Shaking Hands with Old Man Winter [guest]

The ROBINS are here! I can still feel the exhilaration of running around the house, feet pitter-pattering, making sure that everyone knew the big news. Robins were a big deal to me; it meant that Winter’s days were numbered and Spring would soon appear in all of her glory. I, having read a few too many Mother West Wind books and visited far too many convalescent homes, thought of Winter as an actual old man with his long scraggly white hair and beard staggering through the woods with a twisted cane, his old man smells meandering close behind. Spring, by contrast, was a beautiful lady who wore daffodils in her long golden hair and her skin smelled like freshly cut grass and hyacinths. I despised Winter, and the robins foretold of his demise. They were Spring’s Elijah, those who “prepared the way”; oh, how I loved them. Every morning, beginning in February, I would press my crinkly nose up against the frostbitten windowpane and try to spot an orange belly. When they finally arrived, I would sometimes spread birdseed out for them because I knew that whenever I had a long journey--like an hour long car trip--I was usually hungry afterward.

Never in all of my life have I looked forward to Winter. I have always approached it with a feeling of dread, not even really being able to enjoy the depth of beauty in Fall because I knew that Winter was nipping at its heels. Part of this very likely has to do with my tendency toward Seasonal Affective Disorder, becoming slightly depressed without enough sunlight. Another part of it has to do with my geographical history. Having grown up on a small mountain with a very steep, unpaved driveway and a mom who is terrified of driving in the snow meant that we would at times be stuck in the house for a week, or, in certain rare incidents, even two weeks. If being stuck in a house with your family for two weeks won’t give you cabin fever, nothing will.

I guess all of these things combined created in me an affiliation of Winter with depression and loneliness, something that even the thought of Christmas could not absolve. Taking it another step further, I came to think of it as symbolizing a spiritual desert of sorts, a place absent of God’s touch. If there was one thing that I couldn’t stand to think about, it was losing my tight grip on God, and I had ridden the highway of holy living for the majority of my life until I hit about 21, when it all came crumbling down.

Without the grisly details, I took some pretty big hits to areas of faith and trust in the Bible when I was in college. If I was wearing any armor of God and standing on the solid rock before, certainly now I was stripped to my unmentionables and deposited in the sea. I suddenly found myself in unchartered waters, and little did I know that it was the beginning of a winter/desert experience that would last for five long confusing years.

True to form, when my spiritual Old Man Winter arrived with his wrinkled face, I resented him and kept waiting for Spring to rescue me. It was only a matter of time, I told myself, until this depression—this life void of passion for God that I had never been without—would be forced to retreat in the face of some compelling worship time, a communion service, or a walk by the pond on a starry night. But try as I might, it persisted. I held on to hope as long as I could, but, underneath, there was a foreboding sense that this was it. My spiritual days were over, and I was about to step into one of those stagnant shells of an adult that I never wanted to become as a teenager. You know the type, the ones who start most of their sentences regarding spirituality with, “Back in ’73….” and who haven’t appeared to learn anything since. I couldn’t comprehend turning into one of these people. Especially since, most of the way through high school, a typical day for me would begin with about an hour in the Bible and would end that night with around an hour of prayer in my closet (literally). In-between these activities, I also memorized Scripture for a competitive program, often achieving the “top memorizer” status. Last time I counted, I had over 2000 verses under my belt, including the books of Philippians, 1 & 2 Peter, James, and huge chunks of Matthew, John, 1 & 2 Corinthians, and Hebrews. I was also respected in my youth group as a student leader and attended a yearlong internship program for a ministry in Texas (guaranteed to acquire you some fire!) between high school and college. You get it, I was the star. I won’t beat that horse any longer.

Point being, it was really disorienting and actually very humbling to go from my super scripted life to not being able to read my Bible for more than 10 minutes in a week. But it wasn’t a discipline factor, it was the desire. I didn’t want to read; I didn’t want to pray, and when I did either, it felt forced.

The longer this continued, the more I was pressed with a deep feeling of shame at my lack of spiritual fervor. I handled the situation like anyone else does when they are ashamed: I hid. I only confided in a very few friends who seemed to be having a similar experience and who also didn’t know what to do. Not to be disrespectful, but the few pastors who did hear me talk about my depletion of passion would either respond with something very inspirational such as, “You know, if I only spent ten minutes a week with my wife, my marriage would be in shambles”, or else they had nothing to offer. Silence. I already felt cut off from God’s presence, and now I was being isolated from any sort of real community.

And so it went, stretching out for years. Each year in the spring, I would add on another number to my time in Winter. Granted, there were some progresses made—a deep and profound revelation of grace—but even more setbacks. I loved the Old Man for a time, taking up a little more freedom in life and philosophy than was usual for me. Mostly, though, I hated it (hated myself too) and felt confused, interrupted, though never abandoned. After a time, I stopped trying to kick myself into doing devotions and just stopped altogether, and what was more, I felt like that was the only thing I knew for sure. I wasn’t supposed to do devotions. This was a concept so foreign to me that I did not dare tell anyone of it; no one, not even my husband, knew.

It was not long after I had reached this point—perhaps six months or more—that I finally found it. I discovered that my Old Man Winter has been known before, and that he has another name, an older one, even. He is known, and written about extensively, by St. John of the Cross as the Dark Night of the Soul. I had heard this term tossed around before, but it always seemed to be just that, a term thrown in there for good measure, with no real understanding of what the dark night of the soul really means. I found hope through those pages, and, gradually, saw hope expand in other places as well.

St. John of the Cross wrote,

...those who are on the right path will set their eyes on God and not on these outward things [religious objects or holy places] nor on their inner experiences. They will enter the dark night of the soul and find all of these things removed. They will have all the pleasure taken away so that the soul may be purified. For a soul will never grow until it is able to let go of the tight grasp it has on God.

This was contrary to all the teaching that I had ever heard before. Further on, he writes,

The sin of spiritual gluttony will prompt them to read more books and say more prayers, but God, in his wisdom, will deny them any consolation because he knows that to feed this desire will create an inordinate appetite and breed innumerable evils. The Lord heals such souls through the aridity of the dark night. …No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.

If there is one thing that I learned through my involuntary relationship with Old Man Winter, and I learned well, it’s that reading more books and saying more prayers does not make us any dearer to the heart of God. In fact, these actions can often be used by Christians (such as myself) to color over the ugliness and reality of their sinful nature. When stripped of the desire to perform these religious acts, I am forced to recognize my helplessness in bold contrast to His ever-deepening grace. So I come to this conclusion: It is His gift to know my sin and His great love, especially this early on in life. Everything that can be shaken will be shaken. Christ remains.

For the first time—the very first time—since I can remember, I looked forward to Winter this year. I find myself seeing beauty in these grey days—even the sharp crispness of the wind is welcome to hit my face and turn the tip of my nose pink. I won’t protest. I’m shaking hands with Old Man Winter… and smiling at the thought of Spring.

He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters


Naomi Boyer is a West Coast girl transplanted to Pennsylvania with her husband, Justin. She considers herself a realist and could own a car with both a "Life is Beautiful" and a "Shit Happens" bumper sticker affixed to it.