The 6th Day of Christmas. Pausing at the Threshold

It is never too late to begin. Some guidance to create your own midwinter retreat.

Fall and winter intermingle at the shore of the Mississippi.

Greetings to you, dear fellow pilgrim,

the sun is just rising here in Minnesota on a frosty day. Today we arrive at the threshold where the old and the new year meet. We are almost there! In fact, our 12 Days are part of this sacred threshold time which spans from Christmas Day in the old year to Epiphany in the new year. It is the midwinter season which invites us to quieten our soul, and to retreat into ourself (as RM Rilke invited us to yesterday).

As we are half way into our pilgrimage through the 12 Days of Christmas, I today would like to invite you to a time of retreat.

And if you have just arrived here at this journey, welcome! I am so glad you found us. It is never too late to start the journey and this weekend is particularly suited to bring you in.

In the monastic tradition pausing and resting are as important as working or studying or any other chore or leisure of the day. In fact, they are so important that they are assigned places in the monastic schedule.

Those of you who are familiar with monastic prayers have witnessed how much pausing there is during daily prayer - which mainly consists of chanting the psalms. This contemplative rhythm is, for this pastor’s daughter, like a breather in itself. No long sermons. Just singing, chanting, praying, pausing :-)

I love to loose myself in the old words and poetry of the psalms, chanted beautifully by the community so as to let my mind wander and to allow my body to breathe. Behind every sung phrase in the prayer book is a *. It means: pause. Breathe. And the whole community does just that. They pause and breathe. And with the new breath they start the next line. Sometimes I go to a monastic prayer just to experience this pause. This sacred space where we let go and where we start again.

Let’s try:

*

Yes. Pause and breath :-)

Pauses are places to quieten the soul and to rejuvenate the body. *

We tune in into our breathing, we slow down. *

Just like that. *

A threshold retreat

Our weeks are scheduled the same way. The 7th day is a day of pause in all three Abrahamic religions. This year, New Years Eve falls on a Sunday and thus organically invites us into a whole day of pausing.

So here is what we will do together during this threshold weekend:

I invite you to a time of pause and a time of deepening. You will decide how this will fit your schedule or how to build other activities you have planned around it. Here are some suggestions:

A time of pausing*

During end of year retreats we invite our participants to be attentive to the surroundings, e.g. to consciously take in e.g. the last sunrise or sun set of the old year. To bid your farewell at the threshold in order to welcome in the new dawn. And so I invite you today to plan your sacred pause. Today or on Sunday, for a day or for an hour. It does not matter. All what matters, is that you bring your heart and that you carve out some time in your day to pause.

Some of you are experienced in pausing and it will come organically. Some of you do need to do some planning in order to experience a pause.

Assign a time slot for your sacred pause. You can pair it with a walk or with sunrise or sunset. You can pair it with your morning coffee, afternoon tea or evening drink.

For those of you who pray: pause from prayer. Build a pause into your prayer. Because a pause is indeed a pause. We hold the prayer, and we breathe.

As the monastic communities pause together, you also can pause together with another creature, a beloved companion, a community, your virtual 12 Days community. At the beginning of the new week I will give opportunity to share for those who wish to do so. And there is also always the possibility to leave a comment below :-) And do click the heart so we know you have been here. Thank you!

A time of deepening

This is the invitation for both those who have walked with us from the start and those who started this journey later or who just arrived today. (This is what I so much love about these kind of pilgrimages. You can start when ever you arrive. It is never too late!)

Here you can find all contemplations of our 12 Days of Christmas journey so far. I am really in love with this beautiful design our new home on substack provides us for this venue.

You can chose a post you have missed or a post you would like to come back to. You can visit or re-visit. Did you probably wanted to listen to this beautifully melancholic German Christmas song from Day 4 offering a container for our sorrows? Or pondering Hildegard’s soulful take on the nativity scene from Day 3? Or seeing our little one bringing in the Christmas Angel on the Second Day? Or walk the whole walk once more?

What my contemplations are trying to do is to create a movement of soul. It is quite familiar every year as our soul moves quite similar through these threshold days. But it does not matter so much which movement happens on which day. Just as each pilgrimage does something familiar, and is open to what happens at the wayside.

So I invite you to walk though this door and right into our journey. Let your heart chose a Contemplation and it will be the right one. I unfortunately cannot create a more pretty button for you. But imagine it as the Christmas door I wrote about in our first gathering post for this journey.

How ever you do it, I trust it will be just right for you.

Tomorrow we will be back with a blessing for New Years Eve. My blessing for today is quite short:

May your time of deepening

and your time of pausing *

lead you to the sacred door

where the old and the new meet. *

where farewells are said

and hopes are built. *

May this weekend

become your sacred portal *

into a new dawn.

* * *

AF

With much love, Almut (with Chuck and little one)

This post is part of our 12 Days of Christmas Series 2023/24: “Reclaiming Joy,” a Contemplative Journey towards the heart of Christmas. You can find all previous posts here. To subscribe or to upgrade your subscription click here. To share your thoughts with us, respond to this email or comment below.

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