I’ve long been a fan of winter. I like its paraphernalia, its garb, customs, necessities, limitations and snowflakes. As a kid I suffered from hay fever and welcomed the relief that the first frosts brought. A spell of living in the country helped me cultivate a taste for the cold times. An acquired taste perhaps, I believe the winter season deserves a prominent niche in the Academy of the Underrated.
In the Midwest where I live, the old Puritan from the north comes down every year through its annual migration routes. With its brisk prefaces in late autumn dawns and dusks, winter make its relentless approach. Nights grow longer. Cold fronts descend like beasts of prey. Frosty winds pounce. Inch by inch the chill clutches at and tempers the countryside. Slowly the land is translated into the native tongue and idiom of winter. The days are short and sun-starved but quietly beautiful in a wintry way. Colors are muted, understated, just homespun shades of brown, russet and tan. With both hands tied behind her back, nature still lavishes beauty almost absentmindedly on winter days.
Hope and belief are easy in June when the world is warm and the gardens begin to flourish and ripen, but when bitter north winds flow and the sun rides low in the southern sky, darkness and nothingness don’t seem so far away. Winter keeps us honest; it ups the ante to our faith commitment.
Winter’s starkness forces us to fortify the woodpiles of our inner lives. We more urgently depend on our community and church to strengthen our hope and purpose in these dark months.
The creative church offers its richest feasts and celebrations at winter’s beginning.
Christmas is everyone’s favorite winter event. Its tale of hope is a simple and profound one. Born into a world of cruelty and malice, to people of no consequence in the world’s scheme of things, God comes to us in a place where we least expect divine visitation. The Christmas feast comes at the darkest time of year, the time when we most need the closeness of our family and friends and when we most profit from being forgetful of self, when we most ache to be reminded that the love that moves the sun and stars can make its nest in the palm of our hand.
We are looking to touch God’s mystery especially at this time of year. We are looking for hope in a bleak and broken world, to worship at the source of God’s great love for us. And God has indeed offered mystery to us – Word made flesh, God’s outrageous love for us that has made its home here at the heart of winter.
Poet Dylan Thomas described a Christmas he experienced as a child growing up in Wales, but he’s really written a lyrical praise of winter:
“…When I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.A small boy says: ‘It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.’
‘But that was not the same snow,’ I say. ‘Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely-ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunderstorm of white, torn Christmas cards.’
Thomas gets right to the point about winter:
“Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”
Without winter, life would surely be easier, more of a lark. Without some kind of winter, though, our lives would perhaps contain much less of a deep connection with the divine in the world. We would simply be less whole.
