Faith in the dark part of the year
We have an obligation to cease fire, end poverty, address the climate crisis, and bring all our human family with us on the road to peace.
As we shift into the last month of autumn, looking ahead to the winter solstice, the earlier arrival of the dark grows more noticeable by the day. At our latitude, the sky now grows dusky by four-thirty; the offset of earlier light in the morning also lessens as each dawn arrives a few minutes later.
The garden mostly fades into sleep; hardier plants and evergreens trudge on. Leaves are more brown and russet than golden and scarlet.Each morning, birds swoop in to breakfast on seedheads; the wasps who nested in one of our little shed roof areas are no longer to be seen. Under its cover of fallen leaves and dying-back perennials, the soil repairs itself and rebuilds its networks of nutrients, bacteria, fungi, and critters.
There is a melancholy at this time of year, and some lingering instinctual anxiety about whether we have “enough” to get through the winter ahead.
And there is also a faith that the seasons will continue their cycle and our beautiful earth spins slowly round its axis and around the sun whose energy keeps us all alive.
Too many members of our human family are excluded from that faith by violence, hatred, racism, anti-Semitism, war, and the intentional use of fear by those in power to divide us from one another. When I walk through our little garden, doing some light pruning, moving the leaves to blanket plants for the winter, I think about my brothers and sisters in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Syria, Yemen; in areas hit by drought, storms, famines, and sea-level rises caused by climate change; in food deserts and heat islands; in communities isolated by poverty. In each of these places and situations, children are in danger. We put them there; we have an obligation to cease fire, end poverty, address the climate crisis.
We have all the tools we need to make this a season of faith and hope that the spring renewal will include all of us. We only need the will to use them.
Thank you for walking the path of peace, and working to make it available to everyone.