ICY AWARENESS: WINTER SPEAKS

Rev. John P. Gaffney
            December 3, 2000

Call to Worship: 

"Let us not wish away the winter: it is a season unto
itself, not simply the way to Spring."

Chalice lighting: 

" In the cold of winter we light this chalice. May it
warm our hearts this day, and especially the hearts of
those who are alone."

Reading: 

"Winter Meditation"
The bare trees have made up their seed bundles. They are ready now. The warm brown light pauses briefly, shrugs and moves on. They are ready now to play dead for awhile. I, human, have not as yet devised how to obtain such privilege. Their Spring will find them rested. I and my kind battle a wakeful to ours." --Denise Levertov

Responsive Reading: 

543 Winter
Let us not wish away the winter. It is a season to itself, not simply
the way to spring.

When trees rest, growing no leaves, gathering no light, they let in sky
and trace themseves delicately against dawns and sunsets.

The clarity and brilliance of the winter sky delight. The loom of fog
softens edges, lulls the eyes and ears of the quiet, awakens by risk the unquiet. A low dark sky can snow, emblem of individuality, liberality, and aggregate power. Snow invites to contemplation and to sport.

Winter is a table set with ice and starlight.

Winter dark tends to warm light: fire and candle; winter cold hugs and huddles; winter want to gifts and sharing; winter danger to visions, plans and common endeavoring--and the zest of narrow escapes; winter tedium to merrymaking.

Let us therefore praise winter, rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant negativities.
--Greta Crosby

Sermon:
      I must admit: I AM A PAGAN. It’s refreshing and liberating that I can say that. I’ve struggled to put a label on who I am or to say what I am when it comes to religion. After I tell someone that I am a Unitarian Universalist, they then ask, “What do you believe?” There are any paths within our Faith. I’ve tried to define and then articulate which one I followed. I will often say that I am spiritual but that’s rather vague and doesn’t explain  what is at the core of my religion. Where do I find my spirituality? We know there are many rooms within this religious house called UUism and I often wonder where I sit and I wonder where you sit. I am not a UU theist if that means belief in a personal God with intellect and will who created this world and intervenes in it. I am not an atheist which often means one who definitively, and may times arrogantly and even militantly, announces that he or she can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no God. Maybe I should be an agnostic but I hate to define myself by a negative, as someone “who does not know”. I know a lot of things though I’m constantly in search of much more. Sometimes I call myself a mystic, as one whose quest is to understand how I am connected to everyone and everything and to my deeper self -- all of which leads to a true peace of soul.  With deeper thought I’ve come to the conclusion that pagan fits best and explains things better.

Some wince at the notion of pagan. Christianity has worked hard to demonize the pagans. A sign of their success is found in the dictionary which defines a pagan as “one who has little or no religion and is marked by a frank delight in an uninhibited seeking after sensual pleasures and material goods”. That’s not me. I prefer the original meaning of the word pagan as “one who is from the fields”. These were the pre-Christian folk who revered or worshiped the magnificent nature in which they lived and felt part of it. Yes, this is where I am theologically. When one asks do I believe in God I always respond that I find the divine in people and in nature and in myself. This must make me a pagan.

All of this brings me to my sermon of today. Being a pagan I believe
that nature speaks to me, and I believe to you, as much as Christians
believe that God speaks to them. My advantage is that nature is always speaking to me. Especially I believe that the seasons speak to all of us.

Do we notice? Do we listen? Do we understand?

     Some do hear the seasons  speaking but winter, it seems to me, is the most ignored and the least understood of all the seasons. Some actually hate winter. My dear wife from Houston, Texas is one of them. “When will this terrible season be over?” she constantly asks. One author speaks of winter in this way: ‘O winter you come stalking in the snow like some prehistoric beast, to pound upon my roof with icy claws”.               
     For many, winter means only those ugly facts of scrapping frost from the windshield, car engines that won’t turn over, icy roads, and high heating bills. They hibernate and wait for Spring. Unlike pagan-like Peter in today’s story “The Snowy Day”, they don’t relish and delight in their “snowy day”. My advice is: Don’t miss this season that has so much to tell us. I think today’s  responsive reading had it right. “Let us not wish away winter.  It is a season to itself, not simply the way to
spring... Let us praise winter, rich in beauty, challenge, and pregnant
negativities”. Beauty. Challenge. Pregnant negativities. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Let us praise winter.  

