There was a light dusting of fine, dry, white SNOW on the deck this morning: ah, springtime in New England! Traditionally, St. Brigid's Day (February 1/Imbolc) marks the start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. It is halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox - a cross quarter point on the great wheel of life. For those of us in the hills of Western Massachusetts, however, that date rarely feels like spring. It isn't until sometime in March that the light has clearly shifted, the aroma of mud starts to fill the air, and a few, wee flowers start to poke their heads through the ground. What's more, it is not safe to do any outdoor planting here until well after May 1 (Beltane in the old way) and more often than not Memorial Day.One of the reasons I still consult the Celtic Wheel of Life, however, has to do with the spirit of each season: our overly linear, hyper-rational obsession with facts often renders the intuitive nature of the seasons listless and pale. But our ancestors knew better than we that "to everything there is a season" - emotions and actions included - and we lose touch with these insights from God's first word and incarnation in nature when we ignore the hard won wisdom of the past. It used to be common knowledge that human beings have weak instincts, but our brain is attuned to story-telling and that is how we pass on wisdom. Not much of that seems to be taking place right now.
The Benedictine monk, David Stendhal-Rast, makes much the same point in his little book on praying the monastic hours. "The monastic understanding of the word 'hour' goes back to a Greek word, hora, which is older than our notion of a day broken-up into twenty-four-hour segments. The original notion of hour is something quite different from a unit of time composed of sixty minutes. It is not a numerical measure: it is a soul measure." He continues:
We come closer to an appreciation of the original meaning of an hour when we reflect on the seasons of the year. They betoken the original understanding, in which a season is a mood and an experience, not an exact period that starts, say, on the twenty-first of December and ends on the twenty-first of March. In fact, we're usually surprised when we find in the calendar that the first day of winter is the twenty-first of December, because either winter has long been here, or it's not yet winter at all. Rather, seasons are qualitative experiences: We sense a subtle difference in the quality of light, the length of daylight, the feel of the air on our skin. We know intuitively that something is happening in nature. The hours are the seasons of the day, and they were originally understood in a mythical way. Earlier generations of our human race, not ruled by alarm clocks, saw the hours personified, encountered them as messengers of eternity in the natural flow of time growing, blossoming, bearing fruit. (p. 3, The Music of Silence)
During these days of self-quarantine and lock down, I am finding new value to the order of non-linear time. There IS purpose to each day if I am quiet enough to listen just as there is value to sheltering into the solitude of silence. As I watch the nervous agitation and ugly belligerence of many who are publicly protesting the current restrictions on activity, two truths become clear. One is that many contemporary Americans have lost the ability to wait for anything in a constructive manner; and the other is we have become so self-centered that we cannot comprehend life beyond instant gratification. We do not know how to listen for the sacred songs within the ordinary and we are so accustomed to distractions that we do not know how to rest without noise, activity and pressure. And this speaks more to the failure of our religious and spiritual institutions than the spiritual illiteracy of the nation's citizens.
During my last pilgrimage to L'Arche Ottawa in January 2020, before the travel freeze, I was listening to a podcast featuring Fr. Richard Rohr. He was taking questions about his new book: The Universal Christ. Someone wondered about the anemic way most churches celebrate baptism - sprinkling with the smallest amount of water possible with only the most minimal training for children or adults - which opened Rohr's emotional and analytic floodgates. "What a waste of archetypal energy" he roared. We have impoverished our best earth-centered sacrament by stripping away the power and awe of creation and rendering it dainty, quaint and sanitized. "This is just another example," he continued, "of the total failure of the church to train its members in the wisdom of the sacred". This came rushing back into my consciousness last night upon reading more in Christine Valters Paintner's book, The Soul of the Pilgrim:
As a culture we rarely acknowledge the value of being uncomfortable. We strongly discourage grieving people to stay with their sadness. Instead, we tell them to"cheer up" or "move on." Rarely are they encouraged to explore what grief can teach them. We are forever seeking the next thing to make us feel good. So much of what passes for spirituality these days is about making us happy, about affirmations and having positive experiences. We so often engage in what the poet Hafiz calls "teacup talk of God" where God is genteel and delicate. Sometimes, of course, we need these thoughts to remember all that is good and beautiful... (But we also need to know about) a path of radical unknowing (where we practice just being without) grasping for the clanging bells of great epiphanies. (pp. 84-88)
So here we are now as a so-called "Christian nation" in the heart of a season of radical unknowing without the skills or desire to enter it. No wonder some are racing around in trucks with their guns. That's how the dominant culture treats all challenges: with violence and threats. Others are just aching to get out and shop - another upside down sign of our gnawing emptiness. This is our time to "welcome the tender grace of unknowing" and give ourselves over "to a fertile darkness despite the fears or voices that long for certainty" (Paintner, p. 88.) But we can't because our spiritual institutions have steadfastly avoided guiding us onto this road less traveled. We are raging with expectations and have little understanding and almost no practice with letting go in order to rest into the serenity born of trusting God with all we cannot control. The radical irony of this paradox is that this is precisely the time when we are most apt to discover new eyes to see and new ears to hear: when we are vulnerable,broken, without clarity about what to do next and at our lowest. Will our religious and spiritual institutions find the courage and clarity to take us deeper? Some are trying, I know. But given our history, public trust is at an all time low. The renewal of the soul will be modest, humble and slow.
And that, too, is probably for the best. Massive social, cultural and economic changes are swirling all around us. So many among us are fearful and grieving. This is not the time to be abrupt. Rather, let us move quietly, slowly, tenderly and in small ways as we share compassion and open the door to the restorative wisdom of contemplation. In this we can contribute to the renewal of a prophetic imagination.
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