c. 2003 Religion News

CLEVELAND _ Where does one achieve spiritual nirvana in January?

Forget about going to the highest mountains in Tibet, or living a hermitlike existence amid the desert sands of North Africa. Nor will spiritual wholeness likely be achieved lounging around the beaches of Florida or Southern California sipping mai tais from the shaded comfort of umbrellas and lounge chairs.

Those in the know, the people attuned to the majesty of the four seasons, will tell you it is in places like Cleveland, Buffalo, northern Maine and the Dakotas that seekers can best refuel the soul and reinvigorate the spirit for a new year.

In a new book from Skylight Paths Publishing, “Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season,” well-known essayists, theologians and authors from Annie Dillard and John Updike to Kathleen Norris and Henry David Thoreau offer reflections on how the bleak, often unforgiving canvas of winter also carries with it a beauty and power that can be God’s chicken soup for the soul.

In these narratives, there is a sense of a divine purpose to a season often dismissed as an unpleasant interval before the glories of spring: the way ice fishing brings together a boy and his dying grandfather; the sense of place evoked by the death of a next-door neighbor who was the living memory of a small community; the hope that fragile wildlife will survive predators in a bleak winter, giving a park ranger the courage to pursue his dreams.

Taken together, the writings present winter as a season for the soul, say the book’s editors, Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch.

“Winter illuminates, it brightens and lightens the world it covers,” write Schmidt and Felch, who teach literature at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. “God asks Job, `Have you entered into the treasures of the snow?’ The Psalmist asks the Lord to wash him so that he `shall be whiter than snow.”’

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It is a theme that resonates with religious folk in Northeast Ohio.

“No question about it, I would never go where there were no seasons,” said the Rev. Sally Wile, associate minister of Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights. “I think I’ve died and gone to heaven with all this snow. It’s … the peacefulness of all this snow.”

The Rev. Louise Westfall, pastor of Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights, also cannot imagine living in a place where winter does not provide a season for spiritual rest and renewal.

“Snow just covers every imperfection. It gives the landscape a kind of innocence, a purity,” Westfall said. “It does remind us we can reinvent, we can remake, we can transform the landscape of our lives.”

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It is not as if any of the writers hunkered down amid a northern winter ignore its brutal, hostile aspects.

Think of winter, and harsh images often come to mind: barrenness, frigidity, ice, slush. Cold-shouldered, cold comfort, cold steel, coldblooded.

“We often see the season as a time when life retreats, as the time of old age, loss, sorrow, endings. It is not only our personal experience of death that chills us in the long nights, but the shock of cruelty that is exacerbated by winter’s unrelenting, impersonal cold,” the editors write.

In one story of a surprise blizzard, there is the stark account of a cattle inspector freezing to death getting up on his horse. He was discovered the next morning with one boot just inside an iced stirrup. The horse apparently kept waiting for him to complete his mount and died as well.

In the words of naturalist Richard Nelson, “Winter waits and finds all life. In the end, each of us stares through the dark eyes of winter.”

But the essays also point to a central religious teaching _ that in facing death instead of avoiding it, one gains a better appreciation of life and a deeper understanding of humanity.

Essayist William J. Vande Kopple tells the story of how his 13-year-old son, who enjoyed summer vacations fishing with his grandfather in Iowa, could not bear the sight of the older man dying of cancer in a nursing home in late December. He vowed never to return after his first visit.

What he did instead was go to their favorite fishing hole, cut a patch of ice away and fish. When he caught a fish, he asked his uncle to take a picture and give it to his grandfather. Upon seeing the picture, the grandfather, an active man all his life who was despondent and inconsolable in the nursing home, broke out into an enormous smile and raised his finger in a triumphant gesture.

It was the smile and gesture he and his grandson shared when someone caught the first fish of the day. In the middle of winter, consumed by the fear and uncertainty of death, it became a gesture of hope that gave joy and purpose in one of the bleakest moments in their lives.

In another story, taking notice of how each death diminishes a community, author Robert Finch describes the burial of his next-door neighbor on Cape Cod. She was a woman who would be consulted before local burials because she knew where there were “bones without stones and stones without bones” in the local cemetery. At her graveside, Finch experiences the loss of a strongly rooted sense of place.

“What I felt was a sense of fundamental change rather than personal loss _ a deep change in the life and makeup of the neighborhood.”

Author Jim dale Huot-Vickery, who lived in a remote cabin in northern Minnesota, writes about a particularly harsh winter where death was everywhere in nature. Finding the carcasses of starving deer who had lost the will to fight their predators took an emotional toll on him. The harshness of nature made him reflect on his life and his own long-abandoned dream of paddling a canoe from northern Minnesota through Lake Superior to the sea.

“Winter, I could see, doesn’t just come after the body. It fully challenges and, for those who survive, strengthens the soul,” Huot-Vickery wrote.

Life goes on amid the harshness of winter, each of the essayists points out.

Poet Patricia Hampl of Minneapolis said the inwardness and austerity of the season made her automatically associate it with creativity and spirituality.

“The cold was our pride; the snow was our beauty,” she said. “It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze; making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.”

In times of darkness and shorter days, people might become more aware of the light within them, said the Rev. John Henry, abbot of St. Herman of Alaska Monastery in Cleveland.

“Sometimes, if you can’t find it on the outside, you’re more likely to find it on the inside,” he said. “The winter gives you the time. It gives you spiritual rest.”

DEA END BRIGGS