Before this pandemic, when I’d think about the fruits of the Spirit, I would picture apples and bananas dotted with raindrops. Joy and peace, as citrus and melon. Gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, a bowl of cherries. Self-control, clearly the grapes. This year, I have learned what was always true, though it is less colorful and a lot harder. The role of the Christian isn’t the person in the grocery store selecting the perfect fruit, then tasting and arranging it into a nice cocktail to serve the world. The Christian is engrafted, as we say, into the whole plant. That means how we weather the seasons has lasting effects on the fruit.
In her lovely book “Wintering,” Katherine May writes about winter as a physical as well as an emotional season. All creatures seem to notice and transform during winter, except human beings for some reason. For example, most trees produce their buds in high summer, and though they might seem like skeletons to us in winter, if you look closely, there are fists of life pressing bravely, even expectant, against the cold. May makes this beautiful claim that “winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.” I think that the church is currently in a kind of winter that will define us for a long time. This season will leave its mark to be sure, but unlike newer institutions, we have faced hard winters, and even pandemics, before.
The pandemic has shuttered the world tight like a blizzard. Signs on the front of churches beg people to wear masks, to self-report and stay away if they have been ill, and to stand six feet apart. Like December trees, the church seems bare to neighborhood people on their meandering COVID walks. It’s like a sad version of the children’s finger game: Open the doors, where are all the people?
But the spindly church is not a scene of death so much as a potent waiting. As a pastor during this ecclesial winter, I have a half dozen stoles at home and no table paraments to tell me “wear the purple one today.” I find I lose track of liturgical time. Advent seemed to pass her baton straight to Lent. The Christmas birth happened somewhere in there, but not in the flash of green like in past years.
And yet new life has been pressing forward, as if underground. In homes. Over Zoom. Youth writing letters to seniors. Canned food pumping out into the community in a complex root system of boxes in the narthex moved to people’s trunks, all of it humming with purpose. Deacons cover the lonely terrain of people’s lives with calls and care, a kind of mulch that warms what would be too tender to expose to the elements. Every Sunday is a kind of blessing of the animals, with birds chirping behind the liturgist and cats on computers presiding like the fussiest of beadles.
This arctic snap for the church is not without pain though. I feel an ache at the migration of choirs and live music to a flat screen. They had to leave us like southbound birds until it is safe again. The people we lost were giant trees that fell in the forest with few there to hear them, to bear witness, to mark their unique sound in the world. It’s lonely. It’s a wilderness place. We’re all out on a limb in some way or another.
But Easter life starts in seasons like this one. The good news springs to life in dark wombs and empty tombs and shuttered upper rooms. It shoots up from the stump of Jesse, and that means there are fruits on the way from the wintering church.
I imagine the fruit of love will be sweeter since it has learned how to navigate close quarters. I imagine the peace will be bolder since it has faced fragility. I imagine the joy will be watermelons, a grand picnic of togetherness that we finally appreciate so much that we spread the seeds of it everywhere.
