Part I: It’s the Season:

The prolific 20^th Century spiritual writer, Thomas Merton invited us to, "Love winter when the plant says nothing."

It might be better to say at this point: love the sermon when the preacher says nothing! Maybe that’s not a good idea, though. Perhaps we can have a bit of both – the spoken word, and a bit of the unspoken as well.

For this is advent, on the Christian calendar, a time of expectation and waiting. In Judaism it is a reminder of the dark days of Syrian oppression, the prelude to Chanukah. In Islam, these are the days of Ramadan; days of fasting and soul searching, of spiritual and physical discipline, days of turning inward.

In our culture and in our clime, we are drawing nigh to the solstice, the mid-winter. It is a season of cold and darkness, of almost momentary days and interminable nights. It is, or once was, a downtime for the repairing of tools and the mending of souls. It is a good time, a natural time, this season of darkness, a time for looking inward to meet our inner most selves — there waiting to meet us — like the germ of a seed waiting to meet the plant it is destined to sprout. And in its waiting, in the winter, the plant indeed says nothing.

Now retired Unitarian Universalist Minister, Max Coot’s once wrote:

When love is felt or fear is known,

When holidays and holy days

and such times come,

When anniversaries arrive

by calendar or consciousness,

When seasons come, as seasons do,

old and known, but somehow new,

When lives are born or people die,

When something sacred’s sensed

in soil or sky,

Mark the time.

Respond with thought or prayer

or smile or grief,

Let nothing living slip between

the fingers of the mind,

For all of these are holy things

We will not, cannot, find again."

The medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote:

This word is a hidden word

and comes in the darkness of the night.

To enter this darkness put away

all voices and sounds

all images and likenesses.

For no image has ever reached into the soul’s foundation

Where God herself

with her own being is effective."

We are invited by the long nights to enter the darkness. Eckhart said, "The ground of the soul is dark." It’s frightening sometimes to enter the darkness, to dive deep. We can’t know what we’ll find there.

The soul is as deep as the universe is wide, and it is in the darkness of those depths where gods come and go, where fountains spring forth. It is in the darkness of those depths where we are invited to come, to meet ourselves, to sit, on that dark soulful ground with the gods of our own making. It is there in the dark that we are invited to come to our center, there to meet the source of our power.

Not long ago, a young man came to see me. He was on a spiritual quest, he said. But he was struggling to find the time, the time to engage his spirit. "There’s so much to do," he said. "My work is so important to so many people. I just can’t find the time. I just can’t find the time for my own discipline."

He told me about the god he worships in public, the god of success. But closer to home, the god that makes him tremble is the god of failure. The god of success is all around us, of course. Its altar of sacrifice is bathed in glitter and bright shining lights. He is a demanding god that requires the burnt offerings of our creativity and love, who requires the burnt offerings of our faith, any faith in that which abides.

The god of failure lies low, in the shadows, just on the edge of the darkness. It poses there, an imposter, pretending to be the deepest and the darkest. But it only lurks on the edges, like Argus at the entrance of the cave, guarding the path inward.

As the young man sat and talked, he began to see that beneath even his fear of failure was a deeper fear of stepping into his fullness of being, into his fullness of power, into his creativity and into his capacity to love. He began to see that beyond — below — his successes and failures, is a passage into what he truly hopes to make of his life. And he began to see, that he has to spend time in the dark, adjusting his eyes to see the dark soulful ground, to find his path to that future

Simone Weil wrote, "One should identify oneself with the universe itself. Everything that is less than the universe is subject to suffering."

Standing in the mountains on the darkest of nights, away from the clutter of city and lights, that’s when we get our best glimpses of the vastness of creation. We’re not in the mountains here, but we are in the season. The darkness invites us in to meet the universe itself.

The Unitarian Universalist poet and songwriter, Shelley Jackson Denham writes in, "Dark of Winter."

"Dark of winter, soft and still,

your quiet calm surrounds me.

Let my thoughts go where they will;

ease my mind profoundly.

And then my soul will sing a song,

a blessed song of love eternal.

Gentle darkness, soft and still,

bring your quiet to me.

Darkness, soothe my weary eyes,

that I may see more clearly.

When my heart with sorrow cries,

comfort and caress me.

And then my soul may hear a voice,

A still, small voice of love eternal.

Darkness, when my fears arise,

let your peace flow through me."

Giving in to the dark is like giving in to death a little. It’s not so much acquiescence as it is surrender. It’s letting go of what we know and embracing, for all we are worth, the mystery that lies below what we know. Whether it is now or later, death awaits us all. Whether we engage in it now or never, the mystery sustains us all.

In "Measure for Measure," Shakespeare wrote, "If I must die I will encounter darkness as a bride and hug it in my arms."

Another sage writes, "We are all amateurs at facing death." In so many ways it’s also true that we are amateurs at facing life. In death we let go of life. In the darkness though, we embrace it. "The paradox is," Albert Nolan suggests, "that a [person] who fears death is already dead, whereas the [person]who has ceased to fear death has at that moment begun to live."

Feminist theologian, Susan Griffin rights, "Nothingness spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed." When we let go, when we go into the dark, we come face-to-face with nothingness. Experiences of nothingness are never superficial; they are about the essence of our being.

In the darkness of winter, below the surface of the ground, the seed lies quietly waiting. So imperceptively moving within it are the stirrings of Life. In our own darkness, beneath the glitter and the bustle, beneath the successes and the failures, beneath the joys and the sorrows, life stirs in us and calls us to itself — not for our own individual sake, but for the sake of Life itself.

Gandhi wrote, "True individuality consists in reducing oneself to zero. The secret of life is selfless service. The highest ideal for us is to become free from attachment."

American author and poet, Wendell Barry writes,

When we’re in the midst of things, when the lights are ablaze and action is apace, that’s when we’re merely skimming the surface. It’s when we wake late in the night, or go into the darkness of our own bidding that we see the ropes of the ties that bind. It’s there in the darkness we are tested.

What will our answers be? Are the ropes gnarled and frayed from overuse? Or have we tended them carefully with time and diligence? And isn’t this, the season of darkness, a time to pay attention, to mend our souls, to shore our faith?

Margaret Williams Baxton wrote:

"Once upon a time I was

Now I am

Some day I will become

Once there was

And now there is

Soon there will be

And some day there surely shall be

Once upon a time we were

Now we are

And some day how (Hallelujah!) we shall surely become,

Amen Amen"

Baxton writes out of her faith; she anticipates that which is yet to be. To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. It is this season, it is this time of darkness, which is the season for becoming, which is the time for the building of a faith in it.

William James wrote, "…one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance." O, come; O, come, Emmanuel. This is our time for making ready.

Let us put down the busy work of our hands and our minds; let us drink in the waters of the fountains that run deep within. Let us be filled up, and in the filling find ourselves ready and eager to love and to live.

Langston Hughes wrote:

So since I’m still here livin’,

I guess I will live on.

I could have died for love —

But for livin’ I was born.

Though you may hear me holler,

And you may see me cry —

I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,

If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine!"

I bid you to accept this invitation of the season;

To mark the time;

To love winter when the plant says nothing;

To enter the dark and the deep;

I bid you to take the time for the mending of soul;

To take the time for the experience of breath;

To take the time to know yourself.

And I bid you to rest in the grace of the world, where: Life is fine!"