Wintering
I completed the marathon of my first semester. It ended, not in a victorious, waving at the crowd, dunked in Gatorade kind of way; more of a sweating, puking, pathetic crawl over the finish line, followed by a week of burnout, migraines, and uncontrollable napping. Advent, this season of waiting, has taken on a new necessity this year. I am so hungry for a pause.
~
In my burnout recovery, I picked up Katherine May’s Wintering. I’ve had it on the to-read pile for a few years now and when I saw it on the shelf last week, I knew my winter was here.
“I’m tired, inevitably,” she writes. “But it’s more than that. I’m hollowed out. I’m tetchy and irritable, constantly feeling like prey, believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough.”
Bingo. Such was, or maybe is, the nature of my burnout. Each night, for months, I fell asleep having fallen short of the to-do list, and each morning I woke up to a list that just went on and on, with mental room for little else. All the demands and requests were perfectly reasonable on their own, but then, an avalanche is built by harmless, pretty little flakes. 100 days of relentless multitasking took their toll and I felt flat, emptied.
May’s book defines wintering, the moments in our lives when we are forced to tap out, to exit the steady flow of activity, productivity, utility, and just focus on survival. Career changes, job losses. Parenthood. Legal troubles. Divorce. Violence. Prolonged health struggles or sudden medical emergencies. Crisis. Loss. We duck out of “normality” and enter the world of the sick, the lost, the needy, and the world does not wait for us to catch up.
These are precarious times. Transformation becomes apparent and inevitable. For a future pastor, these are the moments and seasons I hope to dive into willingly, helpfully, compassionately, and really join people in. What relief am I receiving today that I can someday offer for others?
May writes, “Usefulness is a useless concept when it comes to humans. I don’t think we were ever meant to think about others in terms of their use to us.”
I’ve lived on both ends of the spectrum of utility, feeling at seasons that I had nothing to offer, and then seasons I feel just too needed to stop. Either extreme is misery. There are times we need to hear, “You’re needed, you’re so helpful,” and times we need to hear, “Stay home, we will survive just fine without you.” Permission to take charge, permission to drop the ball. These are good gifts we can give each other.
But there is a deeper need: that need to not be seen in terms of utility at all. To be human. A young friend recently lamented to me that their school policy has changed to replace snow days with remote learning. I heard the real grief and I felt it too. I saw snow forts replaced with more work, more screentime and the steady carving away the moments of surrender. Mother nature will no longer excuse us, no matter how much we delight to be excused.
We are going this way. We avoid our winters, our darkness, our silence, our cold. They become one more frontier to overcome. Now we can work from anywhere, everywhere, at all times. Always available. No excuses, no retreat. We are working from home, from planes, from the car. We are maximizing our potential. We are amplifying our productivity. We are sacrificing to bottomless, impersonal gods and shaming the failures who just can’t suck it up and keep up, those who complain too loudly. May writes about the bizarre relief of discovering a legitimate, painful medical problem to deal with: finally, a decent excuse to step back, fade away, give up for a while.
Particularly now, in the midst of the holiday season, there is this thick layer of glitz, performance and busyness burying a season when the daylight shrinks and our bodies crave rest. Against all our instincts, the message is clear and relentless: hurry if you want to keep up.
~
Professor of Religious History, Kate Bowler, studied the American prosperity gospel, a theology which, in simplest terms, subscribes to the idea that if you are “good,” if you believe the right kind of faith, and follow it correctly, good things will happen to you. This means, of course, the opposite is true: if something bad happens, well, obviously, you’ve done something wrong.
“Blessed is a loaded term,” Bowler writes, “because it blurs the distinction between two very different categories: gift and reward.”
I like to think I’m a “good person” (whatever that means), and when I start tallying my blessings, it’s a long, long list. It can be tempting to think that’s somehow my doing, but I am, at best, a steward. The food I eat was grown by a community, usually complete strangers. The technology I use, the medication I take when I’m sick, the home I live in, my education, my very body, all of this was received, not one molecule created by me. Every good thing in my life came to me, not from me. So it goes in 1 Corinthians, “What do you have that you did not receive?”
The framework we bring to our blessings matters, because if everything’s going great, when we can keep up easily, we might delude ourselves into thinking that’s our doing. We will also find, when things go wrong, our faith is more wet blanket than life raft.
Suffering arrives inevitably. Care, to this kind of faith, looks like sussing out what sins a person needs to confess to get right with God or “reassuring” that God has a lesson in this suffering, so hurry up and learn it. A conviction that says all suffering is earned and deserved is certainly a dangerous perspective.
