The Magic of Winter

Sermon by Dwayne Eutsey


I’m not a big fan of winter. In fact, I can be downright Scrooge-like when it comes to this time of year.

What little there may be to like about winter is lost to me among my sore back from shoveling an endless layer of snow; driving on dangerously icy roads with the tires of other vehicles spitting and splattering that brown salty glop all over my car; paying those crushingly high heating bills; suffering through colds and flues, numb fingers and toes, and the never-ending sniffly, snotty noses.

With all that going on, is it any wonder I cringe when I hear those sappy songs about winter that we hear around this time? Songs like:

When it snows, ain't it thrilling,
Though your nose gets a chilling
We'll frolic and play, the Eskimo way,
Walking in a winter wonderland.

Especially when I remember digging out after last week’s big snow storm, all I can say to that winterist propaganda is: Bah humbug!

If cultural references to the season are any indication, I’m not alone in my Scroogey feelings about winter’s bleakness. Shakespeare, after all, coined the phrase “this is the winter of our discontent.” C.S. Lewis describes the dreary climate of his fantasy world in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as being “always winter but never Christmas.”

Emily Dickenson, in her poetically cryptic way, wrote

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons —
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes —

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us —
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are —

None may teach it — Any —
’Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air —

When it comes, the Landscape listens —
Shadows — hold their breath —
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death —

In his poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the appropriately named Robert Frost also equates a wintry evening with death.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Although that doesn’t sound so grim, literary critics like Jeffrey Meyers assert that Frost’s theme here is “the temptation of death, even suicide, symbolized by the woods that are filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year.” Meyers goes on to muse that “the speaker is powerfully drawn to these woods…and wants to lie down and let the snow cover and bury him.”

I wouldn’t go that far in my feelings about winter, but I have to admit that on dark, chilly mornings I want to remain buried under the blankets and hibernate until April. For people who have seasonal affective disorder, of course, such a mood is more intense during the cold winter months. Aside from the medical reasons for this, there also seems to be a mythic dimension to Seasonal Affective Disorder.

According to an ancient Greek myth, the lord of the underworld, Hades, wanted the goddess of the harvest, Persephone, to be his wife. This being in the days before eHarmony, which might have given Hades an easier way of finding a mate, he decided to kidnap the goddess. When Zeus, Persephone’s father, heard about this, he ordered Hades to return Persephone to her mother Demeter, the goddess of the Earth. Before Persephone left the underworld, however, Hades tricked her into eating the food of the dead, which meant she could not leave the underworld. Demeter cried foul but Hades insisted that rules were rules.

As king of the gods, Zeus had the final word on the matter and decreed that every year Persephone would spend six months with Demeter in the land of the living. After her harvest responsibilities were over, Persephone would then spend the next six months with Hades in the underworld. Whenever she went to be with Hades, her mother became so morose that her mood caused winter to envelope the world until Persophone returned from the underworld.

So, especially in many cultures of the northern hemisphere, winter is often associated in our collective imagination with barrenness, depression, and even death. As we know from our Fellowship’s involvement in the Talbot Interfaith Shelter, there is also the all-too-real plight of homeless men, women, and children right here in our community struggling to survive in this so-called winter wonderland.

You might be wondering, then, why the focus of today’s sermon is on the magic of winter. What is so enchanting about this season if it’s as dreary as I’ve outlined here? There are probably many answers to that question (some of which you can share during the multilogue today), but the most basic answer I can think of can be summed up in a single word.

Hope.

Hope that in the dead of winter, there is still the possibility of new life. Hope that an enduring light shines on in the wintry darkness. Hope that in the frigid isolation of the season, the warmth of a community like what we have here today remains.

As Mary Oliver reflects in Winter Hours:
In the winter I am writing about, there was much darkness. Darkness of nature, darkness of event, darkness of the spirit. The sprawling darkness of not knowing. We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of ________. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith–only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer…

I believe such determined hope is a universal human trait, one that underlies most religious traditions celebrated during this time. Interestingly, this winter hope is often infused with magical thinking especially among nature- based traditions. Pagans in Scandinavia, for example, burned the Yule log on the winter solstice in the hope that it would help engender the rebirth of the sun.

They gathered around large bonfires, drank mead, and listened to minstrel-poets sing ancient legends. Beyond the social need of gathering together in community, ancient Scandinavians believed that burning the Yule log had the magical ability to make the sun shine more brightly (I imagine the mead consumption may have contributed to this belief as well).

Similarly in ancient Rome on the winter solstice, Pagans feasted in honor of Natalis Solis Invicti, the “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun.” As with many Pagans of that era, Romans feared the sun was dying at the end of the year as the days grew shorter and shorter. On December 25, as sunlight seemed to last just a little longer at the end of the day, Romans held a solemn feast they hoped would encourage the continued rebirth of the sun, as represented for them by the sun-god Mithras.

Not surprisingly, early Christians found many parallels between the birth of their Son of God, Jesus, and the rebirth of the popular sun-god Mithras, which is one of the reasons the church co-opted December 25th as the birthday of Jesus. According to Christian theology, after all, Jesus is God’s “unconquered son” (s-o-n), who was born as a divine light shining in a darkened world. While the darkness tried to overcome the light, the light nonetheless prevailed.

Most Christians probably wouldn’t consider their mythic hope in this divine light magical, but how else do you characterize the supernatural power behind the virgin birth? What is magical if not the appearance of singing angels in the night sky and luminous stars that guide shepherds and wise men to the enduring hope of new life born in the form of a fragile human infant?
And it was all revealed, according to the nativity myth, in the dead of winter.

