Rev. Dr. Michael Tino
Lead Ministry Team, Church of the LargerFellowship

“This being human is a guest house
Every morning is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!”

— from “The Guest House,” by Coleman Barks, based on the original poem by Jallaludin Rumi

Around the world and for many thousands of years, humans of different cultures have created rituals of sympathetic magic intended to invoke unknown powers to act in our world. This kind of spiritual work asks us to make connections between objects and actions and the ways in which we want to affect the world.

In the northern hemisphere, it is winter now, and the farther north one goes, the shorter the days become at this time of year. Where I live in the northeastern United States, the darkest days of the year, clustered around the Winter Solstice, have just over nine hours of daylight in them, a full six hours less daylight than we enjoyed in June.

Our bodies feel that difference. For some of us, it is a welcome feeling of cozy darkness as the long nights wrap us like blankets. For others, it is a dreadful feeling of loss as the light dwindles and comes at sharper angles from a sun closer to the horizon.

And the sympathetic magic that many cultures from the farthest north places have developed to face the winter involves light. We adorn trees, festoon our houses, hang lanterns, and light bonfires. We welcome the fullness of the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow. We bask in the warmth of the blazing Yule log (or the psychological warmth of its digital equivalent on our TV and computer screens).

The Christmas trees that became traditional in the United States began as pagan German celebrations, hung with dried fruits to capture the color and scent of summer and lighted softly with candles. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, people are celebrating in ways that were designed by the ancients to convince the sun to be reborn, to return to us and give us light and warmth. And, lo and behold, it worked, every year.

And yet, we cannot escape the reality that many people greet the winter—and the many holidays celebrated at wintertime in order to bring cheer to this desolate season—with dread, with fear, and with a profound sadness that no amount of merry-twinkle lights can break. Our spiritual houses are too often visited at this time of year by the guests of grief and sadness, loneliness and fear.

Sometimes the role of the religious community is to inspire us to action.  Sometimes, it’s to mark the important moments in the cycles of our life. And sometimes, religious community exists just to hold us together for a little while. Sometimes, we come together in community despite the unwelcome guests knocking at our doors.  Sometimes, because of them.

We need the touchstone of community, the embrace of love, the practice of reverent stillness, in order to summon the courage to welcome in those guests. To welcome in the crowd of sorrows that persists in knocking on our door again and again, demanding a room for the night.

To welcome in those guests, though, goes against our nature.  Rumi suggests to us that such guests have something to teach us if we sit with them a while. To welcome these guests in, however, doesn’t mean we have to resign ourselves to their permanent residence in our spare room.  Listening to our pain and learning from it is not the same as letting it take us over.

We have to learn how to encourage these guests to move on when they’ve overstayed their welcome.  Nature does this automatically.  The darkness builds through the fall, and peaks at the Winter Solstice.  And then the light returns.  We can learn from nature, especially at the darkest time of the year.

But we have to do this work ourselves.  There is no tilt to our axis that leans us away from the sun—and then towards it again as we revolve around it.

Luckily, we don’t have to do it alone.

We do it together, beloved. Together, we create winter magic. We sing, we light candles, we bear sacred witness to one another. May your life be filled with magic this winter.