I confess California winters feel strange to me.
Just this weekend, at the dawn of December, my family and I hiked in gorgeous 65 degree weather though golden fields. The trees with their brilliant hued leaves glistened in the sun as we leisurely strolled through the beauty of it all. Then, almost suddenly, the sun began to fade. How could it be so late? Looking at my watch, I realized, it wasn’t late in the day at all. It was simply late in the year. I felt a bit startled as if both the evening and winter itself had snuck up on me. Where did all the time go?
Here in California, my sense of time has been disoriented. Days spent like this weekend would surely have meant the start of school, not the end of a quarter back in New England. Without the seasonal rhythms it feels hard to find my balance. Time is slipping away.
Having spent most of my life in the northeast, my body instinctively awaits the coming season when the temperature begins to dip and the wind picks up; when the brisk autumn air carries the scents of crisp, crackling leaves and a snowfall about to descend. As the days grow shorter and nights grow colder, I adjust myself to the coming of winter, a time when life slows and we re-adjust ourselves to the seasons’ cycles, whether we like them or not. The darkening days offer a refuge from the hectic pace of life as the earth reminds us of our need for rest and renewal.
In my own Christian tradition, the winter solstice coincides with the season of Advent, the four weeks prior to Christmas that rehearse the eschatological promise of God’s coming commonwealth of peace and justice. It is a time of quiet contemplation when we are asked to think about the way the world is and ought to be. It is a time to confront the dark places in our lives and in our world, knowing that light is coming. It is why each week we light another candle on the Advent wreath, a reminder that even as the light grows dim in the world around us, change is coming. The world is about to turn; light about to break forth. Literally and metaphorically. Advent allows us to see the beauty in winter’s darkness and encourages us to find hope even at what feels like the world’s end.
It is this radical hope in the face of all that is wrong in the world, that makes Advent my favorite season of the year. It proclaims that no matter how dark life may seem, there is hope waiting to be born.
Yet, this year, I find myself surprised that Advent has come already. Again.
The disorientation I feel living in California feels magnified by the global disorientation of living amid a pandemic. For many of us, no matter where we are, time feels slippery at best as we move in and out of quarantine cycles…..purple, red, orange, purple. What we imagined to be a season has now lasted a year and despite the promise of a vaccine, the light at the end of the tunnel seems to keep moving farther and farther away. How are we in December back where we were in March? It doesn’t seem right or even possible.
This week Katherine May, author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, reflects on her own inability to hold time during the pandemic. She writes, “Time is slipping for all of us. November is almost over and it feels as if we’ve skipped from one winter to the next without the intervening summer.”
May notes the way in which the pandemic, like bereavement, has unmoored us all from time. Just as the grief we experience in times of loss plunges us into a time of wintering, a season outside the hustle bustle of daily life and comforts of everyday society, so also the pandemic has ushered us into a prolonged season of darkness. It is hard to find ground when time loses saliency.
Yet, for May, wintering is not a barren time. It holds a promise of what she describes as “the seed of something necessary.” Wintering reminds us of the cyclical nature of our lives, the ebb and flow of joy and sorrow that mark a life. “We tend to imagine that our lives are linear, but they are in fact cyclical….Each time we endure the cycle, we learn from the previous round, and we do a few things better. This is how wisdom is made.”
This is how wisdom is made.
Indeed, this is why we read the same texts each and every Advent, calling to mind the proclamations of prophets past who for thousands of years have beckoned us to a different way of living and loving. Their message has not gone unheeded, it has simply been cycling with us as we spiral ourselves in into better versions of ourselves and the world in which we live.
Wintering does not always feel good or productive, but it is necessary. And, it is temporary. The seed of hope and possibility is stirring and will give rise to a blossom we can only barely imagine now. Our task is to hold onto that hope even as the winter seems endless. All that arises ceases. So, too will this winter and in the spring to come, we will find ourselves refreshed and revived, knowing a bit more about the way the world is and ought to be.
Dean T.L. Steinwert
Dean for Religious & Spiritual Life
