Most years the advent of winter has evoked dread. Or, if and when approached in a spirit of surrender, it's inspired sighs, even commitment to long-suffering, a reluctant dedication to further the very important virtue of patience, to carry the hope of spring-coming. Yet often the chill in the air makes breathing out in those steam puffs. Perhaps they’re little smoke-signals asking permission to join the bears—how about hibernating until the world turns alive again?
But then this week late autumn’s falling, mostly fallen, leaves are sprinkling wonder. Today, as shown above, the woods’ opening increased witness of dawn’s beauty. And turning to the opposite western sky, a double rainbow arched to land both north and south, even before the rains arrive.
Yesterday the sun-lit woods, more bared to essence, showed a redbud reduced to a few leaves, looking like heart-shaped jewels were tracing out the bowing limbs in lines as graceful as ballerinas, almost weightless, defying gravity. Alongside it a young maple echoed the dance, yellow light against the dimmed exuberance of spring, the background of fallen leaves turning bronze and disappearing as if the superficial gives way, releasing the eternal.
Instead of dreading winter, this year there’s an exciting sense of winter tracks wanting to be followed, the ones leading further into the “True Self.”
Recent reading of Richard Rohr has prepared the way to welcome the closed-in season because it’s a time especially fitting for contemplation. In his book on the second half of life, Rohr explains how summer’s “loyal soldier” builds the container for a person’s winter work and how the soldier has to be thanked and dismissed.
“Paradoxically, your loyal soldier gives you so much security and validation that you may confuse his voice with the very voice of God. If this inner and critical voice has kept you safe for many years as your inner voice of authority, you may end up not being able to hear the real voice of God. The loyal soldier is the voice of all your early authority figures. His or her ability to offer shame, guilt, warnings, boundaries, and self-doubt is the gift that never stops giving. Remember, it can be a feminine voice too; but it is not the ‘still, small voice’ of God (I Kings 19:13) that gives us our power instead of always taking our power.
The loyal soldier cannot get you to the second half of life. He does not even understand it. He has not been there. He can help you ‘get through hell,’ with the early decisions that demand black-and-white thinking; but then you have to say good-bye when you move into the subtlety of midlife and later life. . .
There is a deeper voice of God, which you must learn to hear and obey in the second half of life. It will sound an awful lot like the voices of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of ‘common sense,’ of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of your deepest self, of soulful ‘Beatrice.’ The true faith journey only begins at this point…we have a container strong enough to hold the contents of our real life, which is always filled with contradictions and adventures and immense challenges. Psychological wholeness and spiritual holiness never exclude the problem from the solution. If it is wholeness, then it is always paradoxical, and holds both the dark and light sides of things. (pp. 46, 48. Falling Upward; emphasis in original)
The passage invites return and deeper engagement in the resources such as the Mystical Languages of Unsaying and to the Beloved, the stories of Layla… and forward into The Cloud of Unknowing and others. Also, Rohr points particularly to Thomas Merton for guidance, especially to his New Seeds of Contemplation. Merton also reveals tracks on the pathway including those of St. John of the Cross and in his translation/versions of portions of Chuang Tzu. In his introduction, Merton writes: “The key to Chuang Tzu’s thought is the complementarity of opposites, and this can be seen only when one grasps the central ‘pivot’ of Tao which passes squarely through both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No,’ ‘I’ and ‘Not-I’ (p. 30). A sample appropriate to the forced inactivity of winter:
“… No one seems to know
how useful it is to be useless.”
The Way of Chuang Tzu, p. 59
These guides join others who teach and inspire in the way to the Beloved, the pathway home. This winter promises opportunity to re-trace ground turned years before, intent on deeper reflection. For example, these lines noted in last year’s autumn are calling:
“When the servant comes to know himself, thereby knowing God, he does not know God in Himself. Rather, he knows Him as his own Lord. This is the God who discloses Himself to the soul, and the self-disclosure is different from that experienced by any other soul. The God that I come to know through knowing myself is the God of my own belief, the water which has assumed the color of my cup.” William Chittick, Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination, p. 344 (cited in Light Enough, Sept 24, 2019).
