Wintering Over
Wintering helps us weather and weathering is one of my own most intimate and important tools in life, how am I going to weather this? What do I need to survive this storm or this drought or this scary journey or this time of my life? How am I going to just get through it.
I began our service with a story of the Moomins preparing for winter hibernation. Snorkmaiden wants to go to the ice festival and skate on the ice – while the older Moomins want to huddle at home. Snorkmaiden throws a rope ladder out of her window and departs and the grumbling parents wrap up to search for her – and as they reach the frozen lake they find friends skating and dancing and a fire and food and jollity – Snorkmaiden is spinning and turning on the ice and everyone realizes that we need to celebrate in winter!
Wintering Over: a sermon
A few years ago, I came across a small book called Wintering by the English writer Katherine May, who lives by the sea in Kent, just across the water in fact from here and who wrote about how to take what we are at times given or handed that we do not want – whether in illness, loss, ageing or perhaps divorce, or job loss. Wintering she says is a period in the cold.
Katherine May wrote from experience. In her 40s she was forced to take sick leave during a period of responsibility and indeed, ambition, as a university lecturer when she was also parent to a young child and the family breadwinner. Unwell and unable to keep going she had to stop and found herself just sitting and contemplating the dusty unloved corners of her home, asking how she was going to get through this – and it was a dark and dreary November. She had no choice but to endure this period, but as she did so she began to find that as her attention dropped right down to the necessities of the everyday, the dust, the next meal, time began to open up – cooking from a basket of apples her neighbour left for her, walking on the beach she began to feel the value in doing less. And she began to write the book that became Wintering.
The very time that looks so hard to weather can be, she suggests, a time for reflection, recuperation, for putting your house in order. She says that while we don’t choose loss, or failure, or tough times, these are inevitable parts of the cycle of life and they ask us to stop, go slow, take time and set in some stores. In her book she meets people who have found and are finding ways to winter: spiritual ways, practical ways and a mixture of both. Wintering is both real and metaphorical – the tools of preparation and endurance that indigenous peoples, travellers, explorers and others have found to winter over are real and then there are the metaphors and ritual practices around changing seasons – the fire and light festivals that mark winter.
I little knew when I proposed this title thatthat I would encounter a real old-fashioned winter this year but last weekend I was walking in Yorkshire and looking out at snowy fields edged with stone walls and dark hedgerows. Or that on the same weekend parts of another city I know Los Angeles would be consumed by fire and that almost all the homes in Altadenatheneighbourhood tucked into the hills above LA & where I had hiked last spring would be gone.
Last weekend I was with a very old friend whose partner died suddenly six weeks ago and so our walk, one of many we have done over the past almost 50 years, was tinged with emotion and the presence of deep change. My friend is wintering, learning how to walk in the weather of loss.
Like all of you I too have wintered and weathered and been weathered by so many phases of life.I too have many stories and yet still I, you all of us are navigating the unknown, we are on the moving edge of being, orbeing on the edge of time, not knowing what’s ahead yet having to prepare for anything, and as we say now, in unprecedented times.
Because these lives we are now living, wherever we are on and in them, are unprecedented in their intensity and uncertainty and the pace of change in them, change we watch, fear, or engage with in many different ways. The very wise Mary Catherine Bateson – Margaret Mead’s daughter as it happens – wrote in her book Composing a Lifeabout just that, and quite some time ago, but what she said still connects. She suggested that western or mainstreamsociety implicitly proposes our lives as quests with goals and hard work as the necessary elements for success, attainments that require consistency and targets. But the reality of creativity, she says, lies somewhere else. The models she chooses lie in those lives that have quite a lot of winter – in Katherine May’s words – lives where people faced with the unexpected (and often unwelcome)have to improvise our/their way through. It’s being able to acceptfluidity and discontinuity, the creative potential in interrupted lives where commitments keep being redefined in relation to the unexpected, that may be what we need for the times we are living in now — and what’s ahead.
As she lived quietly and wrote Katherine May began to consider the shape of wintering as a kind of space in time that requires care and consideration to get through and that is surprisingly important for new growth to happen. Today, in this winter-time, I am thinking about what we do in Unitarian and other ‘sacred social’ communities, or communities of collective trust and purpose. About the values and practices we need collectively to weather storms and droughts and fire and ice and hard times and loss. Not with more and more effort and energy but by doing less at times because we must.I’m wondering if wintering helps us weather.
We all have times of fallow, failure and loss. When I had a post-viral infection many years ago, I had to do what I called ‘getting under it’ rather than over it, allowing it to have its way of setting a much slower pace – even though I felt I was failing at my demanding job by doing so. That was in retrospect not too bad. My friend who has lost his partner is not even sure he will get through it – yet (he will). But letting it happen can be existentially frightening, it’s only afterwards in the aftermath that one can see where one was at all. But maybe we can set up stores as we go – not survivalist tools – not guns and tins – so much as acceptance of who one is when one is getting under it. That vulnerability is a rich place, strangely. And it’s from there that other forms of strength can come. (I think of Richard Rohr who has written so much about this)
It’s more than personal I think, it’s social too. We have been taught to expect and value progress and to look forward to better tomorrows. The immensity of the disappointment with things that people are feeling right now about this is very real. And it’s complicated. In asking us to accept where we find ourselves in tough times I might sound as if I am piously asking people to accept the unacceptable –poor housing and lack of education or lack of opportunity. I am not. I am asking usto imagine a much bigger place for us to inhabit as human beings, with space to accept that our human life and lives are not about constant struggle for progress and growth but also contain times of great difficulty and these are also part of where we are. We will not get over them. They will not go away with progress. What we do to accept failure without recrimination is part of accepting the times when we are out in the cold.Wintering is also about accepting limits to life, indeed facing our mortality is part of this, but also, socially, we face limits to progress or to the struggle for economic growth and to face that without that being nihilistic, but instead allowing something else to open in a different way can prepare us for the world which unfolds in front of us – to open to caring and cooperation, to being human together better, to sharing the world with the beyond human life here.The energy and dynamism that make us who we are do not have to be attached to progress and fixing.
Our life world is seasonal. More than anything the sense that it repeats is what keeps us located in time and connected through it. The sun rises and sets. Throughout climate change the stars still shine light from the beginning of the universe. The moon goes through its cycles, the tide rises and falls. We mark time. Nothing is static – and we do not control it. To winter is to accept living in time with less. And wintering therefore has always been a time when we need moments of special celebration. Our northern hemisphere world turns around two ancient solar solstices, and from ancient times people have marked the transitions through winter — making places where light touches rock only on the solstice, holding fire festivals and feeling perhaps the ‘thinness’ of the fabric that separates this life-worldfrom all that is beyond it, has gone from it and all that might be.
One of the things a spiritual community – a sacred social community – can do is to help us to safely winter. To share our stories of loss and change and, I think, two more things: one is to enable us to just be here lightly. To be accepted as we are rather that for what we do or our achievements, being here can be enough, and to offer a lightly connected space to allow things to emerge, as they will. The second thing is the offer of a rhythm of meeting to connect to – regular routine gathering that acknowledges our humanity and honours the spirit of exploration, that bigger sense of being part of things we don’t know, as we pass through the seasons of life and time. This is not to diminish our commitment to social justice, but part of social justice is honouring our spiritual needs, as we know.
And lastly, spiritual sacred community can also recognise our need for celebration, for singing in dark times as Brecht called it. We all know that being able to weather any winter of the soul or body, or even the body politic, is better when, like Snorkmaiden, we find time to dance on the ice.