I started writing this sermon on Thursday. I was sitting exactly where I am right now, at this desk, before this computer screen. Behind the screen- what you can’t see – is a large window, beyond which are trees, now bare, and a pond, still frozen. This room is chilly during the day, so I have a small heater aimed at my feet warming the space around me. As I typed on my keyboard, both dogs slept in the circle of warmth right around me.
I spend every Thursday in this same spot, dogs asleep beside me. That I write all day Thursday doesn’t mean I’m not frantic in the wee hours of Sunday trying to make a sermon out of thousands of words that go nowhere and mean nothing. But, Thursdays are always good, with plenty of time before me and enough space from the last sermon to have some new ideas germinating.
Winter around my house is very quiet. Some of you know, I live in the woods. I am both a country mouse and a city mouse. On Thursdays, I’m home and everyone else is gone, making for an unusual stillness here. Around me, all the leaves are down which means I can see for quite a distance through the trees outside this window. In summer, the woods are lush and active, with squirrels and chipmunks, deer and groundhogs and dozens of species of birds including pheasants and turkeys and owls and hawks and heron, all making a ruckus. In the winter, everyone has gone to sleep. All is quiet and still and clear.
Every January, I step away from social media, too. I love Facebook and Twitter and think they are the tools we’ll use to change the world. But for at least a month, I let the voices go silent. I enjoy all of the 2000 friends I have in my newsfeed, each saying things that are meaningful or funny or informative, each offering me a window into who they really are, including many of you. But, in the winter, I shut that door so I can hear my own voice and the voices of the people right in front of me. And, I can pay attention to the voices of the wind and the trees.
I’m very ready for the warm weather to return. Getting back outside will be a relief, but there’s an emptying that happens in the winter, a clearing out, that provides the respite needed to get back into the busyness of spring. Spring is defined by new growth, bold colors and big bursts of energy. Kids are in fields playing soccer and baseball and lacrosse or running around playgrounds and screaming on slides. We’ve been so cooped up these last few years that warm weather becomes an instant invitation to find a friend and go for a walk and with covid receding, we’re poised for a tsunami of crowded parks and street music and skateboards.
Winter provides the silence before the storm.
There are two spiritual practices this transition time always brings to mind. The Katophatic also called the Via Positiva and the Apophatic also called the Via Negativa.
The Katophatic path, the path of the Positive, is the one that has much. It begins with descriptions of God, defining and explaining the Divine, talking about all the ways God is good and powerful and present. The Katophatic path might have music and elaborate ritual, incense and readings. There are always a lot of words both sung and spoken often with explanations and exposition and symbols and metaphors packed into sermons that say interesting things, offering insight and ideas and food for brains to chew on. The Via Positiva. It’s what I call the spiritual path of The Stuff.
Apophatic spirituality or the Via Negativa, is the opposite. It’s the spiritual path of emptiness. Nothing. Silence. God is in the void. Indescribable. A whisper. The Quakers share an apophatic spiritual practice when they join together in silence on Sundays. Those who Sit as a Zen practice are also on an apophatic path. Sitting. Being. Listening. It’s a spirituality of desolation, calling us into the barren wilderness where we can rest un-assaulted.
Christmas feels like the ultimate time for kataphatic spirituality. There is So. Much. This past year, Hanukkah and Christmas weren’t simultaneous or even that close together which gave us even more time for even more ritual and words and symbols and traditions. And, I’m not just talking about intentionally religious practices. Our shared national spirituality includes the constant playing of music, gathering of people even during covid-times, the added decorating found in every public and most private spaces. It’s a lot of stuff.
Then comes January, the time we shift into an apophatic pattern of quiet. Ice and cold conspire to keep us still, to move us indoors. The world gets smaller as outside space is less welcoming.
The path of apophatic simplicity feels natural in winter. It’s a gift of Earth. It’s the breath we take between the frolic of the holiday season and the new growth of the springtime. It’s an opportunity to renew our spirits through an emptying.
We don’t live in an age of simplicity. I’d venture to say we live in an age of complexity. Nothing seems easy. Costs are rising as quality of life is falling. Economic disparities are increasing faster than we can track and there’s a cultural expectation not to talk about the stress of paying bills or the constant worry about increasing debt.
