The wisdom of winter.

An extract from Theology everywhere, something to ponder at the turn of the year, read the rest of the article here

Nature’s winter can help remind us to ease off our outward production and consider what we need to collate inwardly. What do we want to carry into spring—and what are we not meant to keep holding on to? As we move through the final days of 2025 and into 2026, what would it look like to store what is nourishing and release what is weighing us down?

Who are the lonely and forgotten we have neglected through the year, whom we could reach out to at this time of recuperation and exchange of greeting cards? Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer describes an older “gift economy” in which abundance is not hoarded in private, but held in relationship, where “all flourishing is mutual.”[1]

Ivan Illich terms conviviality “the opposite of industrial productivity”—a way of living in which tools and systems do not eclipse human agency or flatten the world into endless output.[2] 

Winter makes legible this logic, as it asks less of us outwardly, while drawing attention to the reality that life is sustained by reserves, reciprocity, and the givenness of what we did not manufacture, but can still pass on to others.

From the beginning, God’s own rest is declared blessed and hallowed—a boundary woven into creation itself. Sabbath reaches outward to creatures and communities, a rhythm of relief and refreshment extended as far as the soil itself.

Jesus defends it as a gift “made for humankind”, and Walter Brueggemann describes Sabbath as resistance because it is “a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.”[3] 

The God of ages is through all seasons Emmanuel. There is a time for everything; in the quieter season of winter, we realign ourselves with the rest of creation, learning again that whether in recuperating or making ready…God’s provision is present, even when we are at rest.

[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022.

[2] Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 5.

[3] Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance: Saying No to the Culture of Now, (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2017).