“Winter Spirit ”
the Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne, January 6, 2008

Reading from Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart by Martin Marty
Winter is a season of the heart as much as it is a season in the weather. John Crowe Ransom connected the two kinds of winter:

Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going;
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.

I invite you to undertake a journey of the soul. It will occur in the face of the threat of Absence. Winter will serve as an image for the seasons of the heart. As for the heart, 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.

“Absence, Absence”: a poet hears the cry. Winterly frost comes in the void left when love dies or a lover grows distant. Let a new love come into life or let the enduring one come close again, and summer can return to the heart. So it is in human affairs. The absence can also come, however, to a waste space left when the divine is distant; the sacred is remote, when God is silent. The wind of furious winter for a while blows without, and then grows silent as spring comes. The fury and the bleakness within the soul can remain, no matter what the season or the weather.
Who tends the spirit when winter takes over?”

Sermon

Winter Spirit Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

The arduous season of winter is here. As the cold weather closes in, so the soul is led to more reflective depths. Winter can present us with difficult tests for both the body and the mind. This time of year can be particularly hard for those of us who are experiencing change or grieving losses. Sadness and fear can grip us. Love can feel distant. The landscape outside and in may look bleak. From where comes our strength when the sacred seems remote? How do we tend a winter spirit?

Winter’s barrenness is the opposite of summer’s abundance. It comes after fall’s long season of decline. As the sun slowly withdraws it life-giving rays, biological activity diminishes. In winter much of the natural world shrivels and dies. In ages past, our primitive ancestors feared winter. As the cold came on they remembered earlier winter seasons of great difficulty that some people didn’t survive and felt insecure. By winter, they were often thin on resources to last through the isolation of the frozen months. When the winter grew cold, people believed they were being punished, that the god of the sun was angry at them.

Shivering in the biting cold through the long darkness of the nights they drew together for warmth. They lit fires and candles to keep the light alive. They prayed that the sun might return and dead things come to life again. And the sun always did return, and they marked the beginning of its return, the Winter Solstice, with a festival. When most things seemed dead and lifeless, they brought evergreens indoors as a symbol that there was indeed life in the midst of death. Even though food might have been scarce, they ate and drank extravagantly and gave each other gifts. Eat, drink and be merry was an act of both hope and of realism. To feast on the last of the spoilable harvest put some fat on their bodies to tide them thru the months of lean. With renewed spirits and bonds of friendship they were better able to go through the inevitable difficult time of winter.
The tradition of holiday partying has continued into modern times, but we often fail to acknowledge people’s deeper feelings at this time of year. Expectations run high to have a picture perfect family Christmas, but more often than not, our holidays are not experiences of the sublime. If we are alone or in need, relationships aren’t always there for us. When families gather, emotional mayhem is common. The winter holidays, originally meant to help us cope with fear and anxiety now often generate conflicted feelings for many of us. Understandably, our personal losses and disappointments are magnified during the interval of supposed whoopee and wassail. Therapists gear up as though for combat duty from mid-November through New Year's Day, and a type of depression called Seasonal Affective Disorder is most chronic during the winter months. The sun’s going away is no longer a mystery to us, but there remains the mystery of our own sadness, the winter drafts about the heart. Today, the celebration of holidays tends to ignore the fears and anxieties that can be present in people’s hearts. I believe this is a mistake. First, people experiencing loss or grief need to acknowledge it at this time of year, and second, there is wisdom to be gained by embracing the spirit of winter.
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There is no shame in talking about our experiences of anxiety or depression. I have had my own difficulties dealing with such feelings. Several years ago, I remember the coming of winter frequently brought on me just vague feelings of melancholy. I blamed it on the loss of daylight and the drab colors after autumn leaves were gone. I found it hard to accept wearing my heavy coat and to suspend some of my outdoor activities until spring. As the days grew shorter my spirit sank. I didn’t go willingly into the dark night of winter. One year when I was feeling particularly sad, I turned to a therapist for help. When I related that my father and two of my grandparents had died in previous autumns she helped me to understand why I might feel the emotions of grieving at that particular time in the cycle of the year. I came to understand that my sadness was part of mourning my father. Even without consciously remembering my lost loved ones, the season could instinctively bring on grief.

Whether the season or a family situation brings it on, all of us suffer with a heavy-heart at some time in our lives. Having life disrupted by loss is a universal human experience. We are not the first to face this fate. A job change, a move, a divorce, a death can bring on intense and often conflicting feelings. When a wintry spirit comes on – there are bleak months to face. We all have times of grief when we can’t seem to lift our spirits. Even after the first shock of a loss wears off, happiness doesn’t appear suddenly. The intense psychic pain can lead to the depths of despair and a deep yearning for our lost love.

This poem by May Sarton describes how bewildered we can feel:
“Now we have lost the heartways and the word,
Our senses blinded, our five wits too numb,
Like planes that circle, or a blundering bird
That cannot chart the clouded skies for home.
Now rocked and hurtled through the empty spaces,
We hang upon the hope that some thin radar
May light from deep within our darkened faces,
And tell us what to do, and where we are;
Focus the awful blurring of the dream,
And give some destination to the heart.
What can it tell us, that deep inward beam,
How write a new course on this troubled chart?
Will this lost journey never have an end
Nor the skies open so that love may land?

When we experience loss it is common to fear that our life’s sustaining force has abandoned us. Deep inside us, we know there is love, but why does love not always last? It is hard to trust life when our family structure is torn apart. Sometimes we wish we could just die. When the pain seems bottomless, we may rage against the unfairness of it all. For many finding the energy to cry out, to say we are in pain is a turning point. You may not realize it at the time, but that can signal a crucial choice to stay in the hunt for a happier life, a sign of the dawning of hope.

