The Promise of Winter.

Dwelling

Envy the sparrow, in its often aimless flight? Be jealous of the swallow whose swoops lead it only to sparse food? Envy other beings small and weak, just because they have homes and nests? Envying the birds, or at least pointing to their example, was precisely what seekers long ago would do. Far from the holy place which was their own true home, they yearned to be where the presence of God was announced. Anywhere else spelled homelessness and meant being adrift, lost.

In the winter of our days, physical warmth for most of us is only a twist of the thermostat dial away. Some versions of the "courts of the Lord's Temple" are as available as the offerings labeled "Churches" in the Yellow Pages. But in the winter of the heart, distraction keeps us from appreciating the holiness that could alter our lives, the warmth that is at hand in the company of gathered believers.

So it will be, until we recall the promise of the Presence, and then let it work on our imagination and experience. If we are away too long from the courts of the Lord, we may go off on aimless flights where no satisfaction, sustenance, or rest will follow. Frequenting the holy places, as if by habit but still and always with longing, we become positioned to let the strong words of love in the promised company of Christ reach us, until the new direction comes for the week that follows.

Growth

Tundra: the Russians gave us the word, perhaps because they had so much of the reality to share. The tundra is treeless, bushless, vast, and level. North of it, ice and snow agelessly refuse to recede. South of it, the ground may occasionally thaw. Here, in the in-between locale, one encounters a virtual desert of the northland, where brooks do not flow, lakes do not thrive, melted snow cannot nourish, and no one stands by to offer help.

The barren soul, the unnourished inner life, bears the marks of the tundra: spiritual starving threatens. Those who languish might envy and then wish to flee to the lush southlands, where waters do flow, hands are said to reach generously, and there are supposed to be ready smiles. But tundras are portable. Desertification or progressive ice covering afflicts that inner life of people in all physical climates and can take over among unalert believers, including us.

The first step in recovery, the first move toward nourishment, comes with an acknowledgment of need. This need impels a gesture, a reaching out and up, as it were, with weak hands, to be opened as for a gift. The gift has long been ready' offered as it is by the divine hand that has been reaching for us all along. From it come both the means to enrich our soul's environment and the warmth to let love grow.

Guidance

"Falling," a poem by James Dickey, puts the reader into the mind of a flight attendant who fell more than 30,000 feet to the Kansas soil when an airplane door opened unexpectedly. The horror of the headlong drop, where there is no chance of recovering a foothold, grips the reader who thus falls at second hand. But falling occurs also on the level ground, in ordinary life, as when pioneers stumbled during a blizzard or when travelers leave their marooned autos along the drift-full highway.

Avoiding manifest dangers of the winter landscape will help minimize the dangers of falling, but still we stumble. We know that misfortune is unavoidable through the years. In any case, averting the headlong fall can lead to self-assurance and then stumbling: "I, for one, will go alone through life without missteps." Again, however, "I" will not. Morally a person may avoid criminal activity and yet be nagged by petty impulses. Spiritually one may not fall into total skepticism and yet be harassed by doubts. Intellectually one may not fall into nihilism, but still unanswered questions can be plaguing, almost paralyzing.

Faith says, as does the psalm, that what keeps us from headlong plunges is the fact that "the Lord holds us by the hand." Confidence in that guiding hand aids us through the wintry and drifting passages of our soul until we come to more secure footing again.

Salvation

When the winter wanderer located a way to the pilgrim hostel, nothing to be found was more cheering than the greeting that came with the cup of warm mead. The fallen victim of war on barren battlefields finds no help more enlivening than the cup of water. The patient rings a bell and a nurse comes with a cup to quench the thirst and restore health. In all three cases, the assuaging was momentary, though satisfying.

Satisfying and lasting was the cup of salvation lifted by a psalmist in Israel, after his healing. And in the New Covenant story, on the night before he died, Jesus also lifted the cup of salvation and imparted it to those near him, promising to do so again in the regathering at a feast to come. Twenty centuries later, many celebrants around the cup sing of it as the cup of salvation.

The gospels say that on the night of his Last Supper, Jesus prayed that another cup, a cup of suffering, would be removed. It was not, and he was to take what it contained, following to the cross of divine love.

So it is that the cup of suffering and the cup of salvation, the crown of thorns and the glorious crown worn by the world's healer, fuse into one in the imaging of those who follow today. Salvation back then meant "healing" and "saving." To the believers of the heart, it still does.