A Seasonal Perspective

“Night and day are a continuum. Our planet is constantly turning day into night, and back again to day, with some of the loveliest times being dawn and evening, when it is not sharply either day or night. Our planet is seasonal. Winter gives way to spring, to summer, to autumn, and back to winter. Our lives, too, are seasonal and cyclical. We all have times when everything goes our way; then come days when nothing works out. We despair, and fear that things may never change and life be happy again. 

Yet one of the hang-ups of our Western civilization is that we tend to ignore the seasonal nature of things and to divide things sharply into opposites: night and day, joy and woe, good and evil, black and white, men and women, gay and straight, life and death. We see these opposites locked in struggle. Good must overcome evil; light must prevail over darkness, and life must struggle against death. Quakers are as prone to this as anyone. With our doctrine of the Inner Light, we tend to think that the Inner Light is the norm, that it is all we were meant to be. And we deny and fail to recognize the darkness in ourselves.”

— Elizabeth Watson, 1993
Quaker feminist theologian