The Slow Way: Winter is for Rest, an Epiphany Reflection

Rest is a simpler sort of knowing, a kind of pursuit of joy for the sake of joy

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

I have a tender spot in my heart for the lesser known Church seasons. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas for all its flair and fun. But I tend to long for the quieter seasons like Epiphany, which don’t get as much love. Epiphany is named for the divine revelation granted to the wise men who visited Jesus and it begins on January 6, the day the Church officially recognizes the visit of the Magi.

Then it lasts. It lasts as long as it needs to, until Ash Wednesday. Sometimes four weeks, sometimes nine. I’m sure someone knows why and how this is decided, but I don’t. The main thing to know is this: Epiphany, created by folks living in the Northern hemisphere, was intended to take place in the dark, in the cold. In high school English I learned the word epiphany to mean a moment of sudden revelation or insight. And it makes sense to me that this season devoted to our very own aha moments, our Magi moments of following the voice of Love straight to the manifestation of God, right smack in the middle of winter. Revelation in the darkness, in the sparseness of our own lives.

What have been your moments of revelation, the moments life shook you so deeply that you woke up and realized our way of being in the world wasn’t going to work anymore? One of mine happened over the course of Fall 2019, after a nasty fall down some concrete stairs. The concussion that followed did not line up with my general way of dealing with setbacks. I did my duty to rest a few days and move on with my responsibilities, but my inflamed brain and body refused to cooperate. It was seven months before the confusion, the fogginess, and the chronic pain began to settle. There was only one way for me to heal, and it was a way I refused: slowness, rest, and releasing the expectations I had on myself and my family. 

It’s trendy right now to talk about rest. But it’s still not acceptable to actually practice it. I know this because, even though I’ve been writing about rest, thinking about rest, and attempting to practice it intentionally in my days, I still beam like the “Girl of the Year” award winner I was in middle school whenever someone comments on my ability to hustle. “People admired me for how much I got done,” Katherine May writes in her book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. “I lapped it up, but felt secretly that I was only trying to keep pace with everyone else, and they seemed to be coping far better.” She goes on to point to that feature of modern life we all recognize, our “believing that everything is urgent and that I can never do enough.” 

I didn’t know how to heal from my concussion. I knew how to do the exercises the physical therapist gave me. I knew how to take the medicine the neurologist prescribed. But rest? Who knows how to rest, really? Everything is urgent. And if we are good because we get things done, who are we if we don’t? 

May says that “transformation is the business of winter.” I love the east coast for the starkness of winter’s business. After a decade in California, I’m still mesmerized by the austerity of this season’s bare trees, and the backdrop of the sky that reveals itself only in winter. It’s wise for us to recognize that we who live in Winter’s hard reality are shaped by the sideways and brief daylight, the bareness, the cold that surrounds us. Winter strips us in the same way it does the trees. We’ve just trained ourselves not to notice, to bundle up, turn on our heaters and artificial lights, and keep on producing. But what if this season is an invitation to acknowledge our limits, and honor the limits in one another, to practice being still, less productive, more joyful? 

This Epiphany, will we allow ourselves to be transformed? 

I’m still learning how to live with a body that experiences chronic migraines as a consequence of that fall four years ago. But the gift of my body’s limits has been God’s invitation to find out what it means to rest, and actually learn to practice it. It’s not, I’ve learned, sitting. It’s not necessarily napping. It’s a simpler sort of knowing, a kind of pursuit of joy for the sake of joy. As May writes, “I had no idea how much these quiet pleasures had retreated from my life while I was rushing around, and now I’m inviting them back in: still, rhythmic work with the hands, the kind of light concentration that allows you to dream, and the sense of kindness done in the process.”

Maybe this season is an invitation to kindness, to dreaming, to working with our hands. Can we allow ourselves to cease the relentless pursuit of doing enough, and instead choose to be kind to ourselves and one another—to make warm and generous meals, to sit with people we love under blankets, to dream, and to ask ourselves who we are if we’re not proving ourselves? These are the spiritual practices of Epiphany, to be still long enough to see the revelation for all that is.

A Slow Practice

I love the Danish concept of hygge, the commitment to coziness, meaningful connections, small pleasures, and gratitude during the winter season. A few years back, in my early years of pursuing the idea of rest, I read The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well. The book walks through all the principles of practicing Hygge: warm, delicious food, fires and candles, cozy socks, good friends and family under blankets, stories, games, togetherness.

For those of us who struggle to stop producing or performing, who aren’t sure how to practice our faith outside of doing, embracing the concept of hygge during the Epiphany season is its own sort of spiritual practice.

Today I want you to consider how you will mark Epiphany in your life for the next five weeks until Ash Wednesday in mid-February. Can you commit to one concept of hygge over the next five weeks? This is the anti-New Year’s resolution. It’s embracing stillness, comfort, and joy (as opposed to self-improvement!)

What if for the next five weeks you commit to having friends to your home once a week and making soup for them? What if you promise yourself an evening sit by the fire every night? What if you bake more bread, take time for more phone calls with people you love? These are the spiritual practices of making room for joy.

For today’s practice, I’m inviting you to ask God to help you know what you need in this season. How will you connect with rest and joy? Give yourself five minutes to rest in the presence of Love and ask for what you need. See if any ideas rise to the surface for you. If a practice becomes clear for you, write it down and commit to making it part of your life from now until Ash Wednesday.

End with this prayer:

God of comfort in the cold, light in the darkness, transformation in the winter, guide me to choose rest and joy this season. Amen.