On Winter

Sermon by Rev. Alan C. Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
December 14, 2003

Reading:
From Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer

The little deaths of autumn are mild precursors to the rigor mortis of winter.  The southern humorist Roy Blount has opined that in the Upper Midwest, where I live, what we get in winter is not weather but divine retribution.  He believes that someone here once did something very, very bad, and we are still paying the price for that transgression!

Winter here is a demanding season --- and not everyone appreciates the discipline.  It is a season when death’s victory can seem supreme; few creatures still forage, plants do not visibly grow, and nature feels like our enemy.  And yet the rigors of winter, like the diminishments of autumn, are accompanied by amazing gifts.

One gift is beauty, different from the beauty of autumn but somehow lovelier still:  I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.  Another gift is the reminder that times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things.  Despite all appearances, of course, nature is not dead in winter --- it has gone underground to renew itself and prepare for spring.  Winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined, to do the same for ourselves.

But for me, winter has an even greater gift to give.  It comes when the sky is clear, the sun is brilliant, the trees are bare, and first snow is yet to come.  It is the gift of utter clarity.  In winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer growth only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground they are rooted in.

A few years ago, my father died.  He was more than a good man, and the months following his death were a long, hard winter for me.  But in the midst of that ice and loss, I came into a certain clarity that I lacked when he was alive.  I saw something that had been concealed when the luxuriance of his love surrounded me --- saw how I had relied on him to help me cushion life’s harsher blows.  When he could no longer do that, my first thought was, “now I must do it for myself.”  But as time went on, I saw a deeper truth: it never was my father absorbing those blows but a larger and deeper grace that he taught me to rely on.

When my father was alive, I confused the teaching with the teacher.  My teacher is gone now, but the grace is still there --- and my clarity about that fact has allowed his teaching to take deeper root in me.  Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being.

Sermon:

Wednesday evening, I was walking into Unity House just as Ken Hooker was arriving for choir practice. It had just begun to snow, and Ken asked what I thought about it. I looked at him in the eye and surprised myself as I said, “I am ready for winter!”

It may sound odd, but the last couple weeks I have been pining for the bitter cold. Part of it is that we are in the season of Advent, that time of expectation and anticipation that out of the darkness new light and new life will emerge among us. I had this preconceived notion that a freezing December would make the Holiday Season that much more meaningful. Thus the relatively warm weather we have enjoyed up until Friday has been a bit of a let down. I should speak for myself. My partner, Angie, is thankful we’ve been yet spared the bitter cold.

I was raised in Bakersfield, California, where the temperature rarely drops below freezing. During the year, days reach over 100 degrees five times more often than those that drop to 35. It wasn’t until my two years in Massachusetts that I came to appreciate real winter. But even those two winters were mild in comparison to the norm. So I have yet to really know and make friends with the season. Perhaps it is out of dread, perhaps seeking to reconcile my partner’s apprehension about living in such a climate, that I am wanting to reflect this morning on the spiritual gifts that winter brings as well as explore what we can learn from those times we endure a winter of the soul.

Because I have not yet weathered a Midwestern winter, I consulted the experience of our Chalice Circle facilitators. When I shared today’s reading from Parker Palmer with them, they came forth with several nuggets of wisdom. Here are some of their comments:

American culture is creating a society that has no winter. Instead we are kept so busy and distracted that we are burning up.

We are in need of winter. It is when everything stops and a wonderful hush rests across the land.

It is a time for ritual unlike other seasons: you’ve got to keep track of mittens, gloves, hats, coats—and take the time to put them on and take them off each foray into the bitter cold.

Snow days are the best. When trapped in the house we have fun, spontaneous activities.

When I moved here and had my first winter, I learned I can drive anywhere—I just can’t always stop.

If you’re Lutheran, you have to have winter—it is the season of discipline.

Winter is only a punishment if you try to beat it.

If you aren’t careful, you can die.

