This Is Your Life

In our earlier reading, Russell Baker gives a humorous account of losing his sense of self and his sense of his life when his circumstances radically change. Clearly he eventually started reflecting on what was happening in his life - maybe around late August. But we just ended summer this week, and for many of us, fall is a contemplative time. It’s a time for thinking, for walking and pondering. It is a time for taking time because we know the rush of the winter holidays is around the corner, but it is there, around the corner, and not yet here. Now we pause, look ahead, draw breath before diving into the next wave in the sea, sometimes calm, sometimes stormy, of our year.

And part of what we anticipate is the hunkering down of winter, provisioning ourselves with heating oil and firewood and boots and warm clothes, ready to make the best of the dark months ahead when we rise in the dim light of cold mornings and drive home in the twilight of late winter afternoons.

The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:

Lord: it is time. Great was the summer’s feast.
Now lay upon the sun-dials your shadow
And on the meadows have the winds released.

Command the last of fruits to round their shapes;
Grant two more days of south for vines to carry,
To their perfection thrust them on, and harry
The final sweetness into heavy grapes.

Who has not built his house, will not start now.
Who now is by himself will long be so.
Be wakeful, read, write lengthy letters, go
In vague disquiet pacing up and down
Denuded lanes, with leaves adrift below.

The cold months of the year are a difficult time for many. Rilke is right; if we have not built our house, we will not start then. Lots of people go into a minimalist mind set, come November and December. The coming months are to be got through, until finally spring returns triumphant with flowers and sunshine, and then, summer’s feast. That is when life begins anew, and for many of us, that is when we begin anew as well.

Until then, we feel as Shelley describes in his Ode to the West Wind:

"O wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,
Thou, form whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Like those winged seeds, pregnant with life within, we tend to lie low, and sometimes cold, in winter. Sometimes our spirits are likewise low, waiting for the lift of spring. When this condition comes with the cold, dark months, it is called SAD - seasonal affective disorder, and it’s something a lot of us suffer from. But it is worth noticing that this lowness and capacity to go into a reduced mode of living, doesn’t only come in the bleak months of nature’s cycle. Sometimes it comes at what feels like a winter in our lives - the winter of our own personal discontent.

We all know the feeling of life suddenly or slowly, bending away from our will, our hope, our striving, towards what we fear or dread or are not ready for. We may have been directing all our energies in another direction, or to ward of what has now happened nonetheless. We lose someone we love, or our work comes to naught, someone’s illness worsens and we must change our entire lives to help them, or are finally helpless to help them. The circumstances of an emotional or spiritual winter have differed for many of us, but the experience of bleakness, of hunkering down, of going into the highly focused, necessarily limited way of being called "coping mode," is common to us all. And we often talk about these times as interim periods - until we get our lives back, especially if the circumstances prevailing are not circumstances we chose.

In the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Job, Job’s sufferings are the result of a wager the devil lures God into making with him. Satan bets that Job, one of God’s most faithful followers, will falter in his faith, if he loses all the fortune and prosperity that make his life, and presumably his tangibly rewarded faith, easy. God takes him up on it, and Job proceeds to lose everything. Everything includes his health, his wealth, and eventually even his beloved children. Throughout all, he questions why this is happening to him, but his faith in God never wavers. And in the very end, he is ultimately rewarded; he gets back his health and his wealth, and his wife has many more children, as beloved as the first were.

One of the many difficulties of the Job story is relevant for our consideration today. because although in one sense he recoups all his terrible losses, he never gets his life back. His health is renewed, but he still had to go through the physical pain and suffering of his illnesses, which take necessarily changes a person. He recovers his wealth, and money is money, so that’s pretty much that. But his children, his beloved children are dead, and lost forever. He has more children with his wife, but these are different children, and his loss of the first is irredeemable. The life he continues is not the life he lost - that earlier, more innocent existence with a different family of children around him, is lost forever. His life continues, and is even blessed, but it is not the same, and if that was what he was waiting for, he can never have it.

