I'm bringing you this afternoon a little story about what happened in the Rolling Ridge garden on a rainy evening in April.  Rolling Ridge is a haven for wilderness and wild things, a place for Partner Groups to renew themselves in faith and friendship, a cradle for ministry and retreat and study, a laboratory for permaculture. For me, though, its essence has always been the call to live in community, which I believe is the one thing being asked of humanity on every level from the personal to the cosmic in this time. The call to community has a tenacious and essential pull, like gravity, yet, honestly, we do well to look before we leap, for there is real risk in launching forth.  Here is a warning from Adrienne Rich, a poem called “Prospective Immigrants Please Note”:

The rain has played with the clouds and the peeping sun for days.  Sometimes the forest glows lush and golden; then it drips and drips, the earth sucking at our galoshes.  Nothing lasts for long.

Here spring is in full swing.  Outside my window, bluebirds are nesting in the box fastened to the old smoke house.  Brilliant blue and orange, they flash from tree to box, bearing a morsel of caterpillar, or sweet grasses for their nest.  Back and forth they go, slipping again and again through the small, round opening, into the mysterious dark interior and back out again. 

In an old story, it takes Christ three days to let go of all that holds him to this world, including the breath of life, and journey to the underworld. There he “harrows” the darkness and the depths, as an ancient farmer might probe and stir and prod the soil for planting.  Then on the third day he stands next to Mary in the dawn twilight so utterly changed that she doesn’t recognize him, her dearest, most intimate friend. It is Easter, the fire feast of the Resurrection, when Christians hold services at dawn and look to the rising sun in the East while the Earth turns green again and flowers. Thus the holy, uncontrollable alchemy of descent and inception, release and grace, death and transformation, is celebrated.

February had days and days of balmy breezes; insects hummed; the tree frogs made the pooling creek water boil.  Then in March a bitter storm cracked tree branches and froze the forsythia blossoms.  The days lurched from sunny warmth to sullen cold, and the wilting daffodils nodded amid crumbling brown leaves: an erratic, unsettling season. 

Things are turbulent on every level. We know this.

The evening has fallen. Our day of silence is slipping into another, darker realm. I am remembering a haiku by Alexis Rotella:

No moon tonight
I light a candle
And listen to the
Dark

There is a chickadee outside the window.  It has lighted on a slender branch of the nearly leafless bush and is turning its black-capped head this way and that while its little body dances briskly, feathers puffed against the chill.  The day is harsh. A bitter wind tosses the tree tops. A dusting of snow, remnant of a fierce winter storm to our north, lies in patches over the curled brown leaves on the ground.  Not lovely, nor inviting, still the rugged scene is worthy of contemplation: the nuthatch running up the tree trunk, the sudden red flash of the pileated woodpecker, the woodshed tarp rippling in the wind.

I expect that 60 miles away, the nation’s capital is vibrating: filling with celebrators and protesters: the triumphant and the grieving, the jubilant and the angry.  I expect that it is loud and edgy and unsettled.

This was a reflection offered near midnight on December 31, in the candlelit Meditation Shelter at Rolling Ridge, part of an annual gathering of friends and journeyers to cross the threshold together.  I began writing it while on the way to visit family in North Carolina on the day after Christmas.

Advent always was an interim time, spanning the threshold between the harvest festivals of autumn and the vulnerable, fierce hope of Christmas.  That “betwixt and between” time and place, where things tend to happen, wove itself around us as we gathered for retreat in a time when the forest waited, bare-branched and leaf-carpeted, for that first snowfall, likely still weeks away. 

In a season when it is traditional to think about the coming of the light, I was pondering darkness.  It seems that this Advent falls at a moment of history when the world is in an up-ended, uncertain, and, yes, frightening between-time, when we struggle to know how to be and what to do and how to behave as things all around us in politics, in governance, in world affairs, and in our psyches, slide toward the dark.

This was the opening reflection for the Friends of Silence Board Meeting November 20, 2016.

Our country and our world is in a good bit of trouble right now.  We live in what storyteller Michael Meade calls “black dog times”. The tale goes like this: