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| The EP covers for Jon Foreman's solo project. From left to right: Spring, Summer, Fall, and Winter. |
Seasons. They pervade every aspect of life. Without them, there is no change, no movement, no growth. Without them, the world is dead. We are dead.
This is the lesson the Lord has been trying to teach me over the past two years, and I am only just now beginning to understand:
Life, especially our interpersonal relationships, is made up of seasons-- of movement, of change, of growth. These seasons, in many ways, mirror the seasons of nature. Spring brings the joy of discovery and newness of life, summer the heat and the stamina of youth, fall the harvest of maturity, and winter the death of certain elements of the old in anticipation and hope of the new. The more we come to understand the beauty and the necessity of each one of the seasons (and the more we come to know their divine author), the more we will know peace in our relationships with both God and man.
Why? Because our love, our promise of faithfulness to the beloved, will not be rooted in the joy we find in the seasons of comfort and youth. Rather, we will find faithfulness and perseverance through all the seasons, whether they bring consolation or desolation, by being rooted in the unchanging author of the seasons-- the God who alone makes us secure (Psalm 4).
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The last two years of my life have been filled with moments of joy, to be sure, but they have also been colored by a pervading sense of desolation, a spiritual dryness, and a lack of spiritual vigor. For a long time, I blamed a myriad of life circumstances and events for this desolation, but something in me knew that these couldn't be the root cause. So I kept looking for the answer, and I eventually found it in the seasons.
About five years ago, I experienced a springtime of faith so vibrant, so refreshing, that the whole course of my life was changed. I discovered-- I mean really discovered-- the Eucharist, was welcomed into a new family of friends, transferred schools, changed majors, and began my journey as a life-long student of theology and catechetics. Since then, I've experienced extreme highs and extreme lows, I've made mistakes (and lots of them), learned lessons, laughed, cried, dreamed, schemed, traveled, grown, been stretched, fallen, risen, hurt, been hurt, forgiven, and been forgiven.
The last two years, I now realize, must have been a natural movement into a spiritual fall and winter. The joy of discovery that came with the springtime of my faith and the youthful stamina that came with summer started to wear off, and at first, that scared the heck out of me. All of the sudden, it seemed, the once-zealous "Jesus girl" was experiencing desolation in prayer, spiritual exhaustion, loss of zeal, and a falling away from spiritual routines. I now realize it was because I didn't recognize the desolation, the exhaustion, and the loss of that fiery emotion as a natural winter season of spirituality, and I didn't know how to handle it. The remedy, however, came in a rather unexpected way: through prayers and reflections on the indissolubility of marriage.
I don't recall when I first started to make the connection between the seasons, the marital relationship, and our relationship with God, but maybe it began with the difficulty of dealing with the deep wound of divorce in my family. The recent experience of witnessing my parents' marriage fall apart is truly indescribable. In short, I felt utterly helpless, my ability to trust was deeply wounded, and I began to fear marriage, the very thing I have desired for so long. When it happened, I was already experiencing spiritual autumn, and winter was just around the corner. It was only when, in hindsight, I looked at my spiritual winter alongside my thoughts and fears about marriage, that God taught me something profound:
Marriage and a personal relationship with God are very similar concepts, similar covenants. In each, we make a commitment to love the other despite emotions, feelings, fights, struggles, hardships, etc. And there are seasons in a marital relationship just as there are in our relationship with God-- spring, summer, fall, and winter-- the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the sick and the healthy. We say this in our wedding vows, secretly and naively hoping that the bad, the poor, and the sick will never come, or if they do, only in small ways that we can keep under control and work through easily.
What I've come to realize is that these moments (of hardship, of lack of emotion, of temptation to apathy, of a feeling of distance) will come, but to abandon the beloved during these moments is really to abandon love itself. Love is not love if it only loves when it is comfortable, if it is only faithful when it feels good.
In both marriage and spirituality, we cannot abandon the beloved because we are experiencing a long, harsh winter. Winter is a season, but it is not the only one.
When we experience the winter season of desolation, we must commit ourselves to the beloved even more than we did when we first felt his love. We must work to renew and revive our commitment to him by returning often to those moments in which we experienced consolation. In marriage, to the memories of the springtime of love. In faith, to the same!
How did I first fall in love with God? How did He romance me? What moments, what places, what circumstances, what words, what gifts, what songs, what prayers? If we cannot return physically to these, we must return to them in our memories as if on pilgrimage to the holy sites of our conversion.
If we find ourselves in winter, let us know that spring will come. And let us prepare ourselves actively for spring by developing non-emotion-based habits and spiritual disciplines that will bring us even more to life when we are once more given the gift of consolation or emotion. Let us allow the Lord to sleep in our little boats, as St. Therese said, because he must be exhausted from answering all our prayers, while we continue to serve. When He is silent and feels distant, we must let Him sleep knowing that he is near, and trusting that He will awaken to console us once more.
Conversion is on-going. It never ends in this life. It is a process. It has seasons. And seasons bring change, growth, and life! Matthew Kelly said, "You cannot become more like Jesus Christ and at the same time stay as you are." If we are to grow more and more into Christ, we have to experience the cycle of death and resurrection until finally we reach perfection, that total union with Christ, that final resurrection, heaven. "For these seeds to give birth to life, first they must die" (Jon Foreman, "Baptize My Mind", Spring).
We have to experience the full cycle of seasons in order to be brought to life. The sooner we accept this reality and embrace it, the sooner we will be able to put our trust in the One who is unchanging-- the God who will be by our side throughout all of life's joys and hardships. After all, it is he who "gives and takes away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord!" He is the one who breathes the breath of life into us and draws us silently near to Him, even in the darkest night of our souls. In clinging to Him, we are able to "walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil, for He is at our side" (Psalm 23). Without Him, we build castles on the sand which will crush us when they fall to the waves, and we scatter seeds in a rocky soil that will take root only until hardship comes along and destroys them (see Mt 7, 13).
Love is faithfulness, in relationship with man as with God. If you, like me, are single but believe you are called to marriage, you can prepare yourself for this great mystery by growing your relationship with God... by staying faithful to Him most especially in the winters of desolation and lack of emotional zeal. You can learn to stay faithful to God in big things by first staying faithful in small disciplines like daily prayer (see Lk 16). If you are married, let your marriage be further preparation for your own faithfulness to God and let your faithfulness to God inform your marriage. Really, we cannot be faithful in one without being faithful in the other.
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I'll leave you with a song that has helped me to reflect on this beautiful mystery of the seasons of love and spirituality:
"Even the Winter" by Audrey Assad
What if we find ourselves beneath the snow,
Our warmest words all frozen in our throats,
And all we feel is left out in the cold,
You and I?
What if the days grow short and lose their light?
What if the coals burn black and the embers die,
And we can't find each other in the night,
You and I?
Even the winter won't last forever.
We'll see the morning, we'll feel the sun.
We'll wake up in April, ready and able,
Holding the seeds in the soil of our love.
What if the ice we tread is just too thin?
What if we can't escape the squall we're in?
What if our hearts of stone are permanent,
You and I?
What if the spring comes soon,
And we're surprised?
What if the seasons help us realize,
Some things are only proven over time,
You know?
Even the darkness cannot disarm us.
We'll see the morning, we'll feel the sun.
We'll break up the earth,
'Cause we know that it's worth it,
Sowing the seeds in the soil of our love.
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