~
This semester has prompted me into an anthropological study of my own faith, the very same one I was born into, interwoven into my culture, my family, my identity, almost impossible to puzzle apart from the web of my identity. It’s a bit like pointing out water to a fish: dude, you’re freaking me out. I’ve been asked to attend the matrix. “Religion is not culture, but it is not other than culture. “(Sanneh)
Where does faith end and culture begin? I have learned the question may well be impossible to answer yet vital to attempt. I cannot afford to mistake the two. Far too many chapters of the history of Christianity are filled with blood because the faithful mistook their culture for their faith and imposed the former instead of giving life to the latter.
In November I attended Rural Plunge, an immersive weekend course where seminary students are invited into homes, congregations and farms of rural Illinois to experience the culture and lifestyle of the rural Midwest. Not exactly a culture shock for me, yet I had plenty to learn. These are my people, but what exactly does that mean?
It was a hoot. We spent a weekend being sneezed on by goats and patting sheep and kicking a slobbery ball for the livestock dogs. We criss-crossed icy fields as the farmers talked about grain markets and tariffs, milk temperatures and veterinarian bills. They gave us apple cider donuts and pellets to tempt the alpacas, and they welcomed us into their homes. We worshipped in churches where everyone knows everyone and the same people who grow the food run the kitchen, so everything’s delicious. It was a wonderful experience, and I’m grateful that, with such a vast majority of Lutheran churches situated in rural areas, our seminary emphasizes and lifts up rural calls.
We were given a book list to choose from in preparation and I read Sarah Smarsh’s Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.
“The defining feeling of my childhood,” she writes, “Was being told there wasn’t a problem when I knew damn well there was.”
That problem is economic and cultural and the dangerous way these factors inform one another. Growing up impoverished in a culture which glorifies wealth and denigrates the poor, leads to internalizing the idea that those with less are morally inferior. In this way capitalism and the prosperity gospel have wed: good things happen to the worthy. God’s love is handed out in health, wealth and acclaim. Struggle, then, is indecent. Poverty is a signal of moral failure.
Smarsh’s family is undeniably hardworking, but that work never seems to pay off in financial stability, and when you’re working yourself to death, you don’t have time or attention to question why the stairs you’re climbing never seem to end. There is not time, not resources to examine the systems which puppet our lives, let alone question or challenge them. Pair this hardworking spirit with deeply ingrained shame in asking for assistance, and you wind up with laborers who will work themselves into deeper poverty while degrading their physical and mental health. Smarsh’s father nearly dies from chemical exposure on the job and the bland acceptance of this near-death experience without outrage signals a learned helplessness. He is just happy to be alive and a bit embarrassed at those missing paychecks and hospital bills. Suffering quietly becomes the most affordable dignity.
“We can’t really know what made us who we are. We can come to understand, though, what the world says we are,” writes Smarsh. “The person who drives a garbage truck may himself be viewed as trash. The worst danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you.”
On top of the relentlessness and risk of this work, it is also wildly personal. Unlike so many modern workplaces where employees are alienated from the fruits and roots of their labor, farmers are often standing on the same soil their parents and grandparents stewarded. Walking away feels like abandoning a personal history. To lose the farm means tearing up deep roots. The stakes are high and close to the heart. Suicide rates among farmers are 3 times higher than the general population. As Smarsh puts it, “Class is an illusion with real consequences.”
Like becoming a pastor or a teacher or a social worker or any number of careers that seem to require a piece of your soul, to be a farmer is to answer a call. Farmers work relentlessly, creatively, and with a great deal of heart. Their hard work is vulnerable to markets, weather, disease and systems beyond their control. Add to this the tension and politics of maintaining relationships in a family operation, in a small town, you find there’s plenty of room for prayer in a farmer’s life. It’s a tenacious way to be in the world. There is pride, unique freedom and an intimacy with the natural processes that come with this lifestyle, yet rural life can feel, in many ways, invisible and alienating.
During one tour someone asked our guide what kind of assumptions people make about his work. He chuckled as he recalled a similar tour where he mentioned that he lived nearby and someone had asked, incredulous, “Wait, people actually live here?”
We can make the people right in front of us disappear. We have this power to recognize or deny the humanity in others. This semester Professor Lohrmann said he doesn’t like to call the Medieval period the “Dark Ages.”
“It’s a bit like calling where we live ‘flyover,’ like we can just skip over it, like there’s nothing going on.”
~
In her wintering, May finds herself seeking rituals. She attends solstice at Stonehenge, even finds herself sitting in a church pew, feeling a simultaneous discomfort and reassurance in the assembly. Organized religion is not something she identifies with, but the gathering still brings her reassurance. “Congregations are elastic, stretching to take in all kinds of people,” she writes. “We need them now more than ever.”
Just as I have been doing this semester, May explores the concept of ritual.
“[Rituals] open up a space in which to host thoughts I would otherwise find silly or ridiculous: a voiceless awe at the passing of time. The way everything changes. The way everything stays the same. The way those things are bigger than I am, and more than I can hold.”
