Make Way for Grace and Grieving
Sarah Signorino
As a winter solstice baby, I was first introduced to the idea of “wintering” when I picked up Katherine May’s book, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times as a birthday treat last year. I started reading it immediately, toward the end of Advent. May writes, “Wintering is a season in the cold. It is a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, side-lined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider.”
I was finding it impossible to enter into the joy of Advent. It had been a very difficult year for my family filled with death, sickness, and change. I had been trying to compensate for the dark and cold in my Buffalo home by hanging up extra twinkly lights and wearing fuzzy socks to bed. The graces of the season could not sway me toward the joy and hope I normally associate with Advent.
The question of how I could “winter well” became my focus through the cold months. It was a welcomed, not feared, intentional retreat into the darkness. It was an opportunity for me to name and welcome my grief and my graces from the year, to intentionally create space in my mental wardrobe. Instead of focusing on Jesus’ birth and joy in my prayer life, I focused on the time between the Annunciation and arrival in Bethlehem–the waiting, the work, the uncertainty, the fear. This time was full of progress too. It must have been lonely work.
Today’s readings give us two other women who undoubtedly had a period of wintering in their lives: Samson’s and John’s mothers who both find themselves unexpectedly pregnant. They customarily retreated during their gestation and to readjust their lives which, undoubtedly, contained blessings and challenges. It was a period of wintering.
Are you in a period of waiting or darkness this Advent? How can you carry both your graces and grieving during this period of natural darkness? How can you winter well?
Sarah Signorino has almost 20 years of experience in mission and ministry. She served as the Assistant Director in Campus Ministry and the Director of Mission & Identity at her alma mater, Canisius University. During that time she also began and co-directed Canisius' Be the Light Youth Theology Institute in 2018, funded by the Lilly Endowment. Sarah lives with her family in Buffalo, NY, and enjoys hiking, reading about women's spirituality, planning retreats, and going on adventures with her kids.
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