Reflections on the Winter of the Soul

Battling darkness right now, or know someone who is engaged in the battle? Stumbled onto this article by Kim Thoday, a pastor and author who lives in South Australia. I hope it brings some light to those in the darkness. It did for me. Holding a candle for those of us who've been there and those still in the darkness. Enjoy, MC

"Reflections on the Winter of the Soul" by Kim Thoday

The journey of discipleship moves a/cross into the vast variety of human terrain. We traverse the high mountains of God's love and mystery, the vast undulating and sometimes flat distances of God in the ordinary, the desert experiences of God in human frailty and the deep valleys of God's absence and human aloneness and despair.

It is in the moments and seasons of despair and depression, especially deep depression, that we can experience all hope and faith being extinguished by an ever more powerful vortex of blackness. These are quite common experiences in the long-term life of discipleship, triggered by a range of different human responses to grief, loss, tragedy, hurt, burnout, disillusionment and so on. We have moved a/cross a barrier; that fine, intangible line between hope and hopelessness, meaning and meaninglessness.

Saint John of the Cross, who was imprisoned in complete darkness for 9 months as a result of his beliefs, profoundly experienced this winter of the soul. He described the experience: "... the soul feels itself to be impure and miserable ... the soul knows clearly that it is unworthy of God or any other creature."

Someone has said: "When the night is at its darkest, the eye begins to see." Perhaps it was no accident that the Apostle Paul was struck blind for three days on the Damascus road ... three days a/cross. The deepest valleys of human experience contain the necessary seeds of healing, deliverance, and maturation for new stages of life and discipleship. Depressions in the ground of our existence are part of the contours of life. They contain the ingredients for experiences and insights of spiritual renewal and the life of grace and hope. To climb out of a depression means saying our farewells and discarding loads of unnecessary baggage. It requires some friends, like Ananias, to reach down and help us and it demands an open-ness to the unknown landscape ahead.

Saint John of the Cross experienced the winter of the soul as a necessary part of the journey of finding himself in God. He said: "... this depth of darkness drives us forward to the love of God." Perhaps we can only more deeply experience and contemplate the depths of God's love once we have experienced the winter of our soul as if God has abandoned us.

The Apostle Paul says to us: "... suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us." (Romans 5: 3-5).