For all of their range across time, seasons of the Spirit, as well as seasons of the flesh, are grounded in the here and now. It’s the paradox that unites the two, and intensifies their wisdom. Eternity, in effect, as found in a flash.

Keep racing, and you’ll see nothing but a blur en route to some goal. You can be fully alive in the rush of adrenaline, your attention concentrated on what is essential in split-second increments. The pace is unsustainable for long, naturally, and an emotional crash will follow. The alternative is to stop yourself, to achieve calm before the storm or calm within the storm, before continuing. Stopping, to regain strength as well as collect scattered thoughts and actions. To restore focus and wholeness.

When I think of these seasons, I don’t know whether the yin-yang emblem of Buddhism, with its “S” rippling through a circle, and light on one side and darkness on the other (alternating day and night or sun and moon), or the Christian cross is more appropriate. The cross, after all, leaves us with four quadrants, like the seasons themselves, while the yin-yang expresses alternating rhythms encountered daily.

The daily rhythms converge on sunrise and sunset – in many traditions, times of meditation, prayer, or chanting. Moments to acknowledge the presence of Spirit with us, in our flesh.

Walt Whitman, describing his first Quaker meeting, tells of entering a room where people were “sitting still as death.” The phrase initially appears morbid and troubling. Even so, it reflects an early Quaker understanding of a necessity of “dying to the world” and its desires and distractions in order to become open to the Spirit. Deep silent meditation becomes a kind of winter, to be followed by spring. The flesh, too, is given symbolic rest and freed from unessential movement. The moment becomes timeless. The stream clears. Fears and worries fall away.

This, too, is a season I invite you to discover.

The hour will end, and we’ll return to our usual labors, before drawing back together in stillness.

~*~

For more Seasons of the Spirit, click here.

Even our name, Society of Friends, emphasizes that we’re an assembly of PEOPLE. While we come together “to know that which is eternal,” each of us brings something different to the table (shall I say “our invisible communion table?), whether it’s in worship or our committee service.

As people, our individual training and daily work shapes our personal experience of the divine, and probably each other. I long to hear more from the varied insights within that kaleidoscope. Someone drilled in mathematics, for instance, may see a particular elegance and absolute beauty emerging within a complex calculation; a physicist, awe in the immensity and energy of the universe; a teacher, in the opening of young minds and the challenges that go with it; a carpenter, in the very character of wood or an emerging space; an artist, in the physical variations of revealed light; a gardener or farmer, in the rhythms of the seasons or the tenacity of weeds; I recall one salesman who treasured finding ways to help people solve unique problems in their businesses, even if he didn’t sell his product that time around.

I like the fact that in Bible stories we see occupations as well: shepherds, mothers, fishers, carpenters, weavers, purple-dye makers, tentmakers, rulers, even soldiers, slaves, and priests, their paths crossing and sometimes being transformed.

The other part of the story, of course, is what we take from our faith and practice into the nitty-gritty of our workplace and homes. How are we changed, to work change? In all the directions we go?

~*~

For more of my reflections, click here.