Last week someone said to me, “February is the cruelest month, not April.” Who’d disagree? The cold and the grey can start to feel like quite a drag this month. Even with erratic winters these days due to climate change, with some weeks seeming to be weirdly spring-like, enough to trick crocuses out of the ground, this shortest month can feel like the longest. And if you’re inclined to despair about all the things in this world there are to despair about, it can be a hard time.

Many cultures in temperate regions have festivals around this time that relate to the length of winter and the anticipation of spring. Like Groundhog Day in our country, right? Now, I, for one, don’t recommend putting our faith in rodent-based divinations. (Flipping a coin is in fact more accurate.) But for what’s really at stake here, we don’t need to retreat to magic. The fact of the matter, geologically, is that we are now just past the half-way mark between the winter solstice and the spring equinox.

In the words of Kathleen Norris, “Spring seems far off, impossible, but it is coming. Already there is dusk instead of darkness at five in the afternoon; already hope is stirring at the edges of the day.”

Many plants and seeds are beginning the process of stirring out of their dormancy in preparation for spring. And people who are growers are doing things like gathering for seed swaps, and drawing up plans for their spring gardens.

We know that our God has made this world good and worthy of love and flourishing. So, periods of darkness and cold can be in fact fertile times, in their way, important parts of the larger cycles of life and death and rebirth, of action and rest and preparation for renewed vitality.

One of the traditional festivals of this time is St. Brigid’s Day in Ireland.

St. Brigid is a beloved embodiment of the life-giving, life-renewing powers of a life lived with the heart of Christ. In Ireland, there are many wells that are dedicated to St. Brigid. She was someone who drew so openly from the deep and true source of the living waters of Christ, which quench our deepest thirst.

St. Brigid was born to a woman who was enslaved. The experience of her upbringing, coupled with her experience with the living Christ, made her lovingly attentive to those who need special nurture, especially those who have been neglected. She also is associated with the sacred powers of bringing fertility and creativity and healing and renewed life out of situations that have become desperately in need of that.

Patron saint of creative and procreative powers: Hearth, fertility, midwives, and newborns. Blacksmiths, printers, poets, cattle, chickens.

It makes sense that St. Brigid’s feast day is February 1st, when winter can start to feel desperate, but we can reasonably look to the coming of spring.

In Ireland, one of the practices on St. Brigid’s Day is to go to one of her wells and dip a piece of cloth in the water and tie that cloth to a nearby tree. Often people use this as a way to pray for healing for themselves or a loved one, bringing a piece of cloth from that person. But it’s also an opportunity to pray for other ways one may be needing or yearning for renewed vitality, praying for a blessing on whatever new buds are preparing to emerge come spring.

Let me suggest a ritual. What’s needed is a strip of cloth or ribbon; a body of water, either natural or in a basin that can be sacred for you; a tree that has lost its leaves for winter; and a prayerful attitude.

Here’s the ritual:

1. Prayerfully reflect on these questions:

What can be preparing to grow for you, for one you care about, for our society, for our world? What potential for renewal do you deeply hope for, that’s deeply needed, especially to help you, to help us, to help others near and far live more fully into who God has created us to be? Consider a God’s eye view of yourself, or your family, or our society, or our world.

2. Pray that hope into the strip of cloth or ribbon

3. Dip the cloth into the water source, praying for your hope to be nourished by the living waters of Christ

4. Tie the cloth to the branch of an overwintering tree, knowing it is beginning to stir out of dormancy, and in a few months will begin to bud.

5. Return to the tree in the coming weeks and months, prayerfully remembering your hope for renewal, and the Spirit of Christ that is helping it prepare to bud.

I wish blessings upon the potential within each of you, and within us as a community, society, and world, to continue to grow into the belovedness God has created us to be.

Delivered Sunday, February 4th, 2024, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge. We performed the above ritual together during worship.

Image: St. Brigid, from Dancing Saints Series by Mary Hall