My pagan winter-musing really hit me yesterday. Remember what it was like? -- a cold, clear, deep blue-sky, winter day, befitting of a December moment in Maryland. I had gotten a phone call on Thursday from a woman whose mother had died. She wanted a memorial service and a grave-side service but something that was not too heavy on traditional religion. This was right up my alley. I feel very honored to be invited into these private, precious moments of people’s lives. I feel this kind of work is essential to my calling to the ministry. I find myself so enriched and changed by the experience. I met with the family, as I always do, but I had some reservations about a graveside service with a coffin since in most of my memorial services there is usually ashes in a urn and no burial. I found some wonderful readings for a burial and I headed to the gravesite in Beltsville. Thoughts about this pagan-like Sunday Service were swirling around in my brain. I noticed the beautiful, almost prayer-like forms of the barren trees. The barren brown turf of
the fields struck me as particularly beautiful. And then there was the soft sunlight from that deep blue winter sky.

As we gathered around the gravesite with the sun in our eyes and a brisk wind against our faces, I began with the text that read: “It is good to be together at this time and place, because we need not only the blessings of Nature, but the blessing we can give to one another”.

Suddenly I felt a oneness with the grieving family and with nature. This open field and the mourners and I blended. We needed each other. Then the words began to pour out. This was sacred ground and this body was being returned to the ground from which it came. Picture us standing there on the wind-swept field and tell me if the words I read do not move you as much as they moved me. Listen to the words I read: “Now as we stand under the rounding dome of the sky, with the resilient and good Earth beneath our feet, washed by sunlight and air, we intuit things timeless and reassuring. We know, deep in our flesh, the sure cycles of nature, the fit of a human life span into the seasons of the generations, the Earth, and the Universe, a sublime design. And there is an unmistakable rightness to what we now do, no matter how much we protest this death. From dust to dust: from spirit to spirit: from eternity to eternity. Between these spans, a human life fits”. The deceased, the family, and I became one person and we were one with the earth. After the
service a woman came up to me and said: “I’m not a religious person but that was the most beautiful burial service I have ever seen”. It was beautiful because in the fine pagan tradition, we honored the divine, the sacred in the hallowed ground and in ourselves. The winter scene framed the picture.   Winter spoke to us.

What does winter say to you? It calls out to me to be still, to rest.
There seems to be so much activity in the planting of the Spring, the
rollicking pleasures of the Summer, and the harvest-gathering of the
Fall. Winter calls us to be still. Nature is still --- from the frozen
pond to the rigid brown crust of the once fertile fields. We need a time to be still, to look within, to relish the treasures that we have. The author Edward Hayes in his book “Prayers for a Planetary Pilgrim” advises: “Be still so that you can discover, slowly, day by day, that you and Earth are one, to know in that Wonder of Wonderlands who you really are”.

Winter calls us, not only to renew our spirit by being still.  It calls
us to gather around the hearth with family and friends that was not so possible in the open-air pursuits of other seasons. Yes we need the call and gift of each season but winter is the time for simple, quiet pleasures. No need this winter season to garden, to exercise in the full warm, sun-filled days. Now we are called more inside as the days become shorter. In our homes will we retreat to the television or the computer or will we enjoy the personal, intimate time with family?  Winter, I believe calls us to this.

Ice against the skin can startle us and make us more aware of the
moment. Through this “icy awareness” winter speaks to us.  Robert Frost understood how winter speaks and he expressed it in his poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening”.  Remember his words:
     Whose woods these are I think I know/ His house is in the village
though He will not see me stopping here/ To watch the woods fill up with snow.

The man with the horse-drawn carriage in Frost’s poem could not resist stopping “to watch the woods fill up with snow”. Though he had much work to do, he felt called by the stirrings within his spirit to pause and watch something so simple as “the woods fill up with snow”. Is our spirit stirred enough to stop and listen to this winter season? Winter, the icy winter, is speaking.  I hope we all take the time to listen.

Closing words:

Be still so that you can discover, slowly, day by day,
that you and the Earth are one,
to know in that Wonder of Wonderlands
who you really are.
--Edward Hayes