Sweater Weather

Snowflakes were falling yesterday, and not for the first time this year. More days than not, the skies have begun to turn gray. Nearly all the leaves have fallen from the trees. Temperatures look like they’ll be in the 30s most of this week. It seems that winter is upon us.

If you ask most people what their favorite season of the year is, not many will say winter. I’m working on embracing the stark beauty of this season and the wonder of the many adaptations that the natural world undergoes to weather it. And so in preparation for my first Wisconsin winter this year, I recently read a book called Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. While it’s not a “Christian book” (written by and for Christians for the sake of deepening our faith), I found many insights in it that apply to our individual faith journeys, as well as our communal life together in congregations, this synod, our denomination, and the church beyond us.

I often find myself wishing that life was more linear - endless upward progress towards perfection. Our lives, however, are less linear than cyclical. Just like the ever-changing seasons of the year, and all of the natural transformations they propel, so too do we experience the cycling of different seasons in our lives. We often encounter similar issues, emotions, seasons, over and over again, sometimes at a deeper level each successive time around. Each season has a dramatic impact upon our inner landscape. Each season demands that we change with it. While we cannot control the changing of the seasons, we can adapt to live with them. 

So it’s time to get out your boots, and sweaters, and coats, and hot cocoa. It’s time we change our plans from spending long hours frolicking outdoors, to snuggle up indoors near a fireplace (or huddle in an ice-fishing hut!). We will get the most out of winter if we accept this season for what it is.

The same is true in our congregations and the greater church. We get the most out of each season when we can accept and through the Holy Spirit adapt to it. I work with our congregations in transition - in between one pastor and the next. These congregations find themselves in an season generally seen as less desirable than say summer. It’s a winter of sorts, a time when fields lie fallow, preparing for the next season, waiting to spring up again. On the surface, it doesn’t look like much, but there is transformational work happening to bring the future to birth. And God’s presence in the midst of this season of winter, is no less real, no less faithful, than in the long and bountiful days of summer.

Perhaps there are gifts here in this season. Perhaps God is doing a new thing, as the season of Advent reminds us. Perhaps there is beauty in the stark landscape, the drifting snow, the crisp cold.

As May puts it, in her book: “Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” 

May you come to know God’s presence, perhaps differently, but faithfully during this and every season of your life.

Rev. Asher O’Callaghan
Associate to the Bishop
Director for Transitions and Discernment