I need to share that in writing under this title, that I am not just honoring the wisdom of the seasons of Nature. I want to honor the experience of many of my clients, as well as within my own many years of life experience.
Darkness
I write this at the time of mid-winter – the time of year when the days are shortest, and the nights are longest. And it seems that peoples from aeons ago have always known to “do something” about this.
My own professional involvement for a number of months had involved preparing a middle-aged client for prison as the result of an auto accident where her passenger was killed, and alcohol was involved – and now serving a 15-year sentence.
So ‘darkness to hope’ has been a very present personal quest. Where could we go other than buying into the conventional retributive framework of crime and punishment? (Which is not my soul’s home.)
Balance & Blessing
My Native American friends have a wise saying:
“Blessings and Balance,
Balance and Blessings,
For from Balance comes all Blessings.”
That wisdom has fed me for many years. What could it teach me here?
Then my attention was drawn to a phrase in Kahlil Gibran’s classic, The Prophet: “The deeper that sorrow has carved itself into your being, the more joy you can contain.”1
What could these wise resources teach me?
In the Bible, it emerges that almost everyone who wrestles with God, will carry a wound of some sort, as well as a blessing.2 They actually seem to balance each other.
I have long been a person of Hope. And I’m used to helping and seeing clients work things out, one way or another. And sometimes ‘working things out’ can mean ‘wrestling things out.’ But in the ‘secret’ of Blessings and Balance is the reason why I don’t burn out after all these years.
The Lessons of Nature
I grew up with people who live close to the land – Iowa farmers. Also having being adopted into a northern woodlands Native American community. And for both, their primary textbook was their interaction with Nature herself. They learned from the rhythms of Nature. “Seedtime and Harvest.” Each Season has its work, its benefits, and its joys. We are now just emerging from the time of Harvest – Fall often being a ‘favorite’ season, when beauty and dying intermingle in an explosion of Nature’s beauty and serenity. The plants earlier seeded, tended, harvested and stored, will now feed and sustain us through the dark time. In the Winter, farm folks will tend the animals, repair the implements, and dream. (In my memory of grade-school years, in each Fall there were more birthdays celebrated than other times of the year.) The Natives call Winter “the Dream Time” – when whatever is going on is hidden underground.
I have the luxury of ‘knowing’ two major “mid-winter” rituals of Hope. First, there is Christmas, when God renews the world through the hidden birth of a fragile Baby. Only a quarter year later does the story ‘break open’ with Easter, and the “Birth of the Church.”
Secondly, I have been able to frequently participate in the Ojibway Winter Solstice – a rich High Ceremony, where we let almost everything go, so we can be built anew on ancient human and spiritual values – the sacred Creation Story is told, and an elder shouts to the Sun to “return.” And it does.
Patience – the antithesis of ‘human greed’_
One additional ‘teaching’ from Nature.
The Sun begins its return at the Winter Solstice. The days do begin to get longer, day by day. And yet the Winter cold will continue and even increase for a few more months. The plants safe under the earth’s surface aren’t ready to ‘come forth’ – the Sun must ‘take time ’to warm the earth so the plants can emerge, so the trees can leave, so the animals can venture out from their Winter stables. The Earth knows, understands, and trusts the necessity of this patience, and so must we.
In the Christian calendar there’s also a parallel ‘delay’, a time of patience between Christmas and Easter, between the coming (birth) of the Holy Child, and the Death of the Holy Child. Then can emerge Resurrection and Pentecost – where the ‘rest of the world’ can have the Hope of the Redeeming Christ, the Hope of the Kingdom, Life relieved of the burdens of sin, (all this Christian language!).
The first months of the Narrative are in relative secrecy. The life of Christ was hidden from the world except for the minor emergences of Jesus, healing and teaching a new ethic of Divine Love, and forecasting his necessary death, by which the World finally could blossom (the Time of the Church), and the coming (harvest) of the Kingdom.
Hope, like love, is patient – a virtue that takes time to form, to mature.
Greed – the antithesis of Patience
For the time being, I’ll use this word in place of the (highly prized by Christians) word ‘sin.’ A simple definition of human greed is “I want what I want, and deserve to get it at whatever cost because I deserve it more than you (others).”
Greed is the death blow to the balance we can learn from Nature. Our current “climate crisis” is the visible manifestation of human greed destroying Nature. It’s as if a disease would wipe out all women, leaving 1) the men totally (and some gleefully) in charge, but then leading to 2) the total death of all humanity. Would Nature weep, or say “hurray”? – an open question with nobody left around to ask.
Greed is more impatient – like a 4-year old, “I want what I want when I want it – now! It’s developmentally immature (and therefore more innate to a market-oriented society.
What then of Hope?
Two responses
1) I began to notice some years ago, that every time I’ve been involved in a religious or spiritual ritual or exercise, something within me, a unique identity emerges, by which I can affirm
“Now I know who I am!”
Then I realized this is probably a universal experience, issuing from many or all religious and spiritual traditions and experiences. I know it from the completion of the services in my own church. Being sent forth, “Now I know who I am!”
And all the both open and secret resources of Nature and Life, will in Hope respond with love and prosperity. In short, we will be Blessed.
2) And what can I promise or advise for my client now behind bars? Is there any Balance, is there any Blessing I could point to?
I couldn’t unequivocally say yes. But I refuse to say no.
There’s a reason that visiting those in prison is one of the Catholic Cardinal Acts of Mercy. Mature Human-kind has long been known to not abandon those who live in darkness. I can visit her. I will keep in touch. I will pray for her, and lay flowers on the grave of her friend who died. We would talk when together, navigating her terror in those months before she was sentenced – and before I watched in that courtroom as she was led away. Words can ferry hope. Words can connect. We can both write.
I can affirm (maybe stubbornly) that there’s always Hope – and we can both walk out of this darkness with the ability to exclaim “Now I know who I am.” And somehow there is a “we” that forms as well. Community emerges – often forming slowly, with patience.
Yes, there is darkness, and often there’ll still be more darkness, as yet a Hope begins it’s subtle emergent journey upwards.3
Hope, like love, is patient. It takes time. Like all Winter – awaiting….
Footnotes
1 This book was a great favorite of my mother, and to encounter it again was as if a timely gift from the past.
2 Often, when context and circumstances allow, I’ll share with clients the account of Jacob wrestling with the angel, in Genesis 32 – then getting wounded, and then blessed (in that order).
3 Interestingly within a month or more of incarceration, she wrote me of joining a Bible study group studying the Book of Job.
2 thoughts on “From Darkness to Hope”
You are a very spiritual person, Bill. Also evidenced by your singing.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this moment in your life.
Beautiful!
I cannot fully know your path, Bill. For me the crisis of your friend & your care for her brought tears to my eyes. And some anger. Will such a long incarceration bring about redemption? She may already know such grace in the waiting time. Will punishment “correct” her mind and soul? Research has shown that punishment neither prevents nor corrects. When someone goes to prison so goes their family and friends. Circumstance putting you relatively close by might be the blessing for now. May her memory be a blessing for you, in the meantime.