The Wisdom of Winter

We begin the New Year in darkness and rest

Winter teaches us that we are not ultimately in charge.

As I stare out my window at the frozen landscape, this is the lesson I’m suggesting we take from it.

An Arctic outflow, as they call it, currently has much of western North America in its icy grip. In my temperate rainforest climate, bulbs—which had already started to sprout as a result of the relatively warm winter thus far—are now regretting their decision. Everything green that had been moving towards a too-early spring is dying back again, soggy and wilted in its frozen collapse. No wonder the ancients found winter an unpredictable and scary time.

It’s common knowledge that early cultures all over the world saw the dying of the light in winter as a harbinger of the fearsome possibility that the sun might never return. Many of the pagan winter festivals were designed to prevent this dire potentiality from occurring, whether through some kind of sacrifice or other geniculations.

The truth that has recently occurred to me is how fitting it is that our New Year actually begins in the dead of winter. In fact, this reality is more in keeping with ancient Hebraic thinking than it is with pagan beliefs. Pagan rituals were designed to offer some sort of appeasement to the gods so that the sun and new life might return. Hebraic thinking holds that life emerges from nothingness by divine agency, without the involvement of human agency. It’s an important distinction.

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Several years ago, I was chatting with my older brother about how difficult it is to keep up the regular pace of life and work during the dark of winter. In particular, we were talking about that season between Christmas and New Year’s Day. These are some of the shortest, darkest and coldest days of the year, when the body just wants to sleep, rest and hibernate.

I must have been feeling badly about how unmotivated I was at the time, because the simple wisdom of my brother’s response struck me and has stuck with me.

“Things have to die back in winter,” he responded. “If the plants and animals hibernate, maybe we should too. You have to let go in winter.”

I remember having one of those “Who are you and what have you done with my brother?” moments, where I suddenly gained a new measure of respect for this guy I’d grown up with, formerly a typical brotherly pest. Who knew that he had thoughts like these?

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This year, especially, I’ve been returning to what he said. An after-Christmas flight to visit in-laws turned instead into a week of flu for my family and I, during which I “accomplished” exactly nothing. And surprisingly, I was fine with that. It seemed not only the single possible thing to do, but also the most appropriate thing to do. We played games, chatted, built puzzles and shared some favorite Netflix movies with each other. Exactly what one wants to do while visiting family.

Though we’d had a somewhat more extensive schedule in mind, it turned out that I was happy with this week of enforced rest. My mind needed the “formless and void” down time. The winter darkness and the cold push us towards this season of rest anyway.

This imposed Sabbath season reminded me that it is the nature of the world that everything is born out of rest. In fact, the very nature of Sabbath itself tells us that we are not ultimately in charge—we do not initiate reality. We respond to a greater reality; we do not create it.

“The Gloaming.” Painting by Laura Wilder. Used with permission.

Reality begins in rest

Countless authors, more learned than I, have written about the ancient Hebrew concept of Sabbath, which dates back to the beginning of human history and of time itself. The tradition tells us that after creating the earth, the Creator rested on the seventh day. So began the notion of resting every seventh day.

Yet, I think there is a broader pattern to reality that Sabbath reveals—one that goes beyond the wisdom of just a weekly day of rest.

We are told that the cosmos was “formless and void” before the heavens and earth were created. The Spirit hovered over this void and drew forth life. All that now is began in nothingness. In the same way, the notion of a Sabbath day of rest for the Hebrew people thus began in the evening: the beginning of the night, a time of formlessness and emptiness, when we are not in control. “There was evening and there was morning: the first day,” the biblical text says (Gen. 1:5 NIV).¹

In the ancient Hebraic mind, the day did not begin in the morning, as we moderns conceive it. We think a day begins when we wake up to perceive it. But the ancient concept of a day began with the falling of the night, and ended as the sun fell again the following day.

Thus, a day begins in darkness, outside the ability of our human agency to shape it, at least as it comes to our need for sleep. The day begins in chaos and formlessness, rather than with the wakefulness which allows us to interact with our world. We are profoundly not “in charge” during the night hours. In fact, instead of being in charge, our bodies must sleep and recharge, while our mind travels mostly outside of our conscious will. If we avoid submitting to this reality of rest for too long, our health fails. During the sleep that we cannot live without, we must rely on divine agency to sustain us.