My mom’s early years were in Boxholm, a small town in rural Iowa. She remembers when the family moved to a much larger town of 1,000 residents! Both she and her cousin, Rosalie, were only children, and they were and remain the best of friends. Both my mom and Rosalie had two sons, and twice during my childhood the families came together. Rosalie’s family has always seemed to me especially hearty, well suited to dealing with winter and other life challenges. Her husband and sons, strong and physically able, all served in the military, while my family far more focused on education. Rosalie’s oldest son, Bruce has always loved snowmobiles, pickup trucks and Trans-AMs. After graduating from high school, he joined the Army and became a part of the elite Ranger corps. He has stories of nearly fifty parachute jumps and other rugged experiences. His life journey was so different from mine that when the families got together for his brother’s wedding eight years ago in California, we didn’t have much to talk about.

Today, Bruce has three children, the youngest just shy of three years of age. Two years ago, when Bruce was putting up Christmas lights on his house, he had a terrible fall. He was only four feet off the ground when the ladder fell, but that was all that was needed to crack a couple of his neck vertebrae. Bruce was paralyzed from the neck down. He required a breathing tube for nearly a year. His wife left him. And his mom, Rosalie, widowed just months prior, moved in with Bruce to care for him.

The shock of such a terrible accident left me unsure how to approach my cousin with whom I hadn’t talked since his brother’s wedding. With Rosalie I talked several times before Bruce was home from hospital and rehabilitation facilities. I remember that first awkward conversation. I told him I was sorry he had to go through all he was going through. He responded, “Yeah, it sucks.” He didn’t say much else about his condition but instead talked about a myriad other things.

This past July, when Angie and I took three weeks to drive here to Chicago, we stopped for three nights in Boone, Iowa, to visit Rosalie and Bruce. I wondered how we would relate to one another. We talked and talked and talked. I was amazed how well Bruce had learned how to cope with his tragic injury.

I have renewed respect for Bruce. He doesn’t wallow in the question, “Why did this happen to me?” Instead he seeks to make the best of his situation. He swallows his pride as others feed him, bathe him, and put him to bed. He manipulates a stick to turn the pages of a magazine or use his computer and respond to emails one key being poked at a time. Bitterness sometimes surfaces but he carries on with dignity, moving forward into a future full of uncertainty.

Martin Marty writes in his little book, A Cry of Absence, “Winter is a season of the heart as much as it is a season in the weather. … Winterless climates there may be, but winterless souls are hard to picture. A person can count on winter in January in intemperate northern climates, or in July in their southern counterparts. Near the equator, winter is unfelt. As for the heart, however, where can one escape the chill? When death comes, when absence creates pain—then anyone can anticipate the season of cold. Winter can also blow into surprising regions of the heart when it is least expected. Such frigid assaults can overtake the spirit with the persistence of an ice age, the chronic cutting of an Arctic wind.”

Enduring a winter of the soul doesn’t magically or automatically lead to growth or deepening. Opening up to the pain and anguish in life can take us through a transformational process, like glass being formed through fire, but such suffering also can easily lead to bitterness, discouragement, and defeat. Tom Owen-Towle, a retired minister from San Diego preached from this pulpit a year ago, says “We are broken people, you and I. What matters somehow is whether we become weak or strong at the broken places.”

In just the past few months, at least ten people here have shared with me about the loss of a parent. Several of you have told me about the death of a sibling. Three of you have shared with me the loss of a child. It is the experience of many here in this congregation to find ourselves as among the remaining generation, reflecting upon who we are and what is important in our lives. Winter seems to accentuate the stark absence of those who were an important part of our lives.

Parker Palmer says, “Our inward winters take many forms – failures, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same advice: “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we live boldly into the fears we most want to avoid, those fears will dominate our lives. But when we walk directly into them – protected from frostbite by the warm garb of friendship or inner discipline or spiritual guidance – we can learn what they have to teach us.”

Winter spirituality acknowledges the cry of absence—the cry of the heart, the Absence that forces itself to be heard and felt. And it calls upon us to bear ourselves to the bitter cold. As much as we might dislike the burdens of winter, this most dismaying season holds many spiritual gifts.