As a student of religion and the deep truths contained within myth, when I contemplate these magical ways of understanding winter, I can actually begin to feel my icy Scrooge-like grudge against the season thaw a little. But Scandinavian Pagans gathered around a burning Yule log and drinking mead, or Romans celebrating the rebirth of Mithras, or even Christians reliving the nativity story all seem far removed from my every day experience.

Intellectually, I can appreciate the magical hope nurtured by these rituals, and can even yearn to experience it myself during the winter doldrums, but it’s often just not there in an authentic way for me.

Or is it? Maybe like Scrooge, I’ve allowed myself to become so consumed by the dark and dreary aspects of this season that I have forgotten or overlook the magical light of the season that’s shining all around me. I don’t anticipate any winter ghosts paying me a visit anytime soon to point this out (not without copious amounts of mead consumption, anyway). So, in the spirit of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which was influenced by Unitarianism, I’ve taken it upon myself to reflect on events in my past, present, and maybe even future that exemplify the magical hope of winter that I’ve been discussing.

Following the spirit of Winter Past, I was taken back to my earliest winter memory at my grandmother’s house in Aberdeen, Maryland. I must have been four years old and recall sitting on the hardwood floor beside the Christmas tree in her living room. All the lights in the house were turned off except for the line of colorful lights strung around the tree, glowing through the silver tinsel and trim. I remember it feeling very magical at the time.

I loved to look at my distorted reflection in the fragile red and blue bulbs hanging from the Christmas tree branches like strange moons over the tiny toy village arranged on the floor below. I wondered what it would be like to become so tiny that I could go inside those little white cardboard houses sitting on the layer of snowy cotton. I also remember stepping behind the large curtain drawn across the picture window in the living room. For one magical moment, I gazed out at the stillness of freshly fallen, untouched snow glittering blue and white beneath streetlights shining in the wintry night.

Years later, when we lived in Dorchester County, I’d spend cold January afternoons playing in the barren woods behind my friend’s house. Trudging alone up the long country lane leading to home late in the day, I’d look at the sun setting on an orange horizon as everywhere else turned an icy violet hue. My legs numb, my nose sniffling, I remember that familiar feeling of entering the warm, well-lit kitchen where my mom was making dinner. Peeling off the snow- crusted hat and gloves and boots and savoring the aroma of whatever was bubbling on the stove, I had that magical sense of being where I belonged, safe and sheltered from the cold darkness gathering outside.

The spirit of Winter Present reminds me that as much as I may grumble about this time of year, there is something about winter’s austere beauty that I find hopeful, even magical. Even when I’m feeling the ache in my back as I shovel snow, I love to stop a moment and listen to that silence that only comes with a hefty layer of snow covering the ground. I gaze around and see dark, leafless trees reaching toward a gray sky as a large bird circles overhead with wings outstretched.

In a moment like this I’m reminded that life goes on even in the bleakest moments. I’m reminded that especially in the dead of winter, we yearn and search for joy, warmth, and community, just like that bird in the cold sky searches for life-sustaining food on the snowy ground below.

“Look at the birds of the air,” Jesus teaches us. “They do not sow or reap or store away in barns.” Yet, the creative power underlying all life feeds them. As strands in the interconnected web of life, we’re no different than these birds in our dependence on nature, but it’s easy to lose sight of that until winter’s scarcity reminds us of the magical interconnection we share with the land and other species.

With global climate change and the deadly erratic extremes of nature these days, the spirit of Winter Future casts some concern over this reassuring feeling that nature takes care of us. According to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Earth’s average temperature rose 1 degree F over the past century and is projected to rise another 3 to 10 degrees F in the next 100 years.

If temperatures continue to rise like this, future generations will only be able to dream of a white Christmas because such a phenomenon will have become a thing of the past. Or perhaps winter will become even harsher and more life- threatening. Researchers believe we can probably expect more extreme wet and dry conditions in the years to come. Coastal areas like the Eastern Shore may become more vulnerable to storm surges as the sea level rises.

Let’s hope we’ll realize that, to paraphrase Scrooge, if our current “courses be departed from, these dire climate predictions will change.” Even if we manage to avoid catastrophic climate events, however, the remission of life during winter will probably always remain associated in our imaginations with death, as I pointed out earlier.

The spirit of Winter Future, however, has also shown me that even this grim association can be hopeful. It even has the possibility of magic when we realize that winter, like our mortality, is simply a natural part of the rhythm of life. I’m not the first to point out that our lives have a seasonal pattern to them: the spring of our youth, the summer of our adulthood, the autumn of our midlife, the winter of old age. Winter, despite seeming to last forever, will eventually end and so will we. But winter also eventually melts away into the refulgent mystery of spring’s new life. Perhaps we have something unconquerable within whatever it is we are that will also experience a renewal of some sort. Perhaps.

I don’t know that the visit of these three spirits of winter have made me love this time of year any more than I did before. It’s tempting, in fact, for me to numb out to the season in the way Wallace Stevens wrote in his poem “The Snow Man”:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

With all due respect to Mr. Stevens, after reflecting on winter for this sermon I’m actually more inspired to behold and cherish the something that, like the unconquerable sun, endures even as we’re enveloped by the season’s cold and dark.

While I may still grumble “bah humbug” during this time of year, the magical spirit of winter now also leaves me more inclined to recognize the gifts that the season brings as well and to express a grateful “amen” for them and the undying light that shines all around and within us even during the longest wintry night.