welcome brigid, come...

The older I get the more I realized that it is always a challenge to practice what I've preached: it was true for St. Paul - and both Abraham and Sara, too - so I shouldn't think I am the exception to the rule. That said, today is St. Brigid's Day, the start of Celtic spring in the Northern Hemisphere, or at the very least the halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. My people in Scotland spoke of it as Imbolc (pronounced IM-bulk) meaning "in the belly." 

It is a fire festival - marking a return of the sun after winter's darkness - as well as the beginning of lambing season. St. Brigid's Feast Day - also celebrated as Candlemas (on Ground Hog's Day) - is all about the return of life after the quiet and somber season of winter. (For those who would like to go deeper, please take a look here: https://www.rte.ie/culture/2019/0131/1026673-st-brigid-and-the-coming-of-spring/?fbclid=IwAR1oaZGKaEI-M_TAhjQfUcTaahU6)C8Pivg4qWP0Og4NnAoKmJx3PsG6DWm0)

The light has clearly changed in these hills: it no longer looks like twilight at 3 pm and the midday sun sparkles (whenever it can break through the clouds.) Sitting in my study yesterday, the return of the sun was wonderfully obvious to all who looked out the window onto the wetlands. We walked in those wetlands this afternoon with Lucie and inhaled the shift of the season. To be sure, there will be another blizzard or three before "mud season" fully arrives, but the old is finally passing and the new is striving to be born. 

Earlier in the day we went to the library. Now some don't think of this as a date, but Di and I have spent eons together wandering the stacks. For us, it is one of our favorite trips out of the house. Who knows what treasures are to be found? We have explored some of this country's great libraries together and we're not about to stop now. As part of this year's inward journey, I am committed to learning how the earliest people of this land worshiped the sacred. Reformed Christianity may have lost touch with God's green earth, but not the sacramental traditions of my Gaelic clan. And certainly not the Mohicans and Algonquins who have worshiped the living God in these parts for at least 1500 years. I also found some texts to help me replant some native wild flowers and trees as spring ripens.

I mention this focus on listening and learning how the earliest human beings in these hills celebrated God for two reasons. First, whether it is Robert Frost, Carrie Newcomer or Mary Oliver, my favorite poets speak about the wisdom of the holy made manifest in nature. Last year I started to spend time in the small portion of land around our house making garden terraces. I took down trees, beat back bramble, mucked around in the soil, learned a little about compost, saw my pumpkins destroyed by fungus, and watched the movement of the sun and seasons with new eyes. As the year turned, I read about making our garden a sanctuary - and doing so with native plants that could replace the invasive ones, too. Parker Palmer's keen essay on the spirituality of the seasons has also been important for me. You can find it here:
(https://fetzer.org/blog/winter-our-challenge-get-out-it) To go deeper in this quest, to search for the sacramental presence of Christ all around me, feeds my soul. Palmer writes this about the winter that is starting to fade:

Winter has an even greater gift to give (than beauty.) It comes when the sky is clear, the sun brilliant, the trees bare, and the first snow yet to come. It is the gift of utter clarity. In winter, one can walk into woods that had been opaque with summer growth only a few months earlier and see the trees clearly, singly and together, and see the ground that they are rooted in... Winter clears the landscape, however brutally, giving us a chance to see ourselves and each other more clearly, to see the very ground of our being... Our inward winters take many forms—failure, betrayal, depression, death. But every one of them, in my experience, yields to the same 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.

The other reason I find myself drawn to the wisdom of the holy in God's first word of creation is that it shows me what endures. What is essential. Carrie Newcomer posted this poem, "Making Sense," yesterday - and it gives shape and form to what I sense the Spirit is saying to me - especially in times as crazy as our own:

Finding what makes sense
In senseless times
Takes grounding
Sometimes quite literally
In the two inches of humus
Faithful recreating itself
Every hundred years.
It takes steadying oneself
Upon shale and clay and solid rock
Swearing allegiance to an ageless aquifer
Betting on all the still hidden springs.

You can believe in a tree,
With its broad-leafed perspective,
Dedicated to breathing in, and then out,
Reaching down, and then up,
Drinking in a goodness above and below
It’s splayed and mossy feet.
You can trust a tree’s careful
and drawn out way
of speaking.
One thoughtful sentence, covering the span of many seasons.

A tree doesn’t hurry, it doesn’t lie,
It knows how to stand true to itself
Unselfconscious of its beauty and scars,
And all the physical signs of where and when
It needed to bend,
Rather than break.
A tree stands solitary and yet in deepest communion,
For in the gathering of the many,
There is comfort and courage,
Perseverance and protection,
From the storms that howl down from predictable
Or unexplainable directions.

In a senseless time
Hold close to what never stopped
Making sense.
Like love
Like trees
Like how a seed becomes a branch
And compost becomes seedlings again.
Like the scent at the very top of an infant’s head
Because there is nothing more right than that. Nothing.
It is all still happening
Even now.
Even now.

By Carrie Newcomer 2020

The light returns. The lambs are born. The flowers peek through the mud. And the evil does not last forever. It is still evil, mind you, and it still hurts like hell. But it is not the end of the story. I'm serving my homemade "Shepherd's Pie" for supper tonight in Brigid's honor. I'll make a St. Brigid's cross for our threshold tomorrow - and maybe bake some Irish Soda Bread, too. I will play the songs of my Gaelic clans and savor the light as it quietly grows stronger. And I will pray that we can stay strong, dear friends, "holding close to what has never stopped making sense: love, trees, the earth" and God's grace.