The Season You Did Not Choose

The email arrives the way bad weather arrives. Not with trumpets. With a little ping. With a subject line that sounds like it was written by a committee of beige sweaters. “Update.” “Next steps.” “Transition.” Words that behave like snow. Quiet. Soft. Then suddenly your whole yard is buried.

Or maybe it is a meeting. The kind of meeting where everyone is sitting too straight, like mannequins in office attire, and someone says your name with a tenderness that does not feel like tenderness at all. It feels like the last spoonful of cough syrup. Necessary, maybe. But still bitter.

You walk out into the parking lot or the kitchen or the hallway that smells like copier toner and old coffee, and something in your chest shifts. Pressure. Altitude. You feel the world tilt by half a degree, just enough to make you wonder if you are still in the same life you were in at breakfast.

You did not expect this season.

You did not choose it.

And yet it has arrived with the calm inevitability of winter. The trees do not ask your permission to drop their leaves. The sun does not consult you before setting earlier and earlier. The geese do not convene a task force. They simply go.

There is a particular humiliation in being surprised by loss. Your mind starts running like a dog that has gotten loose. It sprints through memories. It sniffs old conversations. It drags back sticks and bones and questions. What did I miss? What did I do wrong? Why did I not see the clouds?

The Catholic tradition is bracingly honest about this. It does not insist that you smile through it. It does not demand that you put a bow on your grief and call it a gift. It allows the ache. It allows the lament. The Psalms do not do polite. They do not say, “Thank you for this growth opportunity.” They say, in effect, Lord, where are you. Lord, I am scared. Lord, help.

And that is a kind of mercy. The faith is not a stage where you have to perform cheerfulness for God. It is a place to tell the truth.

Still, after the initial shock, after the mind has done its laps, after you have stared at your calendar like it is a stranger who has moved into your house, a quieter question begins to rise. Not a question you can answer quickly. Not one you can solve with cleverness. A question more like a seed.

What if seasons are not just metaphors?

What if they are grammar?

Augustine, that great restless heart with ink on his fingers, knew something about time. He knew how strange it is that we live inside something we cannot hold. Time slips through our hands like water. We try to name it, count it, schedule it, tame it. And still it moves, carrying us forward, sometimes gently, sometimes like a river in flood.

He also knew that the human heart is a creature of longing. We reach. We grasp. We cling. We build a life and we call it stable. Then something shifts, and we discover how much of our stability was made of paper and habit and the nods of other people.

St. Benedict, on the other hand, was not interested in big dramatic gestures. He was interested in the next right thing. A psalm. A meal. A task done with care. A life built by faithfulness in small increments. Stability, in his world, was not a guarantee that nothing would change. It was a posture. A way of standing in whatever weather arrives.

And then there is Aquinas, the great calm mind who could hold the whole world in his thought without crushing it. He would remind us that providence is not the same as control. God is not a nervous manager hovering over the universe with a clipboard. Providence is deeper. It is ordering. It is meaning held underneath the chaos like a foundation you cannot always see.

That matters, because unexpected vocational loss does something particular to a person. It does not only threaten income or routine. It threatens identity. Work becomes a name tag. It becomes your social map. It becomes the liturgy of your competence. You know where to stand. You know what you are for. You know what you can point to when someone asks, “So what do you do.”

When that disappears, you can feel oddly unreal, like a photo that has been overexposed. The temptation is to measure your worth by usefulness, by productivity, by title. The world does this constantly, with the casual cruelty of a scale that never stops weighing.

The Church, at her best, says no.

John Paul II insisted that the human person is never merely a means, never a tool, never a disposable part in someone else’s machine. Dignity is not earned. It is given. You are not valuable because you are efficient. You are valuable because you are you, a being made to love and be loved, a creature called into communion with God.

Edith Stein, who understood both the sharpness of intellect and the sharpness of suffering, would invite you to look inward, not as an escape but as a return. Vocation is not only external. It is not only a role. It is also interior. It is the shape of your soul before God. It is the particular way you are asked to receive and give love.

