these narratives about darkness, and bring more depth to our experience of this season defined by the interplay between darkness and light.
How can we follow the example of the humble seed? We can slow down, we can rest in fertile ground. If we are growing, building in this time, we would do better to focus on the roots. How can we tangle with others, subtly, underground?
The winter is a time for reflecting on the year gone by, and dreaming for the days ahead. We take stock, clean up, make space for the new, get ready for the springtime.
This is one of the beautiful things about paying attention to the seasons as a spiritual practice. I’ve learned that seasons are not static entities, they are not states of being that we move into and out of in linear ways with neat boundaries.
Have you noticed that in our calendar year, we mark the start of each season by the solstices and equinoxes? The winter solstice, the day at which our hemisphere leans farthest from the sun is in some ways, the day that most embodies the season is in many ways a seasonal midpoint. Yet, we acknowledge that it is also a beginning.
Today we are still in November, but I’m speaking about winter today, because the world has long been turning towards it. We begin living into winter as we notice the trees becoming ever barer, when we first bring out the warm sweaters and scarves, when we start eating butternut squash instead of zucchini.
And before we know it, we will already be turning toward springtime. The pagan holiday, Imbolc, is celebrated in early February, and it is a time that holds the energies of both spring and winter. It is a time for planting seeds–for anticipating the last frost, long before the first sprouts show themselves. We start living into each season before it arrives, and in doing so, we come to understand that we hold all of these energies within us. Like seeds, we are full of so much potential for shapeshifting, and moving in harmony with the world around us.
As the seasons are never static, they are always turning into each other, and they ask us to turn with them. This is the third lesson of winter: By being present, paying attention, we can move through this cycle with grace, while knowing that we are already preparing for transformations that we don’t even see yet.
Life is about change. As Octavia Butler famously writes in Earthseed, “The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” And so, we have tools in our more than human world to navigate this change, to see each transformation as wise and beautiful, but not a place that we can dwell in forever.
Winter teaches us:
Now is a time for gathering together, for gratitude, indulging in lights, and treats. We don’t know what these next long months will bring, but we can proclaim joy and abundance anyway.
And, we would do well to slow down, to get still. This is a time for dreaming, rooting, preparing, not doing, fixing, and making.
Yet, take heart that the days still lengthen, that things will not always be so cold and quiet. Even as we enter this season, we do so knowing that there are cycles of transformation yet to come.
We rely on these rhythms of this spiraling, dancing, wheel of the year. We have been here before, but not quite. We know what we’re doing, but not quite. Get still, offer your presence, turn toward yourself and one another.
Prayer
Will you pray with me now?
Spirit of Life, there exists an abundance of ways to know you, and there are countless ways to name you. We are grateful for your multiplicity.
We call out your many names in celebration of all the ways you appear to us. You come to us in light, in dark, in humble seed and flamboyant fruit.
In the days ahead, we hope that you will draw nearer to us. We hope that you will help us draw nearer to each other
May we know inner peace, comfort, even joy.
May we sing your praises through practices of gratitude and generosity.
May we feel you quietly as we rest, dream, shift, evolve.
God of cycles, God of change, may we remember that we are made in your image.
Amen.
Topics: Gratitude