The Crucible ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 5, 2023
I took time yesterday to stand and watch the sea smoke rising and blowing. At times it was so thick that the water was completely covered with a layer of swirling white. Huge puffy clouds of the sea smoke towered offshore. It’s a sight I look forward to every winter.
As I watched I tried to decide which of our four wonderful seasons could be considered the most magical. Each has its claim: new sprouts emerging overnight from the bare ground in spring, fruits and vegetables appearing suddenly on the stems of plants, leaves of trees turning color and then dropping to the ground. But winter has its own magic, because in winter there is transformation – vapor rising off the water, ice forming so thick we can walk and skate on frozen ponds, rain turning to snow, and snow blanketing the trees and the earth and making it something else entirely. In winter there is phase change – transformation. We awake some mornings and the world has become white and blue and sparkly. There is a sense of enchantment about winter. The snow and ice and sea smoke are ephemeral; gone as quickly as they arrived.
A sense of enchantment, yes, but at the same time, winter demands a response from us. The other three seasons mostly just ask us to notice. But, as we were reminded on Friday and yesterday, winter can be deadly. And so perhaps more than any other season, winter demands that we prepare. We might need firewood. A new furnace. A battery or new tires for the car.
Winter demands that we prepare our spirits for it as well. We can find ourselves pulling inward, not exactly hibernating as many animals do, but retreating a bit, spending more time at home. I noticed this fall that once daylight savings time ended and the sun set really early, that I was reluctant to go out in the evening. I felt a stronger pull this fall to stay home. More than in most years, I have found myself wintering.
Winter becomes a metaphor, of course, for our spiritual and psychological lives as well. We have times in our lives when we feel the absence of light and warmth, or when we feel the need to do less, to redirect ourselves. Perhaps we are experiencing a period of depression or ill health. Perhaps we are exhausted.
In her book Wintering, Katherine May comments that living through seasons of wintering is inevitable. We are likely to try to defer these seasons, though, to push them away instead of preparing as we know we must for the physical aspects of the winter season. After all, it’s far easier to buy snow tires than to take stock of ourselves, and to think about how we might choose to confront the inevitable cold and fallow season.
Having young children taught me that it was necessary to prepare myself for winter, in maybe the most superficial of ways. When my oldest reached the age where he would want to play outside on cold and snowy days, I adopted the old adage that ‘there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing’, and I bought myself the warmest winter jacket I could find; a size too big so I could add layers. We were going to embrace this season. I motivated myself by the thought that the alternative to embracing a winter life would be frankly, far too much television.
Katherine May discovered within herself a somewhat surprising way to embrace wintering. She found herself drawn to winter swimming in the ocean – to polar plunges, which are gaining in popularity. She described her first attempt – a race into the water, the sensation of being struck by a wall that left her breathless. She tried one breast stroke and turned and fled back to shore. She went on to say, “Afterwards, while we stood on the beach with towels…and a cup of hot tea in hand, something strange happened. Gazing back at the water, I felt the urge to do it all over again, to go back and exist in those crystalline seconds of intense cold. My blood sparkled in my veins. I was certain I could conquer it a second time around, could tolerate a little longer in that frozen claw. ‘That was brilliant,’ I gasped.” (Wintering, p. 179.)
In time, a friend of hers shared that she used polar plunges to reduce her dependence on medication for her bipolar disorder. And Katherine and another friend committed to plunging daily. She wrote, “Getting into the sea on days when the temperature hovered around zero was an act of defiance against our own woes. By doing a resilient thing, we felt more resilient. That circular process of being resilient and feeling resilient kept us afloat.” (p.190.)
A younger family member of mine put it this way when I asked them if they could describe their experience of a polar plunge: “taking deep breaths through discomfort, it ends up feeling amazing, connecting to the earth, and proving to myself that I’m committed and capable and brave over and over.”
Of course, most of us will never take this sort of a plunge – an actual physical plunge. But it is an invitation – perhaps an extreme one – for us to think about how we can embrace the hard times in our lives, the cold, unyielding and fallow times. What might an embrace look like for you? What makes you feel resilient, and committed and capable, and brave?
I pose these questions at the deepest part of our winter. We are partway through the four coldest weeks of the year, and of course we withstood life-threatening cold in just the past few days. All that most of us wanted to embrace was a loved one, a space heater, or a bowl of hot soup. But even as we found ourselves huddled at this coldest point, we have reached a crossroads.
February 1 is known as a cross-quarter day, the day that marks the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. In earth-centered traditions from the British Isles it is known as Imbolc, which means ‘in the belly.’ Imbolc honors the beginning of the lambing season, the sprouting of the earliest plants. We might think of it as ‘the beginning before the beginning’. This is a time when we might begin to feel new inklings – faint thoughts about new directions long before we’re ready to take action. Maybe right around now we turn our thoughts to seed catalogues, if we’re gardeners. Not to planting, yet, but to imagining, to dreaming. This is a time of turning; a realization that this halfway point will begin to send us around toward spring. Suddenly we are poised here; at the beginning before the beginning.
These days clustered around the cross-quarter day are honored in many traditions. The legends of the Celtic goddess Brighid, such as we heard in our wisdom tale earlier, evolved into beliefs about the Catholic Saint Brigid of Kildare, the patron saint of midwives, the hearth and home, poets, healing, and even beer brewing. Just as an aside, for the first time, there will be a national bank holiday tomorrow in Ireland honoring her.
Of course, we also just had Groundhog Day, an ancient custom brought to the United States by Germans, which of course, involves determining whether a groundhog can see his shadow on February 2. If it does, he’s scared back into his burrow and we have six more weeks of winter. In case you missed it, on Thursday the groundhog did see his shadow, so brace yourselves.
And in the Christian tradition, this past Thursday, February 2 was also the Feast of Candlemas, or the Presentation of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in the Temple. This is commemorated by the blessing of candles. Today we are incorporating this tradition into our worship by having extra candlelight to brighten our sanctuary.
I see a common thread in all these traditions: a yearning for light and life, for all that is growing in the belly to emerge. There’s the honoring of a life-giving saint. There’s the expectation that hibernating animals will begin to slowly emerge from their winter rest, often followed by their tiny young. We delight in the light and beauty of candles, and offer our blessing and gratitude for this light that they provide us.
And now, regardless of what the groundhog saw, we too will begin to emerge. From now on we will venture outside more. We will begin to look for tiny new buds forming on tree branches, hunting for signs of life. The days are getting longer now, and we will begin to respond, to look forward again. What change is coming?
Would it be easier to stay wintering? No. We are called in two directions; called to rest, to reflect and gather our resources for the next turn of the wheel. And at the same time, winter is a time of transformation, of phase change, that will insist on a response from us. Katherine May reminds us that “winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.” Even as we try to rest, to retreat, we are being formed, forged, brought forward toward new life. Think of Brighid, the goddess of the forge and the hearth, both creating and comforting.
We are blessed to live in a region with four seasons. We can understand the cycle of life in a much more intuitive way because we live it ourselves. We train ourselves to look for the tiny changes, the beginnings before the beginning, to ground ourselves and to give ourselves hope for the future. We live in an environment of continual change. And we learn, if we are fortunate, that it is not the change that matters, as much as it is our response. Nature tells us, here, that we might winter for a time, but that eventually new life emerges, and we are called to respond.
My friends, the wheel is turning us away from our fallow season, back toward brighter light and growth. May you have rested enough to step forward into the returning light, and to feel anticipation for what might emerge for you.
Blessed Be.
Amen.
