Rev. Josh Pawelek

Late November sun shines dimly on cold gray mornings, on leafless gray branches, on still gray ponds. After autumn’s beauty has shown forth, after its grandeur has lifted spirits, after its fanfare has inspired, it all finally gives way to gray skies, empty trees, barren fields, and windswept hills.

In this pre-solstice season, this advent season, this strangely quiet season the gray landscape offers a blank slate on which our racing hearts, our focused minds, our hurried spirits can wander in peace for a time. Stripped of its color and its crops, its farmland lying fallow, the pale sky peering through its empty woodland canopies, the gray world opens around us in all directions, invites us to apprehend its features in new ways, beckons us to notice what isn’t always visible or touchable, but is always present.

In this in-between season before the sun’s return, the gray landscape gives us permission to move off our well-worn paths; gives us permission to  move back from the assumptions and beliefs and truths we hold tightly and close, sometimes without thought or examination; gives us permission to review our familiar patterns from different angles, from different directions, to recognize when they no longer serve us and, if need be, to let them go, to let the late November wind sweep them out across the empty, gray fields, over the empty gray hills, across the frozen gray ponds.

If we open our hearts and minds and spirits to it, this neither-black-nor-white season, this shades-upon-shades-of-gray season will show us new ways that had previously been hidden in the blooming spring; will reveal to us new paths previously covered in summer’s green underbrush; will offer many truths previously concealed in autumn’s rich, splendid color.

In this season may we practice living in shades of gray, hearing different stories, singing different songs, discerning different truths; living in shades, imagining new possibilities, new futures. May we practice living in shades of gray, withholding judgement, embracing humanity in its fullness; living in shades of gray, learning to forgive, learning to be forgiven; living in shades of gray, slowly remembering and naming all those false aspects of ourselves, those pieces of us imposed from beyond us, those boxes and labels that keep us from being our true selves, that keep us from being fully human; living in shades of gray, slowly remembering and naming those histories of genocide and war, those unjust systems, those economic inequalities, those assaults upon the land, those enduring sources of violence that keep all of us from being the beloved community; living in shades of gray, slowly remembering all of it, naming all of it, and
beginning to cast it away, so that when the light returns—and when the gray that has turned to dark finally turns back to green—we will be ready with new selves to create a more compassionate, just and peaceful future.

Before winter snows weigh down trees, bends branches and pile up along driveways and sidewalks, obscuring everything that is open to us now, let us live for a season in shades of gray.

Amen and blessed be.