With the winter solstice less than twenty-four hours past, it is safe to say that we are in the dead of winter.

It is the darkest time of year. Long nights and little daylight serve as reminders of the natural rhythm that is so much a part of this journey all of us are on. In the dead of winter, we find it easier to reflect on those events and experiences that have come and gone, receding into the dimness of fading memories. It is, of course, sad to think on these things. We want those friends who are gone not to be. We want those treasured remembrances of ancient experiences to be as fresh as yesterday but they aren't. They are in the past.

On this near briefest of days, I would suggest that such fadings are not all bad. There is a wonderful story in an equally wonderful book that tells of how a seed must die in order for something beautiful to bloom anew. Perhaps our letting go of things past will allow us to experience beauty even in these bleakest of days.

A past grudge might be a very good place to start. Think of all the time and energy you have expended mulling over a previous indignity or prior indiscretion. Does your blood still boil when you think on the hurt that was done? Let it die, as dead as the landscape that surrounds you. Six months ago, when the summer sun teased us into staying up long past our bed time, we were tempted to dwell on matters that seemed to really...matter. Here in the dead of winter, those same issues take on a different meaning, a slightly altered status. I suggest you take advantage of this new perspective to put some things finally to rest. As The Eagles once sang, quite emphatically, "Get over it!"

Christianity has managed, despite its myriad of muddles, to provide a few things of great value for our well-being. Paramount is our reliance on the image of death and resurrection. No symbol better captures a Christian understanding of reality than this. And yet all of us, Christian or not, spend an inordinate amount of time denying this essential truth. We do everything within our power to make sure we never have to deal with death. Our language that surrounds the time of someone's dying sounds as if what is happening is nothing more than catching the Greyhound for Peoria. We develop all kinds of bizarre and certainly unbiblical scenarios surrounding death because we are so afraid of entering into what is so very natural and, as some of us believe, so very valuable, as well.

This reluctance to accept death and dying is played out daily. Parents who are unwilling to allow their children to become adults, spouses who resent growth and change in their mate, fogeys like me who spend far too much time mumbling about the way it used to be...all of us foolishly denying what these days of winter so powerfully attest...death comes and, in time, change, even resurrection.

For the less religiously inclined, Thomas Wolfe put it this way...

"You can't go back home to your family--

to a young man's dream of fame and glory

to the country cottage away from strife and conflict

to the father you have lost

to the old forms and systems of things which seemed everlasting

but are changing all the time."

Having grown up in L.A., I don't have childhood memories of winter. Now I sometimes wonder if the caricatured Californian who frantically collects toys and mindlessly chases the sun doesn't stem, in some part, from this absence of the dark and cold. One cannot help but speculate upon the fact that most vaporous television sit-coms emanate from winterless Los Angeles...as do a preponderance of religious hucksters.

Perhaps this is nothing but delusional rationalization. Sitting here in the dark, am I just trying to convince myself of its worth? Perhaps.

My experience points otherwise. For me, the evidence is irrefutable. There is value in this time, importance to the long nights. Without this strange and mysterious season there can be nothing new. It would all remain, so very sadly, the same.