the winter season

Spiritual journey often includes changes in season. Long distance hikers encounter changes in season, and in the sacred journey of life we also go through seasons. In his book Spiritual Rhythm, Mark Buchanan writes of spiritual seasons and their activities while maintaining throughout the book that Jesus is the Man for all seasons.

Buchanan first explores the season of winter, describing its characteristics which he illustrates further by drawing the reader’s attention to the book of Ecclesiastes, Psalm 88, and Philippians 3:10-11. Winter is marked by feelings of bankruptcy (of pleasure and meaning) and feelings of abandonment, that God cannot possibly be present in winter, the season that hides Him.  The sorrow in winter seeks to render the pilgrim mute. The temptation of the pilgrim in this season is to run from it with all their might, to disavow its reality. If the pilgrim remains present in winter, however, they receive a wonderful invitation to enter into a communion with Christ that can’t be experienced in the days of ease and song. This invitation is unique to the winter season; a fellowship in His suffering. He points out that we can know the fellowship of sharing in Christ’s suffering first and foremost because He has entered into the fellowship of sharing in ours.

Buchanan goes on to describe the work that winter entails and how it calls for deep and nearly dormant reserves of fortitude. He names prayer, pruning, and waiting as the spiritual labors in this spiritual season. Winter is the best and safest season for the pilgrim to prune, cutting back trivial pursuits, diversion, and anything unnecessary that is draining one of an already limited supply of energy. The work of waiting is that which forces faith to grow, when the pilgrim moves out of the winter season they find their faith tougher, leaner, less prone to doubts or setbacks. In exploring each season, Buchanan does not pass over each season’s gifts and opportunities. One of winter’s gifts is seeing one’s life in its truest light and the opportunity to reimagine that life. Winter makes the pilgrim more heavenly minded, breaking fascination and addiction to things of the world and various distractors. Jesus, the Man for all seasons, is with the pilgrim always. Yet because he is a man of sorrows and familiar with suffering, it is in the wintertime that He draws nearest to the pilgrim