Spirit and Story Archive
Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you can find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys.
To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.
Growing Seasons
By Janet Kirchheimer
“Come on, you can do it,”
my father says as he wraps the tendrils of a cucumber plant around the fence of our
garden. “Sometimes you have to show the
plants how to do it,” he tells me. I am
in awe of my father’s relationship with the garden.
My father is in awe of God, of nature and creation, and by example is
showing me how to be in awe.
Recently, we celebrated Rosh
HaShanah and Yom Kippur, the “Yamim Noraim,” the Days of Awe,
of God and creation. Awe is one of the things
that makes us human. For me, it is a feeling
that comes over me when I look at a natural or a man-made achievement. The feeling draws me out of myself in wonder and
appreciation. In these moments, my brain and
heart are overloaded. There is something
mysterious about this feeling I that cannot rationally
explain.
For me, awe is a religious or
spiritual feeling. When I pay attention to a
wonder of nature, I connect it to God. One
morning this past summer, I spent two hours watching a morning glory open – its
heart-shaped leaves spiraling up towards the sun, the blossom that slowly opened up to a
trumpet-like flower that basked in the sunlight. It
is not possible for human beings to create a morning glory, a rainbow, a butterfly, or a
mountain range.
About six years ago, I vacationed in
the Canadian Rockies. The vastness and the
grandeur of nature blew me away. It was
beyond my comprehension. I had never seen
such big mountains and glaciers. Both my
brain and heart were overloaded. When I
returned home, I wanted to tell everyone about it, but couldn’t find the words to
describe it. To say that the mountains were
huge and the glacier waters were a blue that I’d never seen before sounded
inadequate. Not even my photos were able to
do it justice. Being a poet, I tried to write
poetry to capture what I’d seen, but I couldn’t manage to wrap myself around
such a large experience, and no words came. The
landscape, like the awe, was too big for me to take in.
Only a line from the Hallel prayer that is said on holidays and
new moons came close to evoking what I felt: “This
is the day God made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
For me, awe comes in many different
ways. Sometimes it comes in an
overwhelming experience such as the scale and grandeur of the Canadian Rockies that brings
me face to face with the power of God’s creation.
And other times, it comes in more intimate moments such as when I am
watching my father show the plants how to grow. Still,
other times, it comes while I’m contemplating an exquisite piece of art or a
technological innovation, and I am filled with amazement that God has given human beings
the capacity to design and make such works.
And yet while there is so much in the
world that can inspire me, there are times when I feel no sense of awe, moments of
darkness when there is no connection to God and God’s creations. If only it were as simple as gathering up the
moments of awe and storing them away like the squirrels store nuts for the winter, then it
would be easier during the times when awe is harder to find.
Perhaps this is why we celebrate the
Days of Awe in the fall, towards the end of the growing season so that we can harvest and
store away the moments of awe that come readily during the growing season and are scarcer
in the winter. I want to be able to recall
and be comforted by these moments of awe and to be reminded that the growing season will
come again. I do not want to be like Adam
who, as the Midrash says, was terrified that another day would not dawn when he
experienced the first nightfall after his creation.
Sitting on the back porch the
afternoon of the first day of Rosh HaShanah, looking out at the garden, my father
told me, “In the winter when there is ice and snow covering the garden, it’s
hard to imagine that the garden will ever come to life again. But it will. Nature has its rhythms and cycles. Spring will come again and so will those plentiful
feelings of awe.”
As the season turns to winter, I want
to draw on the lessons from my father and the Days of Awe.
Together, they make me more confident that I can trust in the rhythms of
nature and that, when I am in the midst of a spiritual winter, it will give way to a
spiritual spring.
To read additional articles by Janet Kirchheimer,
click here.
