The Darkest Time of the Year

I have been thinking tonight, and it occurs to me after a very strange fashion, that this may be the darkest time of the year. Yes, in terms of the Earth's trip around the sun, we are now on our way back to long daylight hours and short dark nights. In the dusky hollow between Christmas and the new year though, many of us grow introspective, reflective, retrospective. We turn and look behind us at another 12 months gone by... slack-jawed, agape at the swift passage of time which has taken no notice of us as it dashes by, save perhaps to gray a hair, deepen a wrinkle, or add inches to young frames. It can make us melancholy, thinking of things left undone or unsaid. Wrongs not righted... goals not met... old times gone by. Meant-tos and should-haves. This is the time of year when we self-evaluate, make resolutions and simultaneously flog ourselves for falling short in the current year, while puffing ourselves up with great hopes for how spectacular we will be in the year ahead.

How do we get to this place every time? Well, to start with... it IS darker and colder. Our souls (and our bodies) would really appreciate it if we could make like a bear and crawl into a cave and wait for spring. (Goodbye Christmas, wake me when it's Easter!) We've all come off this family-friends-food-fun high that kicks us in the teeth when we find that it is over... our spirits seem to be in some sort of detox from the drug of conviviality and community. We've run ragged to every party, gathering, family function, school show, parade, company Christmas, reunion, potluck and shindig we can possibly cram into a month. We've shopped til we drop, or madly baked, cooked, created and crafted our gifts. We have compromised our health, our sleep, our waistlines and our wallets in the name of one big party that is increasingly lost on the celebrants. We've spent lots on things that maybe don't matter as much as the one thing we all need more of but can't ever get... time. We're tired of everything and thirsty for something more all at once. We are too much time out of joint, too much of the time.

The sense of the liturgical calendar is gone from our lives too, it seems. I know so many people that couldn't wait to get their Christmas decorations out before Thanksgiving... now, just a few days into the "Twelve Days of Christmas", they are all bemoaning what a chore it is that they must be taken down. Everyone is dreading the return to work, to school, to ordinary life. For them, the star in the East has already set. The shepherds have returned to the fields and flocks... the magi have gone home by another route. We get so caught up in preparing for the big party at the manger for weeks ahead of time, that we don't spend most of the 12 Days actually celebrating it. We don't wait for Epiphany to reveal the visions of the three kings. I have my guilty moments too... I used to leave the tree up somewhat unintentionally, but fairly consistently until February or March. Now I set a strict January 5th deadline. I know that the modern, progressive church does not necessarily set much store by a lot of seasonal/liturgical hoopla. Nor does the modern Christian very often either I suspect. That's okay... but I'm a bit of a medievalist on this score. I adore the changing seasons of the church calendar, and the natural calendar. I continue to the think about the words from Ecclesiastes, reminding us that there IS a season for everything, and a time for every purpose under heaven. I think about how that might benefit us, to reserve a little time for each part of our lives... the mundane, the extraordinary. The holy, the profane, the profound. The sacred and the secular. Some will disagree... but for myself, it gives meaning to things to think about them each in their own context, and as part of a cycle of continuation. It gives me hope in the dark days of winter... it gives me something else to look forward to, and a new season in which to dwell, reflect, and revel. I'm still celebrating Christmas, and you can't stop me!

My big resolution for 2010? To live a very full and rich life, with time set aside for each thing after it's own needs... including time for God... so that this time next year I'm feeling blessed and fulfilled, instead of wondering what I've done with another year.

In the Hub of Circle of Life...

I sit here tonight,(well, really, this morning, in point of fact) filled with a strange sense of the vastness, the miraculousness, and the fragility of life as we know it. In just a short few hours this evening, I have word that my cousin should be delivered of her daughter any moment, and that my friend's sister, who has been battling cancer for maybe 10 years now, and who had been in pallative care, has died. Here we live, on the needle-fine precipice, as soft as the breath in our nostrils, as fleeting as shooting star. Yet that space is filled with the immenseness of a lifetime's experiences. I have been in this place before... a juxtaposition of life and death that makes your head whip around with awe. How can it go so fast? There is a beauty in the realization of how delicate the balance is... each moment moves another grain through hourglass, a pennyweight from one side of the scale to the other... more beautiful still that we have no notion of the total amount being measured. We can only mark what is passed, and guess and hope at what is yet to be. We have to relish the now, and embrace these small hours because as I am being reminded tonight; the little space of our lives, the gift of it, and the joy of it, is in the uncertainty of it. That is what makes the gift precious. Yes, how strange it all is, and how frightening, and how perfect.