In swift succession we observed the inauguration of a new pope, the first day of spring, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and the beginning of Holy Week 2013. For me, each of these has been food for thought.
The very phrase “first day of spring” can draw laughs from New Englanders, who have seen snow as late as May, yet I have come to see the vernal equinox as a genuine marker of life’s passages in our local four-season climate.
Living in New England has turned out to be problematic within my family. Simply put, my kids hate winter, and have fled for warmer climes--as have millions of Americans fleeing from the northeast. So until recently we’ve seen our kids mainly during summer vacations when they’ve ventured back to Boston, or for brief shivering stays to observe Thanksgiving or Christmas with us.
But this year we took a more radical turn, when our sons invited us to visit them in California for Christmas and our daughter agreed to join us from Miami.
I was willing to try out this kind of holiday experience, but was dubious: would Christmas Eve feel like Christmas amid west coast warmth?
I admit that winter has never been my favorite season, and in recent years it has become harder and harder to tolerate the long stretch between autumn’s brilliant foliage and spring’s blooms. In New England, that gap can stretch to seven months. But my response has not been to migrate away. I chose instead to hone my coping skills, and by now I’m pretty adept at making winter seem shorter than ever.
Some of this is a matter of psychological tricks. My birthday, for example (which just happens to be the same as Pope Francis’ birthday) is in mid-December, and at some point I decreed to myself that I was born during autumn--which automatically banished winter from my mind before that date. No matter how dark or cold or wet the days in November and early December, I keep telling myself, “it’s late fall weather.”
Other coping tricks are more objective, rooted in nature itself. I remind myself that all during fall the days grow shorter, but that the winter solstice starts the turnaround of longer days. So now I think of winter as the season when each day is always longer than the last, and I watch for the changes that brings. From my front porch, I note that the sun, which dips behind the neighbor’s fir trees around 2:00 PM in early January, moves later and higher almost daily until, by the end of January, it passes over the trees and shines on the porch all afternoon.
In short, I focus on the subtle realities of seasonal change; I notice morning’s light coming earlier; I feel the heat of the sun and the rising average temperatures and the faster melting of the snow; I even see the reddish tree buds that become visible when viewed in-depth along a highway.
All this helps me convince myself that our seemingly endless winter is largely a myth. The reality is a season that passes all too fast, just like all the others. Despite the continued cold and snow, spring arrives every year, just as it did last week, with days overtaking night and the imminent prospect of Easter and Opening Day and the gradual succession of buds from crocuses to forsythia to daffodils to dogwoods magnolias and pear trees and lilacs and finally roses and full-leaf trees. In the coastal forest that is New England, this bursting forth can feel explosive and sudden, but in fact it is already a discernible in March.
In hindsight, however, I realized that Christmas is another matter entirely. I can dispel the myths of our seasons by attending to the real facts of nature itself, but both Christmas and Easter are by their very nature tied to symbol and myth. And I am very attached to Christmas as a winter event.
We are raised to connect Christmas to cold, to winter, to sleighs and snow and warming fireplaces and roasting chestnuts. This is true even though we know that such things are not a common part of the climate where Jesus was born. We simply accept the images of shepherds and sheep in snowy fields. It is no accident, of course, that Christmas comes during our winter. The choice of December 25 had nothing to do with any historical record of Jesus’ birth. It was, rather, a deliberate decision to counter the Roman Empire’s celebration of the winter solstice. In that sense, Christmas is rooted, both historically and culturally, in the climate of the northern hemisphere. Rome, after all, is on roughly the same latitude as Providence, Rhode Island, and Jerusalem occupies nearly the same latitude as Savannah, Georgia.
It is easy for us to forget that these Christian roots are not universal. I often remind my parish audiences that, for my brother-in-law and niece living in Australia, Christmas comes during summer vacation--the very season when most parishes here are relatively dormant. So for Christians of the southern hemisphere (who now represent the majority of Catholics in the world), the original meaning of “the Christmas season” is, if not altogether lost, at least rather abstract. In Australia, Christmas comes at the summer solstice, so days turn shorter rather than longer. In Costa Rica and other equatorial regions, the very idea of changing daylight is alien, since their days are 12 hours long year-round.
The same paradox applies to Easter, of course: our notion of Easter, associated with springtime’s return to life from the death of winter, and even our use of Easter eggs to represent that life, all depend on the framework of the northern hemisphere, since in the southern half of the world Easter comes around harvest time just as everything is dying.
So Americans might reflect on this: the idea of our “white Christmas” may not be alien to the origins of the holyday, but it is alien to the life of most Christians today. This means that, if Christianity is for the entire world, then these seasonal connotations cannot be the essence of either Christmas or Easter.
With this in mind back in December, I was willing to try a Christmas in sunny California, almost as an experiment in sensibility.
Even before we left, this required some adjustments. We could not abandon the custom of having a Christmas tree in the house, but we could neither leave one there during our absence nor buy one after our return. So we finally conceded to the option I have long resisted, and bought ourselves what I insisted on calling a “permanent” (read: artificial) tree. And we abandoned most Christmas shopping in order to pay for the trip.
My first surprise on arriving in Los Angeles was that it was not really warm. It was when I would call “sweater weather,” and for our whole stay I was amused to see that locals bundled up in winter coats while tourists wore only light jackets, or sweaters, or even shorts and T-shirts. Nights were chilly enough to know that it was the off-season, but while cycling the beach from Hermosa to Palos Verdes, the sun was warm enough to be happy to be outdoors.
There was of course no snow, and despite the lights and decorations everywhere I struggled for any sense of the season. Clearly people reside in warmer climates have adapted their sensibilities so that the phrase “Christmas season” feels appropriate no matter what the weather. Christmas trees were everywhere, ironic “evergreen” symbols among the ever-blooming local flora. Ironically too, the days around the holiday were full of TV weather forecasts reminding us of the travel woes of those caught in the big snow storm “back east.” In California, I learned, the phrase “back east” referred, not to the Christmas Star, but the people unlucky enough to be carrying shovels rather than surfboards.
Something similar applies to Easter. As a kid I heard a lot about “the Easter parade,” yet often it was too cold on Easter to strut out one’s new holiday outfit. This is especially true in 2013 (which brought more snow as spring began), since Easter is so early. It takes a bit of struggle in these parts to feel that life is already returning, but a sharp eye can spot the buds beginning, a sharp ear notes the arrival of birds, and the days have already gained nearly an hour over the nights.
So the symbolism of Easter, like the symbolism of Christmas, works well enough in our region even if the weather does not always cooperate. But that is only because we’re lucky enough to inhabit a part of the globe with seasons that roughly resembles places of our faith’s origins. For people living in other parts of the world these symbols may still be meaningful, but they are not natural. They are cultural constructs that come from another culture.
Happily the Christian tradition, as rich as it is in symbols, is not really about anything symbolic. It is a historic religion, and we put our faith not in those symbols but in the facts of our past.
Those facts contain the key promises on which we depend. For as we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus at Easter, we are remembering the very past events that promise new life for all our futures.
And it is this promise, and not any symbol, that gives us our hope—even as one season gives way to another, as one pope gives way to another, as we turn from invasion to withdrawal, and as Lent turns into Easter.
That is why, no matter where we live, hope is in season this week.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
That is why, no matter where we live, hope is in season this week.
© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013
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