Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

February reverses all revelation,
Arrests the light hurtling toward us, 
Meteor showers suspended in space while we watch from below, 
Still as fossilized trees chained by obsolete roots. 

February preserves only pain,
A moment in time prolonged past bearing
Like the dirty river stagnant in spring but worse in winter: 
Frozen debris in a glass box exhibit on entropy. 

February erases our epiphanies.
Some fright force raises its hand against our hearts,
Holds down our tongues, slight as a snowflake
Accumulating power like an avalanche.

February incarnates the divine instruction:
Be still. Wait. Four hundred years of silence
And forty days in the desert—surely we can outlast 
These slim twenty-eight. Surely spring will come.

Hi, friends. It's good to be back! January was a wonderful reset, a gift of a slower reentry into post-holiday life. Now all the normal routines have picked up and today, in New York, for the first time in a couple weeks, the sun is shining.

I wrote this poem exactly one year ago and now it's finally time to share it because it is once again the fifth Sunday after Epiphany in the liturgical church calendar. One more week and then it’s Lent, which I'm sure will show up in some of my musings here.

I think it's Emily Freeman who said never to make big life decisions in February. February has a way of distorting our sight. It's foggy glass, a warped lens. The cold and the lack of sun (for many parts of this hemisphere), the long unbroken march of the winter and spring seasons without significant periods of rest stretching behind and before us—February is just tough. I think you have to face it the way you do depression and other such struggles: you tell yourself, the feelings I feel are real but the message in them is not. You’re not shaming yourself, but you are calling out the lie. Spring will come. Dawn will break. I am loved. God is here.

This is when they matter most, the truths we say we believe. It's that sublime quote from Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn: The Final Empire:

“Belief isn't simply a thing for fair times and bright days. What is belief—what is faith—if you don't continue in it after failure? Anyone can believe in someone, or something that always succeeds. But failure...ah, now, that is hard to believe in, certainly and truly. Difficult enough to have value. Sometimes we just have to wait long enough...then we find out why exactly it was that we kept believing.”

What is belief—what is faith—if you don't continue in it in the depths of February?

May our Februarys be a season that, however dark, like John Ames in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, we look back on as blessed:

Now that I look back, it seems to me that in all that deep darkness a miracle was preparing. So I am right to remember it as a blessed time, and myself as waiting in confidence, even if I had no idea what I was waiting for.

In Other Words…

You can see the books I've read in 2024 so far here—no five star reads yet but still a good selection.

And you can follow me on letterboxd to see how many of the Oscar nominees I get to before my roommates’ & my Oscars viewing party (we are very excited for this).

A housekeeping note, and a prayer request, if you are so inclined: my arm pain has been flaring up again, so I'm moving to an every-other-week posting schedule to help me manage how much I'm doing on the computer. It may also mean I pause posting on Instagram because that's a lot more finger intensive, which I hate because I love the community on there—but it also means lucky you, substack subscriber!

I’m anxious about the pain because I'll never forget how it got worse and worse and then I had to take two years off of my life, and even though I have since recovered from other flareups, the memory of those two years has left a scar. But I have many other memories of healing and the pain abating, so I'm resting on those as well. Thank you as always for reading and caring and following along. It truly means so much.

Even in this sleepy season, let’s stay awake.

~ Aberdeen