The Light That Grows in Quiet Places

It has been a brutal winter but we enjoyed a few warm days. Last week, Jane and I found ourselves outside in short sleeves. The media called it a “false spring.” We prefer to call it a foretaste of spring.

The snowdrops are already out. Perennials are beginning to push through the soil. Buds that have been forming quietly all winter are becoming visible. Even the rhododendron leaves that curled downward against the cold have lifted again toward the light. The days are getting longer. The light is growing. The winter solstice brought the return of the light, but now that light begins to show itself. It lengthens slowly, almost imperceptibly, day by day.

In the Celtic calendar February, March and April mark the season of Imbolc. It begins for us, in the snow of winter, and ends with spring in full bloom. We are used to it now, but when we first came to upstate New York we discovered spring was about six weeks behind northern England.

Of course, the earth does not look the same everywhere. In the southern hemisphere February is late summer rather than the edge of spring. Their awakening comes six months later, in August. In tropical climates the turning is marked not by snow and thaw but by the coming of the rains and the greening of the land after dry months.

Many traditions have noticed this same turning in their own ways. In the traditional East Asian calendar early February is called the Beginning of Spring, when the rising energy of life first begins to stir even while the ground may still be frozen. In the Jewish tradition Tu Bishvat, the “New Year of the Trees,” marks the moment when the sap begins to rise unseen within the trees. In India the festival of Holi celebrates the bursting forth of life and color as winter gives way to spring. For Christians, the season marks Lent and Easter.

Different climates and cultures express it differently, but the pattern is the same: life that has been hidden begins to stir. The Celtic seasonal framework is simply one expression of this universal rhythm.

Lent invites us to notice something similar in the life of the spirit. Sometimes, spiritual life is seen in dramatic terms—conversion moments, sudden insight, overwhelming certainty. But most of the time the work of grace is much quieter, like the first snowdrops. It appears as small beginnings: a deeper compassion, a question that will not leave us alone, and often a yearning. St. Augustine suggested that the human heart is restless, until it finds its rest in the divine. That yearning he called love.

Simone Weil suggested that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. Iris Murdoch later described the moral life in similar terms. The beginning of goodness, she said, lies in learning to attend to reality beyond the self. Both said that attention is a form of love. They also said that attention is a kind of prayer.

To attend to the earth, to attend to the people and animals around us, to attend to suffering with compassion are forms of love and forms of prayer.

When we give attention, something subtle begins to happen. The tight circle of the ego loosens. We begin to see more clearly, and love becomes possible. Murdoch called it an “unselfing.” For a moment we step outside the small world of our own concerns and see the larger reality that surrounds us.

The Lent-Easter cycle embodies this. Something dies and something lives. Jesus said that “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit.” This is not the destruction of the self. It is the transformation of the self. The ego loosens its grip, and a larger life becomes possible.

I have always found Lent difficult. It asks me to release some of my attachments and illusions. The world around us encourages self-assertion and self-promotion. Lent quietly suggests another way: the way of attention, humility, and love.

Yet Lent is not all bleak. It is like this late winter season around us in upstate New York. The earth may still be cold, but the bulbs are already pushing upward through the soil. The light is returning, even if we can barely see it. And this is promise.

+Ab. Andy