Hope is a strange human emotion. It can persist even when we don’t know what we are hoping for or in what to place our hope. Yet, our experience tells us it is not totally foolish to hope even when life is most dismal. Respite comes to us in its own special way through the darkness. Listen as the author of Psalm 13 begs to remain open for the inflow of grace no matter how bottomless the pain feels:

How long will this pain go on, Lord,
this grief I can hardly bear?
How long will anguish grip me
and agony wring my mind?
Light up my eyes with your presence;
let me feel your love in my bones.
Keep me from losing myself
in ignorance and despair.
Teach me to be patient, Lord;
teach me to be endlessly patient.
Let me trust that your love enfolds me
when my heart feels desolate and dry.
I will sing to the Lord at all times,
even from the depths of pain.

After we have lost someone or something that has been an important part of our lives, it may feel that a part of our self is missing. We may feel that God or our support system is no longer trustworthy. The Psalmist here does not trust but asks for the ability to trust, that love will come to him in his hour of need

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Even though we may feel damaged, or less than whole, and we feel liking running away from our pain, we cannot afford to lose ourselves. Embracing the mysteries of our dark winters doesn’t mean we are passive or must be resigned to accept our fate. It means going inside to learn more about our deepest selves. It is the wisdom of winter to hollow out, to create a space inside wherein our spirit can find sanctuary. It is in the great cold of night, the dark richness of that unknown, fertile, deep part in each of us where our intuitive, creative forces abide. To be able to feel deeply and fully all the pain of grief that is in the mind, heart, and soul is one of the keys to finding a way back to enjoying life. There is a silence, a mystery, a not-being-in-control about our dark times that creates the space for divine wisdom to appear and leap into people’s hearts. It means waiting, watching, listening, suffering and gathering whatever self-knowledge we can - then making choices based on that knowledge, no matter how difficult.

Feeling out of control is uncomfortable. Trying to find a way to understand their grief, people often ask, “Why did this have to happen?”, or “why did it happen to me?” These are questions with no easy answers, and anyway, grief is not solved by insisting on justice. Instead, grief asks us to allow our lives to be recreated in new ways. Sometimes we have to let the why questions go, turn around and move in another direction. The loss of a loved one or a divorce leaves a big hole in our lives. Our sense of self, of who we are becomes fragmented. As much as we may long for things to be the way they were, our lives will not be put together again in the same way as before. We can feel whole again, but we have to wait for new things to come into our lives. And new things will come if we open ourselves to let them in.
It is hard to go willingly when the wilderness of winter comes on us. It seems contrary to common sense to go toward something that causes pain. However, going deeper into the wilderness is often the only way through. Trust yourself; trust that you will find love in yourself that will carry you. Don't avoid your sorrow, don't apologize for it, and don't let anyone talk you out of it. The work we have to do is a coming home kind of work, a return to our foundations, to the source of goodness in our being.
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One early morning when I was a hospital chaplain, a page called me to the intensive care unit to help a woman whose husband had just died. When I arrived, all of the machines had been turned off, the room was quiet. I recognized the woman as one of the volunteers who worked at the hospital. She talked to me about him and she talked to him as we sat with him for two hours before she was ready to leave. They had been married for over fifty years. I knew that she was in for a long period of grieving; there was nothing I could say that would change that. As the sorrow over her husband’s death slowly passed through her; all I could do was to sit by her and witness her tenderly saying goodbye. I was honored to be present at such a momentous time in their lives.

One of the most gracious things we can do is to be present to another person’s pain, to simply stand respectfully at the edge of that person’s misery. When we see a loved one struggle in the darkness, sometimes we try to give direction by sharing our own hard-won wisdom. We may be motivated purely by love, or we may be trying to avoid our own pain or anger. Either way it is not possible for us to fix another person’s grief. Patience with sadness is one of the skills used in the practice of compassion. When a friend cries out, we honor them when we grieve with them. Loving someone through their dark season means letting them know that we are willing to participate in their misfortune and respect their feelings when they are in the grips of a wintry spirit. People who are grieving are doing some of the hardest work of their lives. We have all felt winter’s chill and know that holding another person close can help us both make it through the night.

Being a chaplain in a hospital put me in a special environment, a place where life and death seem to be on the edge every day, and people are freer to talk about it. Outside places like that, there seems to be little support in our culture for feeling sad, angry, afraid or any of the emotions we commonly experience when we are grieving. Sometimes when I am feeling down, a sense of shame comes over me. I think I should be able to prevent the blues. If I allow myself to have “negative thoughts,” I must not be in control of my emotions. There is a strain of our society which says we are supposed to think positively all the time, but that really is impossible. As I said, we all feel gloomy sometimes, so there is really no logical reason for us to be ashamed of it. Wintry sadness, grieving at the death of a loved one, is part of life's ritual. I want to make it known that it is always OK to express your true feelings here. It is part of our covenant of relationship here that we will be present for one another, especially in the hard times.
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I close with words from Parker Palmer: “Winter is a demanding season—and not everyone appreciates the discipline. It is a season when death’s victory can seem supreme: few creatures stir, plants do not visibly grow, and nature feels like our enemy… Our inward winters take many forms—failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them yields to a classic piece of wintertime advice, “The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.” Until we enter 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. Then we discover once again that the cycle of the seasons is trustworthy and life-giving, even in the most dismaying season of all.”