I run a small food justice organization. We’ve done a great job of getting locally sourced, highly nutritious food to the poor. What we’re having trouble doing is getting it to a new and growing class of people who grew up in middle or even upper middle classes who haven’t been able to keep up. Often, these are working people, even people in professional jobs that require high levels of education, but our institutions don’t pay these people well enough to live without fear. The largest growing group – and this is anecdotal based largely on my experience, although backed up some by recent statistics – the largest growing group is middle aged, divorced women. Women who weren’t the primary bread-winners in their families who found themselves alone with jobs that can’t support the homes they live in, who can’t sell because they owe so much in back taxes or double mortgages that selling won’t solve any problems. In my little food justice organization, we can’t help these people. You know why? They are hidden. They don’t tell anyone how desperate they are. They go out to lunch with friends like things are fine and order the cheapest thing they can, saying they just ate while slowing filling up on free bread. I’ve found them in our volunteer circles, asking once most of the food has been given away, if there might be some extra for them to take home. There is an urgency to provide assistance, some relief from hunger and fear and debt, but our culture silences and shames people so they don’t talk about this kind of desperation.
Our economic system prevents so many of us from living peaceful, balanced lives. We’re in a system that tells us more is better, that larger, faster, stronger, newer is the way to go, keeping so many of us on hamster wheels as we run just to stay in place.
We live in a complicated world, one that requires a lot of money which in turn requires a lot of time and we find ourselves running from one thing to the next, always late, always tired, forgetting to eat, constantly knowing no matter how much we do, there’s always more to be done. There was a fascinating article in the Times about over-parenting or hyper-vigilant-parenting, that comes from a place of parents understanding that the disparity between rich and poor is widening and people get lost too easily, so we spend every free moment doing all we can to make sure our kids aren’t the ones who find themselves without a safety net.
We’re seeing historically low rates of volunteerism across the country with donations to small non-profits at levels not seen since the depression, if ever. If you ask anyone why they don’t give time or money, the answer is generally because they don’t have any. At the same time, the number of non-profits has doubled since 1995, each needing boards and volunteers and donations. So, the need increases while the supply decreases. This leads to a dramatic, national loss of well-funded, well-staffed organizations that aren’t seeking to make a profit, but to support all those people who are falling through the cracks and to push for social and economic changes that might save us from the systems that are tearing us up.
Simplicity can become the gift that saves us.
I have a vision for a simple life, and for a community that embraces simplicity as a shared spiritual path. It’s a place where people work less and rest more, where we accept the wearing of older clothes, of staycations and slow food, of intentional communities where people pick up milk for a neighbor as long as you’re at the store and commit to teaching religious education in their houses of worship or volunteering at local advocacy groups with the time we aren’t spending on those hamster wheels. It’s neighborhoods or other communities where people prioritize the group and help each other in significant, meaningful ways so that everyone can live simply, having let go of some of our more complicated expectations.
Henry David Thoreau, the 19th century Unitarian writer who went to the woods to shake off the civilized life he found deadening, wrote: “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
I ask you: Where do your main roots run? How could you free your life of incumbrances? What are the things that keep you from living simply? Might you be able to live gently with other people, letting go of expectations and being more of yourself so others can be themselves when they are with you? Is the gift of simplicity something you can offer? Is it something you can receive?
Covid has helped us drop pretenses. We work from home with kids and pets and noise that force a breakdown of professionalism, replacing it with realism. As we leave our homes to return to offices, people are dressing down, women are wearing flats, even jeans are making their way into the American workplace. At the same time, people are quitting and retiring, leaving their jobs altogether. Schedules are changing, priorities are shifting and boundaries are blurring in a way that might prove very healthy for all of us.
Winter gives us time to reflect, to take stock of culture shifts and to ask questions of ourselves about how we fit into the new landscape. The riot of spring isn’t far away with all her movement and noise. But it’s still winter, a time to downshift. Get quiet. Turn down the volume. Releasing ourselves from other people’s expectations. This is the season for an apophatic spiritual path, listening to the wind, sitting still, waiting for whispers from the trees. I’m going to find my main roots, move away from scattered shallowness, distinguishing the necessary and the real.
I invite you to join me.