“As confusing as it might sound, this year is not a punishment. We are not serving a sentence, waiting for it to be over. I know a lot of people who put a great deal of energy into remembering what “normal” life was like and wanting to return to it. They believe the winter of our discontent is a result of how great life used to be and how much it has changed…Our first step in surviving this winter of our discontent, though, is starting where we are1.”
Writer Greg Richardson shared this perspective a couple weeks ago, and it captures something valuable about living in our present situation. Although discontent is a mild way of putting how many of us are feeling right now. We’re also feeling grief, pain, and maybe even resentment. But his point holds up – if we want to survive this, we have to start in our current situation. This is a service about that effort – starting our survival and endurance in our current situation, when the days grow shorter and the world grows darker.
As I’ve prepared for today’s service, I’ve been excited to share all of the things I appreciate about darkness. It’s a spiritual theme I find a lot of strength and sustenance in. But the qualities of darkness that I find the most nourishing – silence, stillness, rest – are ones we’ve been enduring for many months now. We’ve been in the dark for a while. But even now, approaching darkness does not mean embracing resignation. And as tired of the dark as some of us are, embracing darkness will not come effortlessly. If we’re going to survive this winter by starting where we are, we have to cultivate new relationships with our situation. Approaching darkness with new eyes is, I think, one way of doing this.
First, this will take us acknowledging what darkness has meant to us so far. Darkness is undervalued as far as spirituality and meaning-making are concerned. The attitudes we find cast darkness as foreboding, heavy, or ominous. Instead of embracing it, we usually hold darkness to be a rhetorical tool to prop up other virtues. Darkness is supposed to be full of our worst fears, containing monsters, boogeymen, corruption of the human spirit. Here, it’s the metaphorical opposite of what we strive to achieve. Or, darkness is something we’re told we must conquer so that it doesn’t conquer us. Here, it’s a competitor. It’s something to overcome on the road to enlightenment, salvation, or self-actualization. In its best treatment, darkness is often something to be endured and overcome. In these instances, any lessons we can learn are in spite of darkness, not because of it.
Darkness, and especially the darkness of winter, can be boring too. If our favorite pleasures and pass-times involve being out in the warmth and light, then darkness limits the range of things we enjoy doing. Macrina Wiederkehr begins the essay we heard for our first reading by reflecting on this2. She talks about all of the things she loves doing in the rest of the year that winter prevents, especially time spent outdoors. In a similar way darkness cuts into the time we spend doing the things we love outside and in the sunlight. Even when we’re inside, our bodies and ambitions slow down as the night settles in. Shorter days can take more determination if we’re fixed on the things we enjoy when the days are longer and warmer. Fixed in this way, we can resist finding pleasure or comfort in darker days.
In our opening words, Liz Fisher talks about something similar to the boredom some people find in the dark3. She suggests that darkness can be troubling for many because it forces us away from our ordinary habits of being busy, leaving us underequipped to handle a slower pace of life. While I agree that our culture does not prepare us well for unstructured or undirected living, I think her words come close but don’t quite grasp what’s happening. Rather than “depression” or “panic”, I think it’s truer to describe many peoples’ reaction to inactivity as disoriented. We’ve given such high regard to ceaseless productivity that some of us are unsure how to function if we’re not on the go. When winter and darkness slow us down, it takes concerted effort to adjust to a new way of being in our lives.
The good virtues of darkness, it seems, are literally left in the shadows, often unconsidered. But movements as far-reaching as racial justice work, Paganism, and feminism have strived in the last few decades to uplift darkness as a virtue in and of itself. To emphasize that it is something to be celebrated, rather than endured until it passes. The good in darkness is worth finding, too. In our attempt to live through the under-activity of the last several months, we have been playing an endurance game, and it’s not sustainable. Enduring the darkness to get to the light can only carry us so far. At a certain point, we must also embrace whatever virtues the dark, present moment provides us. By and large, the nourishing dimensions of darkness have not been pointed out by our forebearers. So, if we’re going to find virtue in darkness, we’ll have to cultivate that ourselves.
We heard two perspectives on this cultivation in today’s readings. In our first, Macrina Wiederkehr doesn’t talk about darkness but does talk about winter. Winter, she writes, “suggests a time of resting and deepening, a time to gather the resources needed in other seasons4.” For her it is a time to take a step back from busyness and preoccupation in our lives. It requires us to slow down. And if we’re paying attention to our surroundings, then it encourages us to consider the world and its potential. While winter can seem empty and barren, it’s only because we are expecting to find something that isn’t there. We can get so filled with longing for the greenery of past summers and the summers we hope to see again, that we fail to pay attention to the world as it is in front of us. “The plant hasn’t lost its voice just because it isn’t flowering or greening5.”
