Tonight is the longest night. For everyone in the Northern Hemisphere, this is the darkest day of the year.
Today, on the day of the year we can least rely on sight, the #AdventWord is “hear.”
On the darkest night, when it’s hard to see the next step, we remember we have a lot of different ways of knowing what the next step is. We don’t just follow the light. We follow the music, too. We feel our way along dark passageways. We take a deep breath and smell where the clear cold air is coming from.
Our spiritual lives have seasons. The way we experience God changes, how we read Scripture changes, the role church plays in our life changes, how we pray changes.
Being religious in the “summer” of our life, the bright summer solstice when we saw things clearly, is going to be different than winter spirituality, when our way of knowing can’t rely on sight the way we used to. And summer spirituality is not more “normal” than winter - all these ways of knowing are legitimate and holy. They’re just new to us, and feel more tentative, and that can feel scary.
But if we are dancing home to music in the dark, we are still coming home. If our prayers seem more like running our hands along the edge of a labyrinth and feeling our way towards God, we are still praying.
Seasons shift. There are different ways of knowing God in each season. It can be scary when the old spiritual disciplines we’ve relied on abandon us. When they fail, it can feel like God has failed - or we have failed. No no, not even a little. It’s not our fault if it’s hard to learn new spiritual ways of knowing. It’s not our fault if the new ways feel clunky, it we’re not used to walking by touch or following our nose instead. We are praying or worshipping in new ways, redefining “quiet time” or Sunday mornings sacredness. It’s not easy. Winter spirituality takes practice, especially if we were “good at” summer spirituality.
But this is very holy ground, here in the darkness. There is so much good knowing here. There is so much to taste and smell and hear that we miss in the brightness of summertime. There is holiness drenching the darkness, once we trust our bodies to know it in new ways.