Winter Interest
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
1/10/09 & 1/11/09

 “Other seasons come abruptly but ask so little when they do.  Winter is the only one that has to be relearned.”  --Verlyn Klinkenborg, essayist

Reading

An excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking, a book in which author Joan Didion recounts the first year without her husband, who died unexpectedly, just a few days after Christmas.

 

 

One morning during the spring after it happened I picked up The New York Times and skipped directly from the front page to the crossword puzzle, a way of starting the day that had become during those months a pattern, the way I had come to read, or more to the point not to read, the paper.  I had never before had the patience to work crossword puzzles, but now imagined that the practice would encourage a return to constructive cognitive engagement.  The clue that first got my attention that morning was 6 Down, “Sometimes you feel like…”  I instantly saw the obvious answer, a good long one that would fill many spaces and prove my competency for the day: “a motherless child”

Motherless children have a real hard time—

Motherless children have such a real hard time—

No.

6 Down had only four letters.

I abandoned the puzzle (impatience died hard), and the next day looked up the answer.  The correct answer for 6 Down was “anut.”  “Anut?”  A nut?  Sometimes you feel like a nut?  How far had I absented myself from the world of normal response?

Notice: the answer most instantly accessed (“a motherless child”) was a wail of self-pity.

This was not going to be an easy failure of understanding to correct.[1]

 

 

Reading

An excerpt from My Garden Book by Jamaica Kincaid

 

        People will go on and on about the beauty of the garden in winter, they will point out scarlet berries in clusters hanging on stark brown brittle branches, they will insist that this beauty is deep and unique; people try to tell me about things like “The Christmas rose…in bloom in December is really very beautiful,” but only in the way of a single clean plate found on a table many months after a large number of people had eaten dinner there; or again they tell me of the barks of trees, in varying stages of peeling, and the moss of lichen growing on the barks of other trees and the precious jewel-like sparkle of lichen at certain times of day, in certain kinds of light; and, you know, I like lichen and I like moss, but really to be reduced to admiring it because nothing else is there but brown bramble and some red stems and mist… It is so willful, this admiration of the garden in winter, this assertion that the garden is a beautiful place then….

        But this is not true at all…I want to say to…[these people]. This is just something you are saying; this is just something you are making up.  I want to say that at this very moment I am looking out my window and the garden does not exist, it is lying underneath an expanse of snow, and there is a deep, thick mist, slowly seeping out of the woods, and as I see this I do not feel enraptured by it.  But you know, white is not a color at all…white only makes you feel the absence of color, and white only makes you long for color and only makes you understand that the space is blank and waiting to be filled up—with color.[2]

 

Sermon

Several years ago, when we lived in Chicago, my wife was busy studying for a degree in landscape design. I’m grateful for the time she spent at the Morton Arboretum, for whatever I know about plants and gardens today has been a by-product of her learning. A few of the concepts and ideas were so striking to me that I continue to reflect on their deeper meaning. I remember Susan explaining to me the reason she had chosen a particular plant for the backyard of our two-flat apartment: “This one will have especially good winter interest,” she said. I thought she was kidding. “Why would a plant be interested in the winter?” I joked. She explained that “winter interest” was how horticulturists describe the appealing wintertime features of plant material. Common examples of winter interest might include a particularly attractive or distinctive pattern or texture of bark, an intricate lacework of branches, berries that remain through the winter to provide little dashes of color in an otherwise bleak landscape--any feature that sets the plant apart from other seemingly dormant plants, and that helps create an aesthetic unlike what may be typically noticed during the warmer months of the year, when foliage or other growing things may cover the feature up or pull attention away from it.

 

For people who are drawn to the natural world, who find in the outdoors a place of worship and admiration in every season, the idea of “winter interest” may be obvious. However, no matter how in touch I thought I was with the earth, when I learned about “winter interest,” it was as if my eyes had been suddenly refocused. I began to regard the landscape differently, searching for details amidst the white and gray of winter that I had previously overlooked, or maybe taken for granted. It’s not that I had never seen these details before—I just don’t think I had properly appreciated them. Tree bark, in particular, became fascinating to me. Like wrinkly elephant skin or tubes of intricate sculpture, the tree trunks caught my eye—and my fingers, too. Now, during my winter walks, I would frequently stop to run my hands along the torsos of the few trees in my neighborhood, searching in the cracks and crevices of their bark for the wisdom that I believed must come from simply surviving winter season upon winter season. Their bark, I imagined, was one way they told their survival tale, and now, more than ever before, I was ready to take in what they had to teach.

 

My developing curiosity about “winter interest” went beyond a new-found appreciation for plants, however. By the time I started interrogating trees, I was deep into my theological school studies, a time when I spent most of my days groping for meaning. At the heart of most of my school work were questions rooted, you could say, in their own winter interest:

 

What does it mean to suffer, to experience disappointment, heartbreak, loss, and still go on living?