Winter is a time of rest, and in this regard it’s similar to darkness. Darkness also causes us to slow down as the days shorten, and we may use this time to catch up with the life that’s been whirling around us. And like winter, our first pass over darkness can leave us thinking of it as barren and empty. But this is still because we’re hoping to see something that isn’t there. When we’re so attached to how our world looks when it’s filled with light, we will overlook its appearance in the dark. In the dark, look at the stars and planets. Look at the nighttime animals in your neighborhood. Look at how different your world seems in twilight than in daylight. Some of these things might not take much effort to notice, but if you’re already expecting them to be there, they’re easy to find. My suggestion here is to look out for, pay attention to, things that you’re not expecting to see. What are you going to see when you look into the dark with no expectations?
In our second reading, Liz Fisher writes about something else that darkness can help us cultivate, especially in this time of year6. By encouraging us to turn our attention inward, the dark can also lead us to be thoughtful and constructive with our downtime. When we are caught up in forward momentum, or carried along by the pace of the world around us, sometimes we struggle to take stock of where we are going, and where we’ve come from. As darkness slows us down, we can use this season to be more attentive of our places in the world. Being between one place and another, like we are in this season, can help us in another way. By removing us from our ordinary environment, or mindset, this darker season can help us pay attention to our surroundings. Again, this requires us to look squarely at our current situation, even at the things we’re not expecting to consider. This is a less literal look at our surroundings, and might take more concentration, but is still a look worth taking.
It’s also worth noting that she didn’t write this article during any late autumn. She wrote this piece four years ago after the last election. Four years later, the lessons that darkness can teach are still relevant. While the outcomes of that election and this one are very different, our need to refocus is still present. We are in another in-between time, between an election and the political changes a new presidency will usher in. Between assessing the work we have done up until now, and the work we will have to do in a new administration. Whatever steps we take moving forward are necessarily shaped by the work that we and our forebearers have already done. Those steps will also depend on where we are now, and where we want to go. On the world we’re in, and the world we want to create. The rest and contemplation that this season can bring is still worth cultivating to deepen our perspective of our lives’ directions.
What both of these attitudes require in order to be nourishing is presence. The darkness will pass, whether we’re talking about seasonal or social darkness. But we don’t know when that will be. In the meantime, we do know that there is darkness around us, and we can find meaning in that. Even if we aren’t sold on embracing the dark, the discomfort of this situation will be easier to endure if we are not always looking forward to an indefinite tomorrow, an as-of-yet unscheduled break in the clouds. And the endurance may be more sustainable if we are not always waiting on the future to come. It’s easy for us to get wrapped up in dreaming about tomorrow before it gets here, or longing for the past that has already happened. It’s easy to get attached to these things. But if we’re going to sit with the darkness, or even learn from it, we have to cultivate an attitude of presence, instead of longing for the things that aren’t here right now.
I don’t want to make this sound easier than it is. But I do think this attitude of presence is essential to moving through the darkening months in the middle of a pandemic. I don’t have an answer on how to do this other than say, “pay attention”. That’s harder to do than it sounds though. In March, Lynn Ungar published a poem on rest in the midst of the pandemic. I know many people resonated with it, but at the time, I thought it was trite, and not what I wanted to hear. But as I was putting this service together, it crossed my mind again, and I feel closer to understanding its importance now. Maybe now I’m more worn down by the last few months, and I’m ready for what it says.
“Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down7.”
However nurturing or sustaining they might be, cultivating these attitudes toward the dark will take our careful effort. It has taken me most of the year to come back around to accepting and caring for this attitude of rest. It’s not a perspective that necessarily comes easily unless you’ve worked on this sort of outlook before. That though is the purpose of cultivating a new relationship with darkness, rest, and refocus. Greg Richardson continues in his article by saying this:
“I do not believe the purpose of spiritual life is to rescue us from the winter of our discontent. It is not a way for us to escape difficulties or avoid challenges. Spiritual life is not a helicopter or a lifejacket or a bulletproof vest…I believe spiritual life is not a way out of this mess, but a way through. My experience of spiritual life is not a ladder I can climb to get away, but someone with me in the middle of the winter8.”
Creating new outlooks isn’t about escaping our surroundings, but by paying attention to them. Surviving this winter may require that we tend the darkness, cultivate it, find our place in it. To love it when it says nothing, when it says something other than what we wanted.
1. Greg Richardson, “Practices from the Inside Out: Now Is the Winter of Our Discontent”, Patheos: Strategic Monk, November 10, 2020, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/strategicmonk/2020/11/10/practices-from-the-inside-out-now-is-the-winter-of-our-discontent/
2. Macrina Wiederkehr, “Winter, A Season for Deepening” in The Circle of Life: The Heart’s Journey Through the Seasons, by Joyce Rupp & Macrina Wiederkehr (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2005), 251-255.
3. Liz Fisher, “Honoring the Dark, Part 1”, Patheos: Nature’s Sacred Journey – Celebrating UU Paganism & Earth-Centered Experience, January 12, 2015, https://www.patheos.com/blogs/naturessacredjourney/2015/01/honoring-dark-part-one/
4. Wiederkehr, 252.
5. Ibid.
6. Fisher
7. Lynn Ungar, “Pandemic,” Lynn Ungar: Poetry and Other Writings, March 11, 2020, https://lynnungar.com/poems/pandemic/
8. Richardson