Matthew Fox observes four distinct spiritual paths that we as humans go through. The one he calls the Via Negativa is what I call winter spirituality, the spiritual journey through absence, the path of learning to be present to sorrow and hardship and letting go of the illusions to which we cling so as to discern what is truly important.  A winter spirituality deepens in us a new kind of strength, one that is born of sensitivity. As Matthew Fox, this is “the strength of endurance and perseverance; the strength that solitude requires; the strength that vulnerability is about. This strength does not come from willing it or gritting our teeth. It comes from undergoing pain—unwished-for, unplanned, unheralded pain.” He continues, “There is a strength learned from suffering that cannot be learned any other way. For suffering tests the depth of our love of life and relationship even when and especially because relationships are so often the cause of our suffering. Suffering converts the fuel of Eros into the energy of living Eros out in our personal and social lives. As Susan Griffin puts it, “Beauty demands a more arduous process.” Beauty and terror, as Simone Weil noted are related. “Prettiness does not demand arduousness, but beauty does. Beauty is hard. Hard as hell, the Song of Songs says. Beauty is not learned or valued without the suffering that makes us big enough and strong enough to be proper vessels of the beautiful.”

I empathize with those who are suspicious of the word spirit. To some it suggests only the inner world, and often it serves as a pop-psychology reference to nothing more than a self-indulgent identity. It’s as if to say, “You can enjoy the spiritual high that comes with turning away from the world. Create a sense of illusion and be happy and merry and all full of joy, but you must take your heart away from the shores of reality and the suffering therein. Relocate yourself in the hermitage of the soul.”

When someone says the word, “spirituality,” it is often understood as “summery” spirituality, infused with light, openness, a lack of anxiety, a sense of ease. In other words to find one’s inner self in a state of calm as if one is on vacation—such that you can kick up your feet, relax, and not worry about anything.

I want to be crystal clear about something. This “summery” spirituality is not what I mean by spirituality; it may be a component, but there is far more to the spiritual life than trying to see life through the lens of sunbathing on the beach. In fact, what I mean by spirituality has much more to do with how we seek to be crystal clear about discerning what we are being called to in our lives. Sometimes it takes the brutal clearing of winter to reach such clarity. As Matt Fox says: “When the Via Negativa is ignored, the prophetic voice is invariably silenced. Life becomes superficial, easily manipulated, and ultimately as boring as it is violent. And above all, cheap.”

I won’t forget my first winter in Massachusetts. I was astonished by how far I could see, how beautiful in their starkness were the silhouettes of trees against the horizon. One quiet moment watching over a frozen lake and gazing far through the branches of trees, a sudden flapping caught my attention. I immediately saw the V-shape of several Canadian geese through the branches. Across the sky I watched their flight, pierced with how crisp everything could be seen. At other moments I reveled in the hushed descent of a sky full of snow and the coming to realize that times of dormancy and deep rest are essential to all living things.

But the beauty of winter does not come without a price. Winter is a demanding, dangerous season. I understand that in Colorado and Nebraska, and I suppose in other states as well, on the farms, people keep a rope tied between the barn and the house as a survival technique. When a blizzard occurs, it isn’t hard to get disoriented. As difficult as it seems to lose one’s way in familiar surroundings, it has happened far too many times.

Most of us need not worry about this kind of danger here in Oak Park. But ice poses a formidable obstacle, both on the road and on the sidewalk. In Massachusetts, I learned the hard way that winter is a season you must not rush. In my car, I was lucky when I spun 270 degrees around that I didn’t hit anyone or anything. I wasn’t so lucky when walking briskly to a Sunday morning service. Not only did I have a sore bum for days, but I left a five inch rip in my suit pants at the knee.

As much as we may hate dealing with the sharp pain of cold against our faces and the bundles of clothing we must wear and keep track of and the fear of slipping on ice, winter is a time when we are admonished, and even inclined to follow nature’s example, to go spiritually underground and renew ourselves, preparing for spring.

May we hold close to the wisdom that winter is not a punishment so long as we try not to beat it.

Blessed be.

Amen.