Mark Buchanan - Spiritual Rhythm: Being with Jesus Every Season of Your Soul

To my son, Adam, first born, first man, apple of my eye, pride of my heart. The seasons, from holding you to letting you go, went breathtakingly fast. May you always walk with Christ, the man for all seasons.

The fastest growing sport in Norway is wingsuit jumping. Its the pastime of lunatics, or its what warrior-knights do in an age without dragons. It requires steel nerves, a cool head, a touch of madness. You must be able to look fast-approaching catastrophe in the face, and whoop.

Heres what you do. Ascend the uppermost point of a fjord, walk to the edge, and jump. The first hundred feet is a free fall, a headlong rush down a granite wall toward a stone floor. The wind pulls your cheeks to your ears. Gravity flips your stomach inside out and pulls it up your throat.

You wear a parachute, but the object of the sport is to put off using it as long as courage and necessity allow. Becausesimplyyoure wearing a wingsuit, a jumper with webbing beneath the arms and between the legs. It functions like the skin of a flying squirrel. The webbing becomes wings (sort of), and just before your body shatters on the rocks below, you spread-eagle and start to soar (sort of). Your rate of descent is featherlike, around thirty miles an hour, which is about the same as a parachutist. But your rate of forward propulsion is bulletlikeupwards of a hundred miles an hour, which makes you a kamikaze nosediving his target. Youre a human cannonball, rushing at dizzying speed toward a very hard landing. Those who have done several wingsuit jumps become daring and agile, trapeze artists who twirl and somersault in thin air. They fly as close to the mountains flank as possible, trying to graze its side with their outstretched hand, like ordinary people dipping their fingers in a cool lake as they slip along its surface in a canoe. But these arent ordinary people, and actually touching the mountain at that speed would scrape their hand to bone. When they glide over a ridge of the mountain, their feet sometimes skid across the loose stones before an updraft catapults them freshly over another precipice.

Theres a designer whos working on a wingsuit sans parachute; the wings have brakes, so to speak, some device that flares them out at that last critical moment before earth and sky collide, with you caught in the middle. If it worksthe suit without a parachuteit will ease you down like an angel catching you. The designer, though, is vague about the details. She doesnt jump herself. But Im sure shell have no problem, given the breed of person shes working with, finding a jumper brave or crazy enough to test the prototype.

Theres a part of me, brave or crazy, that thinks this will be my next (and perhaps last) vacation.

But maybe Ive already been there, done that. Ive had seasons in my life when I was flying so high, so fast, that its hard to imagine wingsuit-jumping notching up the thrill at all. Life was pure exhilaration. Life was the distillate of adrenaline. Life was heart-pounding adventure. I flew on wings like eagles, or at least like squirrels.

Im exaggerating, but not much. There have been a few brief stretches of my existence when my heart was riotous with joy, and the wind sang in my ears, and I stretched myself wide to catch as much of it as I could, and put off the landing as long as I dared. I twirled and somersaulted midair, and trusted in the next updraft to carry me over the next cliff.

It didnt last.

No season does.

Which is good, because there have been other times, other seasons, when just getting out of bed was an act of holy defiance. Just facing the day was more intimidating than standing down a dozen Goliaths and realizing Id left my slingshot on the bus seat.

But my life, to date, has been easy compared with most: a lady I know in Canada who, for the past decade, has daily suffered crushing migraines, and no pill or surgery or therapy has brought even a hint of relief, and every morning she wakes (if she slept at all) and endures it one more day; the man I met in Kenya who works all his waking hours at a grueling and menial and demeaning job that barely feeds and clothes him and his family, barely shelters them in their tin-roofed hovel at the bottom of a slum with open sewers and gang riots, and every morning he arises to go through the same thing all over again; the child I visited who ails in the grip of a rare and incurable disease that twists his body in painful contortions and robs him of sight and hearing and speech; the parents who love that child, and are weary and sad with the weight of that love. And every day, spring, summer, winter, fall, brings more of the same.

These, too, are seasons, though some inordinately long.

And then theres everything in between, which most people, for most of their lives, experiencelong and uninterrupted seasons of bland ordinariness: work we dont particularly love or hate, health that is neither brilliant nor dismal, circumstances that have their challenges, disappointments, irritations, as well as their surprises, graces, serendipities, but little bitterness or ecstasy.

What I want to know: is Jesus the man for all seasons?

Robert Bolt wrote a play, and a good one, called A Man for All Seasons. It was about Sir Thomas More, a principled man of court who defied Henry VIII over his manipulation of the pope to secure an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragorn in order to marry Anne Boleyn. This book has nothing to do with that play, except that Im shamelessly stealing the idea, if not the title. A Man for All Seasons. As fine a description as that might be for Sir Thomas More, its better suited to Jesus of Nazareth. Here is the man for all seasons: overflowing with joy, intimate with sorrow, hospitable to sinners, nemesis of evil, tempted in all ways, innocent of all wrongdoing, at home in lonely places, the life of the party, one who turns water into wine, just because he can, who multiplies loaves and fishes, just because he cares, but who denies help to his cousin John as he languishes in prison, who, indeed, refuses to help himself when he staggers in a desert or groans from a cross. He goes up on mountains and down in valleys. He preaches to thousands but takes time for any lone beggar, weeping whore, groveling invalid, writhing demoniac, pleading father. He leaves banquets to visit the sick ward. He is silent when talking would help his cause, and talkative when silence seems most prudent. He is rude with bullies and phonies and prigs and, at the same time, tender with losers and seekers and penitents.

Hes with us when we soar on wings as eagles, and probably even when we wingsuit jump, and with us, too, when we cant walk for fainting.

And everywhere in between.

In the introduction, which comes next, Ill explain that this book germinated in a dark season. It started not on some Norwegian height but in a deep and lonely valley. A winter, is how I describe it. I am not, now that Ive been there, fool enough to romanticize that place and season. I am not masochistic enough to wish its return. But all the same, I met Christ there in ways I hadnt before. I stumbled into the fellowship of sharing in Christs sufferings, as Paul calls it, and until Id joined that fellowship I had no idea, really, what he was talking about.

Im not sure I know now. But what I do know is that Jesus is enough. He has been a good companion all the way through. I have no reason to doubt he will be a good companion for all that lies ahead. I hope there are still many springs and summers and autumns for me. I know other winters will come, and at some point settle in.

Alas and amen. Too bad and so be it.

The Man for All Seasons is here, and there. With him by my side, all is well, and all manner of things are well.

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