A Sad Tale's Best for Winter

An edited version of this post appears in the TFCA Current this month, but I wanted to post the extended version here.  

I never look forward to winter.  I cower under the dark, bleak cold. It makes me draw inward. This past summer, I saw a production of William Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale, which has both redeemed the name of Winter for me, and also given me reason to reevaluate how I think about the season. 

 Long after I saw the play, my mind kept returning to the final scene.  It develops around the statue of Hermione, the virtuous and long-suffering victim of her husband's misconceptions. Leontes, Hermione's husband and King of Sicilia, and Paulina, Hermione's faithful servant, enter with the rest of the characters.  The scene opens under the assumption that everyone in the room is gazing at Hermione's uncanny likeness carved from stone.  The guilt-ridden king sincerely laments the wrong he has done: "I am ashamed: does not the stone rebuke me/ For being more stone than it?"  When the King reaches out to touch the statue, Paulina threatens to draw the curtain back around the statue, and Leontes implores her not to. Finally, Paulina bids the statue to move, and Hermione, not dead but fully alive, wordlessly descends from her pedestal and embraces Leontes. Paulina says: “When she was young you woo'd her; now in age/Is she become the suitor?” Hermione takes her errant, tormented husband into her arms and the woman hardened into stone comes to life again.  The sweetness of this role-reversal, forgiveness, and transformation is heartbreakingly beautiful.

The season of winter can be an emotional, mental, physical, professional or relational metaphor.  I remember particularly a pastor's words on the winter season during a prayer, using the image of a tree. He said that even in winter the life of a tree continues, that a tree doesn't hate winter, but in fact NEEDS winter.  During that time, the tree on the outside may look forlorn or dead.  But inside, it is shoring up strength and nutrients.  It is growing, changing, maturing.  It is getting ready for the season in which it has been appointed to bear fruit.  This imagery came flooding back to me when I saw Hermione, unfrozen and matured in years, step down from her pedestal, ready to forgive her husband who had wronged her, causing the death of their son, the exile of their daughter, and bringing her even to the brink of her own death.

St. John of the Cross says in his 16th century book Dark Night of the Soul: "Even though this happy night darkens the spirit, it does so only to impart light concerning all things." Still, how can he call it a happy night? Simply because night, if we let it, is redeemed into day through Christ Jesus.  In my mind, Hermione forgives Leontes so readily, wordlessly even, exactly because of her years of being "frozen".  The time she spent as stone was her winter season, where she seemed void of life, color and all things good on the outside, but inside was maturing, dealing with the business of seasons past, and preparing for a new season of life to come at the appointed time. She held out hope that whole time for reconciliation, and goodness. And Leontes, through the grace of her forgiveness and invitation back into relationship, is freed to be a real father and husband after his long winter of guilt.  Permafrost melts, crocuses push through the toughened soil, stretching for new warmth and light.

I used to dismiss winter as a cruel period through which I must annually suffer, bereft of any intrinsic value. In many ways it felt like everything was on hold during those first months of the year. Mamillius speaks my heart best in one of the earlier lines of the play: "A sad tale's best for winter."  But it is right, and a good and joyful thing, in these days of darkness and hard weather, to draw close to one another and consider it a happy night because it will, in God's Providence and Sovereignty, lead to the rejuvenation of spring.