Spirituality of the Seasons II: Winter

Winter

Winter is the season of barrenness.  We stand, like the denuded branches of the trees, stripped of our coverings and exposed to the harsh winds of frigid and aridness northernness.  Barren, we become strangers even to ourselves.  Our imperfections, now exposed and visible to the world, seem to become the whole of our identity.  Lost in a world of monochromatic silence, like the silence of a snowy day abandoned by all of humanity, we perceive that we stand alone in the elements that batter us-- the snow, the ice, the howling wind.
No voice speaks from on-high in winter.  The heavens seem shut except for the falling snow and the icy gusts of wind.  And so we retreat deep inside ourselves, like the trees whose bruised and battered trunks still harbor green life within them.  We retreat into ourselves, retreating in hope and not in despair, retreating in order to fortify ourselves against the elements that lash about us in our lonely, empty solitude.  We fortify ourselves to wait.  To wait, even in seeming abandonment, to wait in hope for the redemption of our bodies.  This is the true grace of winter: like trees long exposed to the harsh winter winds, we become strong and sturdy in the hope of spring.

Spirituality of the Seasons 1: Fall

If there is a geography to redemption (mountains and valleys, rivers and deserts) then certainly there is a spirituality to the seasons of the year. The rhythms of the year: fading, death, new life and thriving life are all rhythms that we experience in our living out of relation with the Father through Jesus Christ in the Spirit. As you read these brief meditations on the seasons, I pray that you identify with one of them and can prayerfully discover the grace of God present with you. May you be filled with hope in the goodness, the grace and the provision of God in every season.


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Fall



Fall is a season of contrasts: it is a journey from the sudden beauty of the rich tapestry of colors in October to the slow decay of leaves and the melancholy charcoal sky of November:
As trees burst into a symphony of flaming colors, an image of the transcendently divine one present with us in the midst of arboreal beauty, so too do our hearts flame with a seasoned and tempered exaltation, a rally of worship before the slow retreat back into ourselves for winter.
As leaves fall and the sky grows dark with the onset of the chill air, so too do our hearts settle into a quiet melancholy of the disrobing process: as the trees are disrobed of their flaming leaves, so are our hearts, spirits and personalities disrobed of their own coverings.  In late fall, we become vulnerable as our coverings, our defenses, and even our glories slowly slide away from us, exposing us to that first icy breath of winter. 
In both of these moments, the sudden glory and the slow disrobing, we long for something nameless, something mysterious and transcendent.  We long for home-- the fire on the hearth, the aromas of the kitchen, the comfort of warm slippers.  We long for the safe and secure coverings of our leaves.  Yet we realize that “home” has itself become something transcendent, something put off.  And we desire that coming home with a hunger that carries us through the long nights of cold winter.

I tried to hold you but you'd rather hold your grudge

Some days open on hope; other days open on tragedy and sorrow. I wish this brokenness would go away; that somehow the story of Ezekiel's valley of dry bones would become my story.  My world is a lie that's come true.  Because of that, hard choices are ever before me: fight or surrender, persevere or release, argue or be silent.  There are no easy answers in a world that is a lie.

Yankee Tree

Yankee Tree

My body is built like an old Yankee tree--
     so year after year I'll continue to be--
tall and thin and oh so protracted
     with a mind so fine and ever so abstracted
 from the sense called common to all of the masses;
     I train with Montaigne and push up my glasses.
Like a tower in Babel I've mastered the art
     of building toward heaven completely apart
from wisdom, from knowledge, from hu-mil-ity
     so try as I might I'll continue to be
an old tree, a grey tree that's bent with self-pity
    needing to fall to make way for the City

A theology blog? Say what?

I know, I know.  I don't post nearly enough on this blog to warrant starting another one.  Skepticism noted.

But I did start another blog.  This one is more explicitly academic and theological.  Together, these two blogs represent two sides of my personal theological project: the academic and spiritual interpretation of my encounter with divine revelation.  As I've come to see it, my academic work, just as much as my poetry, photos and stream-of-consciousness blogging, is a hermeneutic of God's action in my life and in the world that I observe.  What does that mean?  Well... I guess you'll have to go here to find out. :]

Cry, Night

Cry, Night!
You damned souls forever unmoving in your
     un-breath-ed stasis
Mind, will, imagination and love inward-turned
     Frozen now in your eternal genuflection before
     the all-devouring I.
No Evenstar can illumine here

Cry, Dawn!
You happy saints forever poured out in your
     Spirit-ed ekstasis
Soul, blood, imagination and love inward turned
     Outward now in your perpetual kenosis before
     the all-indwelling Thou
Dayspring breaks upon this eager morn.

The quiet in the loud

Today was an ordinary day in mid-June in central Texas: sunny and hot and still.  It was also my day to mow the rather large lawn at my church.  Dayspring Baptist Church is housed on a beautifully rolling piece of property.  It isn't far from a main highway and yet somehow, whether graced with a blessing of stillness and serenity or shielded by the tall Texan trees that separate its grounds from the busyness of the highway, this landscape is always quiet.

The stillness and the quiet of Dayspring's property are not merely physical.  There is an ethereal stillness and an otherworldly tranquility that is infused within the physicality of this place.  An ancient, or better yet, a timeless sanctity abounds here, as if the hills and the trees, the buildings made of stone and the iron bells, the roadrunners and the wild turkeys, the grasses and the flowers all exist in perpetual genuflection before an eternal Presence that knows them and calls them each by name.

In this place, one knows what it is to pray unceasingly; the Presence of the divine Spirit that lays thick in this "thin place"-- this place where the curtain of hiddenness that conceals the superabundance of Beauty that forms all reality is pulled back-- compels prayer.  In this place, prayer becomes as natural as inhalation; prayer becomes the simple language of one's breath.