This winter is the first time I’ve sought out a Blue Christmas service. We slid into the back pew of a church I’ve never attended and quietly took in an hour of lament in a season of relentless joy and cheer.
Often we tell the story of our lives as linear, but it is more accurate to say we spiral, revisiting the same old wounds and wishes. Each year the seasons and holidays mark us and, whether we want to or not, we see where we are versus where we have been. Our communities, our families, our own identities are not static. Change is painful.
The message of the Blue Christmas service was honesty. In a world where we are asked to be many things, God knows our hearts. We can tell the truth about what we feel. We were not alone. And it was nice, exactly what I needed, because while I need rest, I do not want to retreat from the world. I want to retreat together from unreasonable demands, constant expectations. I want a space where we can be human and tired and flawed and needy and sad and maybe a little pathetic but still, together. Shared burdens are lighter.
May’s work is a critique of “normal.” To winter is to ask: what is normal anyways? Are these expectations acceptable? Where and how do we have space to be human? Can we admit that life is unpredictable and strange and at times the weight of change is too much for us to carry? Can we please be honest about our winters?
~
“God doesn’t need us,” is a new favorite mantra. Maybe it feels a little hurtful at first but it’s beautiful, I promise. My theology is situated around a perfectly capable God who does not need anything from me. I don’t need to defend God and I certainly don’t “save” people. I can’t earn salvation. The objective of my faith is not avoiding hell or chasing heaven. So why? What’s a faith unmotivated by guilt or obligation? If there’s no prize at the end of the punchcard, what’s the point of this practice?
I believe trust in God is an invitation. We are invited to participate. And trying to be God’s coworker is immensely fulfilling. It’s fun. I study the kind of person Jesus is, the kind of future God promises to us, and I get to try to align myself with this future, or at least get out of the way. I’m invited to participate in the world a loving God is making, and I get to do it in community. And like a hymn sung in an assembly, it’s happening whether I pitch in or not. My voice can falter or break. I can sit out for a bit until I’m ready to roll up my sleeves again. It’s all good. God’s future is inevitable. It will arrive in, through, around or despite us. This I believe.
~
This semester I had to really think about incarnation. Becoming human is one of the weirder things God decided to do, and that’s saying something. God arrived as a baby, such a needy and weak little thing. As if it wasn’t bad enough to become a messy, fleshy human, God didn’t aim very high with this whole enfleshment idea. In all those years on earth, Jesus never climbed the ladder, had no political aspirations. His LinkedIn would not impress us. He didn’t ride around in style. Jesus and his friends were materially “unproductive” and then he died a criminal. By our measuring tapes, God was not a successful human being. This tells me there is an issue in our measuring.
God has shown little interest in appealing to business-as-usual. God has, however, shown a distinct preference for the marginalized.
One of my final papers asked me to answer Jesus’ question in Matthew. “But who do you say that I am?” Here is an excerpt from my response:
“At the beginning of this semester, when considering the relationship between my faith and other faiths and cultures, I felt the weighty history of colonialism, I felt ashamed of the gospel, or at least, the way it has frequently been culturally prepackaged, one-size-fits-a-few, and so I shied from the question and offered only vague answers about love. While I maintain that a posture of love is vital, I now want to be specific about what that means.
A posture of love means a kind of aimless curiosity, as in without motive, as in assuming God is good and capable and way ahead of us. God doesn’t need us to do God’s work and so we are free to be curious. “As the question takes over, we notice that to attend to the other as other, the different as different, is also to understand the different as possible.”(Tracy) Encounter is not about domination, but exchange, like two kids trying on each other’s glasses. We stop looking for the speck in our neighbor’s eye and instead seek to understand what and how they see. Each exchange chips away at our affinity for dichotomy and category, helping us see reality a little more for the God-beloved kaleidoscope that it is.”
God’s people are in hospital rooms and homeless shelters, addiction centers and psychiatric facilities, ICE detention centers and prisons, in the bankrupt, the foreclosed, the failing, the overwhelmed. God is in the waiting rooms. And God’s people lived in history, even the chapters we gloss over. All cultures, all times, all places, encompassed in God’s promises. Practicing my faith means to love aimlessly, to drop the measuring tapes, the inhumane expectations. To be a Christian is to adore the margins, the strugglers. My faith asks me to be honest about the moments that prove we’re only human.
“The church has always needed apparent failure and suffering in order to become fully alive to its real nature and mission,” writes David Bosch. “To encounter crisis is to encounter the possibility of truly being the church.”
Reiterated again and again this semester is the truth that the church does not have a mission: it is God’s mission which has a church. We become the church most truly when we abandon the objectives and measuring tapes of this world and trust God instead. Such a church requires an assembly of people who are truly human, and to be truly human is to acknowledge that we are not God. That we need God. In that need, there is finally freedom, finally rest.