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Image by Timothy Eberly
Wintering & Sabbath
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Dear Beloveds of ORUCC,
I love the cold crisp winter days, but with the fire blazing inside, I admit that I did not venture outside in the hovering around 0 temperatures. Did you go outside yesterday? We northerners embrace winter by saying things like, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing!” We know the importance for our mental health of getting some fresh air and some sunlight as often as we can, even in the coldest temperatures. Elver Park, close to our church, sports lit cross-country ski trails and beautiful ice-skating rinks with reasonable rental prices for gear. We live in a winter wonderland! But it is okay if sometimes we just want to rest inside as slowing down is part of winter too.
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In her book Wintering: The Power of Rest in Difficult Times, Katherine May embraces winter, and uses it as a metaphor for hard times. Whatever difficult times may befall you this season individually, not to mention our collective trials, May would help frame the season as winter which is “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.” She talks of her own struggles with a disease, her husband’s temporary sickness and her 6-year-old refusing to go back to school all happening at the same time.
She shares some wisdom that our Judeo-Christian tradition would call practices of sabbath. Hers, as many of ours, was not a sabbath of her own choosing. She didn’t set this time aside for self-care or family vacation, this wasn’t the beauty of retirement or a welcomed break, but the difficult times that befell her like the season of winter, and all she could do was accept the wisdom of embracing and getting through winter.
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By hibernating, healing, re-grouping, and embracing the dark and the cold, we are wintering. “Doing these deeply unfashionable things — slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting — is a radical act now, but it is essential,” she writes. May is critical of a culture where we are “endlessly cheerleading ourselves into positivity while erasing the dirty underside of real life…The subtext of these messages is clear: Misery is not an option.” She knows the cold has healing powers, and that we shouldn’t buck up, but embrace the wisdom of the winter we are in.
As a community, we can encourage each other to embrace winters we are in by supporting each other in the unfashionable slowing down, resting, restoring, praying. We can support each other by collectively embracing the practices of restoring and healing, the spaciousness that comes from not knowing and being uncomfortably and beautifully human. Katherine May says, “Some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those we have wintered.”
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Sabbath is an ancient practice which God in the Hebrew Bible says “to keep holy.” Present even in the 10 Commandments, sabbath rest is a primal and primary rule of being. To cease from doing and simply to be, to reside with God. This does not mean we ignore important issues and places the world needs our actions. It simply means we also recognize that our worth does not come from how productive we are, how much we can earn, how we fill our day with doing. Our worth and value is innate, and in moments of sabbath or seasons of winter, we can come in close contact with a God who resides in the gift of rest, of sleep, of pause, of knowing God is with us in the stillness.
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As we are pausing in-person worship for January, I am especially conscious of how beautifully we are embracing this disappointment. We know the hospitals in Dane County are full, and we know a value of ours is caring for the whole and the most vulnerable. We know that healthcare workers are overtaxed, not just from witnessing and working through COVID, but through the failings of the medical system which need to be dramatically transformed. Slowing down and witnessing these things is so important. In Greek, apocalypse means “revealing.” A lot is bubbling up culturally and being revealed, and we are witnessing ways the pandemic unveils parts of “normal” society we were living with that simply aren’t working for the whole. Teachers and healthcare workers are patching band-aids on the individuals hurt from the inequalities in our systems. We are paying attention, we are noticing. Winter gives us pause to collect ourselves and wonder, how will we live in response?
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I think a gift the church can offer society is the permission to rest, to know that even the most urgent issues are enhanced and strengthened when the people leading and participating are whole, are rested, and know that their inherent worth comes from being not doing. Slowing down, noticing, hibernating, honoring the rhythms of nature and the rhythms of being human, enhance our collective well-being, even in deep winters of our lives. Knowing God is in the natural world, we can take cues, and slow our nervous system to the rhythms of nature. In winter we recognize the stillness, how the world around us becomes more internal. How can we nourish our interiority? How can we become a soft spot in our culture as a church, where we provide the warmth of community and companionship in the winters of our lives?
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I am feeling deeply hopeful and encouraged about our 2022 year as ORUCC. We have incredible leadership in place who we will vote in during our Feb 6th 11:30 Annual Meeting. We have clarity around some shared priorities this year, for celebrating and appreciating the youth & children’s programming and visioning for the future, for our continued and evolving commitments to justice and spiritual vitality. We are learning not to be defined by COVID, but to be nimble, adaptable, to have a sense of humor and to persist in other and new ways.
May God bless you in your moments of resting, of being, of residing in the stillness of winter and the expansiveness of God’s love.
Epiphany Love,
Pastor Julia
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