This critique is one made outside of the story, it is not answered by the story itself. It is one of the places where God comes off looking pretty poor. But the reality the story illustrates is profoundly true for each of us - there are times when our lives are changed, and we will never get our old lives, nor our old selves, back.

W.H. Auden has also treated this difficult theme of how we live. He wrote:

"For us like any other fugitive,
Like the numberless flowers that cannot number
And all the beasts that need not remember,
It is today in which we live.

So many try to say Not Now
So many have forgotten how
To say I Am, and would be
Lost, if they could, in history."

Perhaps the great challenge of difficult or dreaded periods in life is not to be patient through such times, nor even to embrace them, which is sometimes too much to ask of any person. Perhaps the great task is just to accept that even at such times, this is our life. There is no waiting to get our life back later, this is our life, this nursing or mourning our loved one, this losing our job or failing in a great effort or having to wait for something we can’t wait for. This is your life.

That understanding may not make anything easier or more comprehensible, but it does offer two things. It can give us the awareness and perspective that can help us make the best decisions and live as fully as we can, even in the bleak midwinter. Now winter living is different than spring or summer living, no question, and I’m not suggesting anything different. We have a carol in the hymnal, In the Bleak Midwinter, the point of which is that in the bleak midwinter, while earth stands hard as iron, and water is like a stone and snow has fallen on snow, on snow, on snow, Jesus was born, into the midst of barren cold, love and hope came anew, in that moment as triumphant as they were fragile.

That point of that song is important for us, even we Unitarian-Universalists, because we too believe in light in darkness, in hope amidst adversity, in love standing against pain. But that story is also important, even precious, because it is special. Most of the time winter is winter, and miracles do not abound. Even as we hope for miracles, we need to know that the reality of our life is what it is, and it is as real as what came before and as what will come after.

Things happen to us, and to those around us, and thus are we changed, whether we will or no. We cannot live according to the conclusion of Shelley’s ode:

"The trumpet of a prophecy! O, Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
if that means we live in denial of winter’s place in things,
giving our acknowledgement only to the spring and summertime.

And not only can acknowledging the reality of the dark times in our lives help us gain perspective on them, it can also help us make the best of them, not by living despite the dark times, but by finding the opportunities for meaningful existence, even beauty or joy, within them. Metaphorically, if we refuse to acknowledge winter, lighting our homes and warming them and staying inside in shorts and t-shirts, and enduring in that limited way the cold, we can never know the experience of the crystalline brilliance of a clear winter night sky, or the thrill of walking at night on a frozen lake, or the fun of ice skating or snow angels and snow forts and hot chocolate held between your mittens. Even in a dark or bleak time of life, beauty or joy can be found, though perhaps not always when we would have it. We cannot live through the difficult times with an expectation that such will come to us when we need or want it most, but we can live with the hope that such will come even to us, perhaps when we expect it least.

As the world begins now to become more bare by the day, and we move from a world of green to grey and sometimes white, we know that in times to come, in winter, the world is full of beauty. Nature and humanity are filled with hope and promise. In accepting the reality of the elements of life, whatever cycle they be in, and in accepting our place in those elements, we affirm our connection to beauty as well as bleakness, hope as much as despair, rejuvenation as much as tiredness that seeks rest or even mindlessness. The beauty of the earth, the love that is available to us, within us, and around us, the solace of colors and fragrance and song and embrace, they are part of what is sacred and sustaining, available to all of us, all the time.

This is our time, not another. These are our lives. They are a paradox; our lives are partly, but not entirely, what we chose. And so we suffer. Yet there are still always further choices which confront us, in winter as well as summer. These choices are ours, our choices for our lives. When we recognize the choices before us, and choose, we own our lives whatever their state, and we are better able to live fully and well.

May we be among those who say "Now," and "I am," and may we know, in the winters of our suffering, warmth and light that sustain us. Amen.