The message of a day beginning in the night, therefore, is that the world does not originate with our actions. The day originates with the pre-set and inalterable rhythms of the universe, sustained by divine agency. A day originates with us resting from our human agency.

Rest brings life…

This day-beginning-in-darkness reality parallels the Hebraic concept of Sabbath: a day of rest, following six days of work, which begins the new week. For the Hebrew people, following God meant (and means) that they began a week with an entire day of rest: an acknowledgment that they were not in charge of time and indeed, of provision for themselves. Starting a week in rest meant letting go of goals—of all that had to be done and all that needed to be accomplished. It was a profound act of trust, an acknowledgement of the truth that we do not sustain ourselves, but rely on divine agency to sustain us.

Sleep, by this definition, is a daily imposed “mini-Sabbath” that we cannot avoid. It is one of those immutable laws of the universe that humans have (thus far, thankfully) been unable to change.

At its core then, Sabbath, like sleep, is an acknowledgment that humans ultimately do not provide for themselves. They rest on the abundance and provision of a good God and His good creation. The message of Sabbath is that we are not in charge of reality and ultimately cannot make our lives happen. The message of Sabbath is one of profound trust in the goodness of God.

In the same way, then, I’m proposing that winter is a type of imposed “Sabbath” revealing that we are not in charge of our years. We begin each year in a time of dying back, darkness, rest, and letting go. What I’m suggesting is that it is an immutable part of the nature of reality that everything begins in rest.

• The Hebraic concept of time itself begins with divine agency acting over the dark formlessness, then resting on the seventh day.

• The Hebraic concept of a day begins in the letting go that occurs in the dark formlessness of sleep and rest.

• The Hebraic concept of a week begins in the letting go inherent in a Sabbath day of rest.

• Thus, it follows that the concept of a year beginning in the letting go of the dark formlessness of winter would be in keeping this pattern that requires—even demands— trust in divine agency.

Of course, someone will surely point out that beginning the year in the “die-back” time of winter is only true of the Northern hemisphere. While this is of course the case, what I am attempting to unveil is that our collective concept of when our year begins came out of a more ancient Hebraic way of thinking that is in keeping with a larger reality of the cosmos.

As a global community, we’ve all agreed to call January 1 the beginning of the calendar year—the day on which the year’s numerical date changes—no matter what climate we live in, because it was originally established as that in northern climates with cultures that were based in a more Judeo-Christian concept of reality. I’m not saying the originators of this new year date were aware of this, rather that this is a deeply-imprinted pattern of reality that we, as a global community, adhere to—though we have largely now forgotten its origin. Yet, the underlying truth of this pattern still speaks.

…Mania creates collapse

We can fight these patterns. We can insist that our efforts and striving alone provide for us and make us who we are. Much of the world wants to pretend that this is true, increasingly more so as Sabbath-less nations (think China and India, for example) try to set the global pace.

It’s easy to see that there is a lot of wheel-spinning and pointlessness in this always-on cycle our society has fashioned. Every creative knows that creativity requires letting the mind wander: resisting distractions and resting the brain, allowing free, unformed thoughts and associations to emerge.

Truthfully, much of what is wrong with our society today is likely traceable to the lack of rest that is meant to come from this daily, weekly and yearly Sabbath-keeping. A 24-7-365, always-on world is not good at discerning what really matters, what is deeply important. An always-on, always-working world is a boring world of unending sameness, combined with an inability to rest, think, ponder, perceive and receive the gifts that are always coming to us.

We can fight it all we like, but darkness is necessary to allow for dawn to emerge. Nightly rest is necessary for physical and mental activity and creativity. Winter is necessary for the beauty of spring, summer and fall—both in a literal sense for creation, and in a metaphorical and possibly even literal sense for us. The problem is that we no longer live by these natural rhythms, so we no longer perceive their necessity.

Without this seasonality, without this rest, we risk thinking we are ultimately in charge of our lives and that we alone create our realities, and thus, we alone can “save” our struggling world. Indeed, much of the world thinks this today. They may think it, but the deeper reality, the deeper truths, will always win out. They must. One cannot undo the way of the cosmos. Yet to live as if there are not immutable truths is a type of hubris prevalent in our world. This hubris had led to both our ecological and societal breakdown.

