The World Made New

First snow, the Christian New Year, and an upcoming talk

We returned to our homestead after a week of travel to a landscape utterly transformed from the one we left behind. When we left in late November, there were piles of leaves to be raked, grass I still wanted to clip one last time, some dirt we’d moved that I still needed to level a bit more, and some odds and ends that needed cleaning - a cinder block here, some wood scraps there. All mixed in with the dead grass, rocks, and fallen branches that characterize what we call ‘stick season’¹ in Vermont.

When we returned, the land was blanketed with sparking white. I gazed with wonder, as I do every year, at the beauty and simplicity of the winter landscape coved with a fresh blanket of white. The land danced with countless jewels of ice, many refracting the colors of the rainbow. I also sighed and set down my mental list of things to do on the land, that must now remain undone until April. There’s a little death in accepting the definitive end of the half of the year where I can work the soil and grass, and in taking stock of both my successes and failures over the past months.

As we near the completion of our sabbatical, I’m also looking back at how little I wrote here on Substack in 2024. I spent the first third of our sabbatical year moving at a slower pace, but mostly staying in the same psychic space as other years. In doing less in other areas, I had more time to write. Then, somewhere around the end of April, the words stopped. I found myself drawn more deeply into silence, and to consent to God’s work of stripping me of old and limited patterns of belief. As the psychic ground underneath me was shifting, I simply couldn’t write something I felt was worth sharing in this forum. I now see this reconfiguring as one of the chief fruits of our sabbatical, and I’m getting glimpses of a what it will mean to return.

One of the outer blessings of Sabbatical was that it allowed our family to be even less engaged in the wider culture than we are in other years - which is already far less than most of our peers. For me, it’s given the space for me to lose some of the old ideas and conditioning of my childhood and formal education. Increasingly, I’m realizing that I’ve lived my life simultaneously inhabiting two worldviews - the Christian and the modern - that have radically different foundational assumptions about the nature of reality. Over Sabbatical, I’ve been increasingly shedding the modern worldview, which allows me to enter more fully into some of the deeper graces and metaphysical realities of the (classical, ancient) Christian worldview. From this new vantage, the world is far more beautiful, tragic (in our blindness to deeper realities), and filled with wonder and Divine power than I had previously allowed myself to take in,

God willing, some of that new worldview will find its way into writing here at Substack. I’ve been blessed to receive funding to write a book on the spirituality of Christian prayer, contemplation and Creation this winter, and am thrilled at the opportunity to take a deep dive in this topic that is dear to my heart and vocation.

Happy New Year!

Yesterday, the first Sunday of Advent, marks the start of the Christian New Year. I think it’s significant that our year begins in darkness. The first movement of the year is the time of deepest descent, of the ever increasing night, and of the lowest energy in our bodies. The Christian liturgies call us to begin again by letting go, by stripping down, and by patient waiting. It’s essential, in any endeavor that comes from God, to begin first by becoming still and small, to dispose ourselves to receive. Only from this stance can we hope to move forward as agents of Christ’s love, rather than under the power of our merely human efforts and intentions.

It’s also the time of year when the unified voice of the liturgy and the land are most at odds with the frenzy of the materialist anti-culture. Exactly when the Advent liturgy and the descending winter invite us to wait, to be still, and to be patient in our unfulfilled longing, the secular world ramps up its calls to consume. These calls are more of an irritant than a temptation this year, but it highlights to me the opposite trajectories of the sacred and secular that vie for human attention in this season.

A School of Love: Transformation of the Heart, Vocation, and Building Spiritual Culture

Finally, I’ll be giving a talk this Thursday, December 5th, at 6 PM at the First Congregational Church of Thetford, Vermont. I’ll be speaking on Metanoia of Vermont’s emerging vision of the role of small Christian communities in living out the Way of Christ in our era. The talk is titled: A School of Love: Transformation of the Heart, Vocation, and Building Spiritual Culture.

If you’re local, please join us!

All are also welcome to watch and listen remotely, via Zoom

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82903725913?pwd=Hg9dL5GTO1F8YbJAJTHyaLNMF9eQev.1

Many blessings to you all,

Mark

1. It’s the time after the leaves fall, before the snow cover.