 

Upon what can we rely when life gets messy and painful, as it most certainly will from time to time? 

 

What does it mean to be alive in the midst of death?

 

Of course, asking these questions is not merely a result of preparing for the ministry. Each of us, from the moment we were first exposed to loss, and with each loss that follows, has had or will have ample reason to ask similar questions.

 

How do we make it through the tough times? What might be the deeper meaning in the losses we endure?

 

Asking these questions, in fact, is one of the distinguishing characteristics of being human. Plants don’t have to grapple with the paradox of being alive while knowing that they will one day not be. To be human, it seems, is to yearn for answers to questions that are, by nature, simply without reliable answers. 

 

Why do loved ones die? How do we go on in their absence?

 

The desire, if not the necessity, to wrestle with these questions is similar, I think, to the search for winter interest in a bleak January landscape. The search may seem unrewarding, if not futile. Indeed, the suggestion that there may be beauty or redemption to be found in our losses is only as convincing as our perspective allows. The collapse of an important relationship or the dismantling of our life due to abrupt career changes, unfortunate or unhealthy choices, or just plain bad luck can leave us unsure of where we have been and where we may be headed. Life becomes blanketed in a white blur of meaninglessness.

 

How could this have happened? Why do we even bother to go on? How can we face the future when everything can change in an instant?

 

Our most profound losses tend to arrive as cold snaps that threaten to extinguish whatever hearth-light we had been enjoying. In the mid-winter of our losses, then, we are left to stumble around in search of the fruit still on the barren branches, the signs of life that remain in what feels like a world of death.

 

Joan Didion’s book, The Year of Magical Thinking, is a true gift of winter interest to any of us who have struggled with the grief that accompanies a significant loss, particularly the death of a loved one. She spends a good portion of the book considering the question of self-pity: the tendency we have, when confronted with death, to dwell on it, to obsess about it, to wallow in what we have lost. She writes of how we have been encouraged to view this self-pity as something to wipe away, to harden ourselves against, to get over already. But writing from her own soul’s winter freeze, she concludes that those who are grieving rightfully have an “urgent need to feel sorry for themselves,” a need to indulge in some winter interest, we might say—a need that cannot and should not be ignored or taken away. In the poignancy of grief, it may be all they have.

 

She draws upon the reflections of C.S. Lewis, who grappled with the death of his wife:

 

I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier post across it. So many roads once; now so many cul de sacs.

 

In times of loss, these roadblocks of memory and habit leave us little recourse other than self-pity. Didion describes this as “the vortex effect,” the inescapable pattern of remembrance that directs nearly every thought back to the loss, back to our aloneness.

 

I, too, have grappled with the question of self-pity, though I described it somewhat differently at the time. Reflecting upon the aftermath of my mother’s sudden death, which occurred when I was in college, I noted a tendency I had to see life as if it were a movie—a movie in which I had become the star. Everything that happened was about me and everyone else in my life had become supporting players, acting out scenes related to my family’s grief. I immersed myself in the pain I felt and left little room for much else. A few years after her death, I had become ashamed of this period of my life, wondering why I had been so self-obsessed. Talking with a wise friend helped me give myself a break. I told him “I’m embarrassed that I couldn’t see beyond myself—that I had to be the focus, that I had to be the star.” He nodded and then wondered aloud, “Don’t you think we all may need to be the star sometimes?”

 

Don’t you think we all may need to be the star sometimes?

 

I’ve thought a lot about his words since then, and about the need each of us may have to be the star of our own grief narratives—the all-too-human need that legitimizes our lives in the face of our losses.

 

The question of how we get through the tough times remains, but one answer seems as clear as any: maybe we do need to focus on the absence of life, to find a way to be enraptured by our life’s garden even when it is blanketed with death—even when the closest thing to color may be a few scattered berries or a coating of snow. Maybe life does ask us to take some interest in the bleak landscape. Maybe the absence of color is not only a memorial to the color that was, but also an encouragement to the color yet to be found.

 

The Sunday before I wrote this sermon, I arrived home from church to a house touched by the beginnings of a winter we did not expect, an absence in the making. Our beloved cat Esther, our companion and friend for nearly 14 years, was struggling to stay alive. Within the next hour we had taken her to the emergency room and determined that it was time to end her suffering—a painful and compassionate decision that was much harder to stomach than I could have anticipated. 

 

After we offered our goodbyes and made our way back out into the gloomy winter afternoon, I was struck by how piercing the loss was. We had said goodbye to an elderly cat. But we also had said goodbye to a piece of ourselves. The world was suddenly different without Esther and it continues to be. A painful reality to face, but also a lesson embedded in having to say goodbye to any loved one—the lesson that life marches on.

It is a lesson that teaches us to love despite the knowledge that our time together is only temporary. 

 

To find interest in the occasional winter of our souls, as well as the summer, for each informs the other.

 

And to appreciate each moment that we still have—moments to love, to lose, and to love once again.