Catherine of Siena, fierce as a thunderstorm, would probably grab you by the collar and say something like (tongue in cheek), be who you were made to be, and you will set the world on fire. Not because you have the right job title, but because truth is not dependent on your résumé.

And still, the hard question remains. If God is good, why would this happen like this?

It is not a question to answer with a slogan. It is not a question to answer quickly, as if grief were a leaky faucet. There are wounds that need time. There are losses that leave a bruise on the spirit.

Catholic wisdom makes a crucial distinction here. God does not have to call the loss good in order to bring good from it. God is not the author of cruelty. God is a redeemer. Providence is not a tidy explanation. Providence is the quiet promise that nothing is wasted, not even the pain you did not ask for.

Teresa of Ávila knew that the spiritual life includes seasons that feel like deprivation. Dry prayer. Confusion. Doors that seem locked. John of the Cross went further, naming the dark night, not as punishment, but as purification. A stripping away. A learning to live without leaning on lesser lights.

Which is a terrifying thing to hear when you are just trying to pay the mortgage and figure out what to do with your mornings. But it is also oddly consoling. It suggests that the barren season may be doing work you cannot see.

Hope, in this tradition, is not a mood. It is not a motivational poster. It is a theological virtue, which means it is a gift, and also a discipline. It is practiced. It is chosen again and again, especially when it does not feel natural.

Ignatius would tell you to pay attention to what happens in the soul during desolation. Not to panic. Not to make rash decisions based on fear. To keep praying. To keep showing up. To remember that feelings are not the full truth of reality.

Julian of Norwich, sitting with her visions in the midst of plague and darkness, dared to say that all shall be well. Not because everything is pleasant. Because God is faithful. Because the story is larger than the chapter you are currently stumbling through.

Francis de Sales would counsel gentleness, which is wildly underrated. Be gentle with yourself, he would say. Do not whip your soul like a tired horse. Begin again. Begin again. Begin again.

And then Thérèse, that small saint with an enormous heart, would whisper her maddeningly simple advice. Do the next little thing with love. Wash the dish. Send the email. Make the phone call. Pray the prayer you can pray. Not the prayer you wish you could pray.

This is where the season turns, if it turns. Not with fireworks. Not with instant clarity. But with small obediences that make a path through the snow.

Because new life does not begin with a dramatic announcement. It begins quietly. Under the surface. While the ground still looks dead. Seeds do not hurry. Roots do not show off. Spring is not loud at first. It is patient.

So maybe the unexpected career change, the door that slammed, the title that fell away, becomes something like Lent. A stripping. A reordering. A chance to discover what is true when the usual scaffolding is gone.

Maybe you find a deeper freedom. Not the freedom of doing whatever you want, but the freedom Aquinas would call ordered love, a life aimed toward what actually lasts. Maybe you find truer belonging. Not in a role, but in relationships. Not in applause, but in fidelity. Maybe you become less frantic. Less allergic to silence. Less dependent on being impressive.

And maybe, slowly, you begin to hear your own life again.

Here is a thesis sturdy enough to hold sorrow without smothering it.

Providence does not spare us from winter, but it refuses to waste it.

Not a guarantee that everything will go the way you prefer. Not a promise that you will be comfortable. But a promise that God is present. Here. In the cold. In the confusion. In the empty calendar. In the quiet morning where you are not sure what comes next.

The geese do not stop believing in spring when they lift off into the gray sky. They just go. They trust something in their bones.

You can too.

You can take one step. Then another. You can let this season teach you its strange grammar. You can grieve what is gone without pretending it was nothing. You can hope without demanding a timetable. You can be unfinished and still beloved.

And one day, maybe sooner than you think, you will notice a small thing.

A bud. A thaw. A laugh that surprises you. A door that opens in a way you did not plan.

Winter, it turns out, is not the final word.

God is.