“Izena duen guztia omen da.”

“That which has a name exists.”

— Basque proverb

Many Americans today reportedly suffer from a condition that’s come to be scientifically labelled “seasonal affective disorder” (sad). Like so many DSM-5 research-driven categories of mental conditions, though the category’s boundaries may suffer from a lack of ontological precision or perspective, I don’t doubt that the label indeed refers to something real, even if that something is not what the label purports to refer to. That is to say, simply, lots of people get sad in Autumn and Winter. In this case, the imprecision of the psychiatric approach is in designating this phenomenon as inherently disordered.

For one thing, for affect to sway with the seasons seems perfectly natural. Contrary to popular belief, we are not grey matter computers piloting fleshy machines. The fact we are so easily able to attribute intellect, personality and humanity to artificial intelligence betrays the correlating ease with which we view ourselves as artificial. People see their reflection in the machine because they see themselves as fundamentally no different. But a body is not a machine. Man is made from the dust, his substance consists in the nature of that which surrounds him. That said, it should be considered more disordered for a person’s mood to have absolutely no stake in the encompassing and engrossing cycle of the world’s natural rhythm. 

None of this is to say that the depressive effect of grey skies, cold winds and dead leaves cannot reach a “disordered” degree, but any assessment of that question steps in the sticky bog of what is even meant by “disorder.” The term itself begs the question of the meaning of “order.” As far as the DSM-5 is concerned, the particular sadness of the latter seasons is considered a disorder when it begins to interfere with the regular, daily functioning of the sufferer. Indeed, such a functional definition of order is certainly not useless, but it is also a rather strange fit for the primary metric of correctness.

Yet again, traced ad absurdum, this functionalist hermeneutic produces an overly mechanistic portrait of humanity, taking the human individual as a trolley car whose purpose is to run routinely along a set of tracks to which it is confined. On this view, disorder is whatever “derails” the daily grind. It is little wonder that this pragmatic anthropology finds such little friction against the values of a civilization like America, a civilization conformed to the binge-and-purge pattern, structurally accommodating the endless “pursuit of happiness” through copious work in service of excessive indulgence — like so much of the harvest sacrificed on the altar to Bacchus. “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!” With happiness increasingly emotivized and psychologized, so far removed from its Platonic sense, negative affect is easily targeted as little else than an obstacle between the self and its telos. 

And still, this imprecise aim nonetheless grazes important truth. The stickiness of the term “disorder,” its unmanageable multivalence, the inescapability of its many rearing hydra heads, springs from deep roots. Truly, at what point can affect be said not to interfere with mere rote daily functioning? It’s conscious presence may be greater or lesser, but it is never nothing. So, we are flesh and blood and not metal, not only capable of feeling but incapable of not feeling. The rationalist folly may tempt us yet to ascribe an arbitrary percentage or threshold of efficiency to the ordinary, functional course of the day in order to behead the dread serpent of this sadness and confine it to the category cage science has constructed for it, but the slipperiness of the serpent ought rather to inform us of the cage’s inadequacy. There is no promise in this hypothetical of maximum utility, of a peak quotient of happiness against labor, because even if human beings were machines, all machines suffer entropy, the physical essence of a spiritual principle of loss. 

Having perhaps extended the mechanistic metaphor beyond its limit, let it therefore suffice to acknowledge the heart of the matter, that the curse runs deep. Unhappiness will always hang like an albatross from the neck of the American happiness enterprise because disorder is, in the most profound and pervasive sense, natural. It is inherent, embedded, parasitically latched to the essence of existence and life. Seasonal sadness is as inveterate as the seasons themselves. 

Post-Christian culture seeks the fruits of the Christian religion, i.e. “do not be anxious about anything,” while abandoning the means, i.e. trusting in the Father. The metaphysical branch upon which these blessings can exclusively be enjoyed is sawed off under them. The holy sepulchre cannot become empty before it has been occupied. Anxiety, for instance, cannot be shed before the deeply anxious condition of existence has been noted with due fear and trembling. The sinner enjoys no forgiveness without confession of sin. There is no second birth without assumption of one’s own cross. There is no hope and comfort without prerequisite deference to the legitimacy of our fear and despair.

In this sense, sadness is most basically only as disordered as reality is disorderly. The widespread denial of this fact is visible in the ironically depressing substitution of “celebrations of life” for funerals and wakes. Americans would frankly rather pretend that death is of no consequence, only life matters, and that sadness is not real. But mourning is not incongruent with reality. Such celebrations tacitly handle grief, to put it in mechanical-therapeutic parlance, as something to get out of one’s system. It is an intolerable impediment to happiness, a bug to be therapeutically eliminated.

If life has value, then it is more sensible that we should consider death a loss than pretend it does not evoke our greatest fears and agitate the most perennial sensitivities of the soul. Even Our Lord, knowing full well from the bounty of His divine omniscience that He would call Lazarus from the grave, wept for his passing. Jesus did not bypass death, but in the glorious eternity of His godhead knew better than we the depth of the universe’s broken state. The living God wept because He sees the shadow of death in light of the radiance of life’s true and unending intent.

Therefore, it is manifestly true that weeping, mourning, sadness, and all negative affect are in principle proper responses to the nature of the world. This groaning world is in a sorrowful, fearful, dreadful condition. It is okay to simply be sad. Sadness has a right time and place. The necessary biblical addendum is the condition of coming to the Father for the wiping away of tears. We cannot offload our cares except by casting them on the cross.