Sabbath as a pattern

I could go into the other types of Sabbath cycles that our world should recognize: sabbatical and the Year of Jubilee, but those are topics for exploration in another post. Suffice it to say here that a “sabbatical,” while not a strictly biblical concept, has obvious etymological roots in the concept of Sabbath. A sabbatical is a full year of “rest” after a cycle of six or seven years of work. Some inspired companies, like Intel, actually require this of their employees, because they see the benefits of innovation that come from it (though Intel’s sabbatical is no longer a full year off).²

Like the good farmer who knows that his land needs to be fallow in seven-year rotation cycles, something in us needs to lie fallow every seventh year in order for new life to come forth.

Think back over your life. I suspect that you will see this cycle actually happening, whether you have actively embraced it or not. Seven years into your working career, did you make a major change? What about seven years after that? Did you move after seven years in your house? Unbelievably, for the last 30 years, I have moved roughly every seventh year, without meaning to match this rhythm. And when do marriages often first break up, if not tended to? At the “seven-year-itch.” Every aspect of our lives needs time off for rest, reflection, and care.

In the same way, the biblical concept of the Year of Jubilee was a year of rest for the land and for the people after seven cycles of seven years, or in the fiftieth year. It was a year of forgiving debts and setting other types of working slaves free.³

The pattern is clear:

• Night: unavoidable daily rest after roughly 14 hours of wake and work (two sevens).

• Sabbath: weekly rest on the seventh day after six days of work.

• Winter: yearly (and at one time unavoidable) rest of about a month, after about 49 weeks of work (seven cycles of seven weeks).

• Sabbatical: a year of rest, after seven-ish years of work.

• Year of Jubilee: a year of freedom, after seven, seven-year cycles of work, or the 50th year.

What I’m saying here is that there are natural patterns of rest that we avoid at our own peril. Winter is one of those, and the fact that we collectively acknowledge that a new year begins in the dead of winter is further evidence of the ancient truth of this yearly Sabbath concept.

I’m not suggesting full-stop that we don’t create our realities by our actions and agency. What I am suggesting is that in doing so, our human agency relies on a deeper truth: on the goodness of a Creator-sustained and Creator-intervening universe to exist. Our full human existence relies on divine agency, not just human agency. Sabbath of all sorts helps us to realize and to cooperate with this truth.

These periods of rest (nightly, weekly, yearly)—counter-cultural as they are—are still needed. We need the perspective that pulling back creates. We need the humility that follows the acknowledgment that we, alone, do not create our lives. We need the stress-reduction that letting go of control and surrendering to providence provides. We need the clarity that ceasing from striving alone can bring.

We need Sabbath. We need rest. We need winter. We need to let go, because we need to know that we do not originate ourselves, and that we are not ultimately in charge. We need to trust, or we wear ourselves—and our world—out with striving. Winter tells us that to surrender to these larger truths outside of us is wise—if only we will listen.

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It now occurs to me that starting this Substack out of a time and season of rest is a fitting beginning for this endeavour. It’s easy to feel the subtle, mounting pressure of publishing weekly. It’s helpful to remember that this is a goal, one that I hope that staying in an internal space of rest will help me to fulfill.

That’s my commitment to you, my readers. I’ll publish weekly, but I won’t publish sub-standard content just to meet a self-imposed weekly schedule. Sabbath was made for humankind, not the other way around—and so are publishing schedules.

1. I want to acknowledge my indebtedness in this essay to Darrel Johnson, pastor and former Regent College instructor, for his insights on what Sabbath teaches us about the nature of reality.

2. From Intel’s website: “Intel's view is that employees deserve an opportunity to step away, try something new, explore the world, volunteer, or simply spend more time with their families and friends. They come back with a fresh, new, and valued perspective.”

3. Interestingly, our world was on course to embrace a “year of Jubilee” in the form of debt forgiveness for the world’s poorest nations (Jubilee 2000’s Drop the Debt campaign) when the 9/11 attacks happened in the U.S. and broke the movement’s momentum. I’ve spoken to activists who were part of this Jubilee initiative, who tie the end of the movement directly to that event. But this is a subject for another piece, as noted above.

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Love is the most powerful force in the universe, alone having the ability to create change for the better. Indeed, it is the only force that ever has.

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