I’ve learned much of this truth through experience rendered hard by my own stubbornness. Treating sadness and despair as disordered is truly torturous. No earthly, inward balm can soothe the aches of the soul for long without inflaming them such that they become worse than before. It is the nature of sin that it addicts rather than relieves. Addiction is a deadly imitation of heavenly satisfaction, exchanging the eternal renewal of life for a perpetual deprivation. The enemy isolates good things into idols. If one’s focus is narrowed to one good, say, the day-to-day function of life, the therapeutic emotive relief of happiness, then that good can never lead beyond itself to its Source. 

That Source, which Himself suffered unthinkable despair, crying from the utmost pit of the curse, giving voice to the most thorough possible darkness upon the human heart, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and sweating blood at the mere thought of the Sheol to which He would venture, by conjoining such pain to His Divinity makes it sacred. The promise remains, then, that all who take up their cross, who bear their suffering in service of imitating His utter self-denial, have their despair sanctified. Those who join in His death look forward to being eternally fused to His Life.

Through the travails by which this mystery has been previously imparted by God’s grace to my own soul, my relationship to worldly seasons has been likewise troubled, fraught with the intensity of tumultuous vacillations between love and hate. Fall, I often thought, was my least favorite season. It has often come attached with blues that at one time stung with dread. That is, I like so many get a little sad when the season changes. The difference made by the aforementioned spiritual truth is that I no longer dread that sadness. The innumerable tears, the unfathomable sadness of the Man of sorrows, of the God who graciously knew sorrow for our sake, truly suffering long for the cause of Love, by the power of the resurrection makes the natural sadness of the earth so palatable to the spirit. More than acceptable, it becomes sublime and holy.

It is as impossible to remove the sadness from the rainclouds and barren, dormant flora as it is to remove Autumn from nature itself. All that lives has its time, all that moves must sleep. The melancholy stillness of Winter is portended in the air. But in the depth of that dark sleep, a star will shine in the East, guiding us to the birth of Hope and the promise of Easter. Though that hope be far off, the present gloom is made infinitely sweeter for it.

God has by no means given me the power to remove the subtle sadness from Autumn, but far better, He has given us the gift of no longer wanting it removed. The Spring and Summer have their own radiant and sunny beauty, and the quieter, more sublime loveliness of Autumn is no less indispensable. The nameless Harmony the Taoists yearned after has shown His face, and so decay and fecundity are most truly brought into the fulfillment of their blissfully wedded wonder through His death and life. In the delicate spiraling of the spheres, under the auspices of the heavenly bodies, nature dutifully presents us with visible, tangible, habitable symbols of these spiritual motions.

Ergo, our relationship to the seasons is indicative of our relationship to all they embody. Knowing this, how could I scorn Autumn any more than scorn its meditative, obscure wisdom, creeping softly on raindrops and whispering in the cool breeze? Especially in our day, swimming in the induced myopia of a ravenous desire after that addictive enticement of immediate and false satisfaction, it is increasingly impossible for me to do other than embrace the lower seasons, the natural echoes of contrition, humility and sacrifice, and in this peculiar way to hear them proclaim His eternal power. Autumn exhorts us thereby to see in grander timeframes, to place the day and the week and the year and the lifetime in submission to eternity, not to rush toward the fleeting mirage of worldly promises but to wait patiently upon the ever-near future where our Savior dwells.

In making peace with Autumn, I learn to be patient with her and let her work upon my heart what she was sent to do, trusting that her Maker means it for good. Our Lord was not quick to bring the Autumn of His saving life to its close, but waited lovingly for the proper time, praying to the Father at Gethsemane and drinking the cup to the dregs willingly. He did not call upon the angels to rescue Him from the cross, nor did He rise from the Winter sleep of the grave until the appointed days had passed. And every moment of that right-ordered work was sanctified and powerful for the purposes of God. 

In this the peace of God truly surpasses understanding. Even the blues of the fairer, more sophisticated seasons come into their loveliness. That inescapable sadness is not escaped through rejection but embrace. The disorder of human life is inexplicably transformed into its very order. Our sin becomes a cosmic stepping stone to God’s triumph, our pain becomes a personal avenue of holiness. As Spurgeon “learned to kiss the wave” that dashes the soul against the Rock, I have learned that Christ is mighty to make our sadness worthy of our acceptance. 

This is not therapeutic psycho-babble, either. Sadness is no longer an obstacle between the self and its happiness, but itself the paradoxical conduit of a happiness grounded in real purpose. I cannot sanctify my sadness or “integrate my shadow” by my own power to actualize myself. I cannot accept it unless God makes it acceptable. Only He purges sadness of sin and cures pain of evil. As surely as only His providence can bring Springtime out from under the snow, only the same can make even a little melancholy the wellspring of immense joy. We cannot afford to let modern “comforts” distract from this fact: that the sad lull in time is also the time of harvest. Creation remembers this order and is faithful to her obligation to remind us. What would love be without yearning?

And so it is that the year’s twilight plays her part, suffused with sunset gold and robed in starlit silver, the confluence of night and day, where the tension of all impossibly holds together in Him.

“As in all the sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.” — George MacDonald, Phantastes

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven … a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. — Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4 (RSV)

Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of countenance the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. — Ecclesiastes 7:3-4 (RSV)

…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead. — Philippians 3:10-11 (RSV)