On the Podcast: Always Winter
Resources and Listening Guide for Imagination Redeemed, Season 4, Episode 2
One cold and wet November, in an artists’ colony in Greenwich Village, a young woman named Johnsy became ill with pneumonia.
In the hallway outside her room, the doctor told her roommate, Sue, that Johnsy needed to decide to get well.
Sue slipped back into Johnsy’s room to find her counting the leaves on a gnarled ivy vine outside. Its feeble branches clung to a crumbling brick wall.
Six.
Five.
Four.
“When the last one falls,” Johnsy said, listlessly, “I must go, too.”
Worried, Sue pulled the shade down and went to tell their downstairs neighbor Behrman about Johnsy’s declaration. Old Behrman himself was a failed artist, the kind that talks for forty years about painting a masterpiece but never does. He scraped by on small projects and gin, but for all that he was a good-hearted man—gruff, but protective of his two young neighbors.
Together, Sue and Behrman peered out into the night at the rain and the snow and the battered ivy vine. Afterward, Behrman helped Sue with her latest drawing and went home.
The next morning, Johnsy demanded to see outside. All day, one last green-stemmed, yellow-edged leaf hung tenaciously from the vine. Wind and rain pummeled the building through the next night, and in the morning Johnsy ordered the shade to be pulled up again.
The leaf was still there.
For a long time, Johnsy stared at it, this inelegant but stubborn little thing. At last she called Sue, and repented of wanting to die. She asked for food and help to sit up.
The doctor visited and noted to Sue that Johnsy was looking better. He had to go down to see to another patient, though: an old man had also come down with severe pneumonia and would have to be hospitalized.
The next day, the doctor pronounced Johnsy to be out of danger. But in the afternoon, Sue came to Johnsy’s side to tell her, gently, that Behrman had died. He had been found by the janitor two mornings before in wet and frozen clothes. No one could figure out why he had been out in all that ice and darkness—until they found a lantern, a ladder, and brushes beside a palette with green and yellow paint on it.
“Didn’t you wonder why the leaf never fluttered or moved?” Sue asked Johnsy.
And together they looked outside to the wall, where, on the very night that stripped the vine of its last leaf, Behrman had painted his masterpiece.
In this episode of the Imagination Redeemed podcast, Brian Brown, Sarah Howell, Christina Brown, and Amy Lee will discuss how, as Christians, we can live well in seasons of winter or otherwise small, constricted seasons of our lives.
Resources mentioned in the episode:
“The Last Leaf” by O. Henry
This untitled poem by Emily Verdoon
I and Thou by Martin Buber
“Leaf by Niggle” by J. R. R. Tolkien
“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” translated by John Mason Neale
Les Miserables by Vincent Hugo
Pilgrim’s Inn by Elizabeth Goudge
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Further Recommended Reading and Listening:
“How to Love an Artist, Part One” by Mandy Houk
“How to Live Like a Narnian” by Brian Brown
Why Christians Need Mythology on the Imagination Redeemed podcast
“The Hidden Beauty of Creative Community” by Amy Lee, published by the Rabbit Room
Seeing Through the Darkness: George Rouault’s Vision of Christ, published by Image Journal
“A Leaf by Niggle”, Makoto Fujimara
Reclaiming Quiet by Sarah Clarkson, particularly chapter five, on small seasons and callings
For the Senses:
If you missed our editor’s roundup of things we’re loving this winter, click here and find music playlists, cookies, latte recipes, and more to cheer your soul this February.
Discussion Questions:
You may listen to podcast episodes while commuting, exercising, or doing chores. We certainly hope that Imagination Redeemed is part your everyday life!
But IF you get the wild idea to, say, host a listening party—or listen separately and come together with friends to discuss the episode over a meal… well, we’d want you to have discussion questions for the occasion!
(While we’re on the subject, should book listening clubs become a bigger thing? We vote yes.)
How can we allow God to use our limits to cast warmth and light into each other's hearts and homes?
How might our story today, “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry, show a microcosm of some aspects of the human condition?
Have you ever grappled with finitude in your life, when a season or a calling feels small and constrictive?
Has there been a piece of art that held the same power of hope as the leaf Behrman painted for Johnsy? Was it a song, an image, a poem, a movie, a book, a story?
What does it look like to recognize a certain rightness to powerlessness and waiting, and find God’s agency there?
For some, winter is a cloistering season that brings a sense of comfort and contentment (the Danish even have a word for this; hygge). For others, the season is defined more by absence than presence, symbolized by those Christmas decorations that got packed away: the absence of light, of warmth, even of hope. And we can, of course, have winters in our lives that aren’t limited to February. Times that leave us feeling far from God, or angry at Him, or paralyze us with the sense that we can’t be who we want to be until spring comes. …So the question for us in this episode is: in winters of our lives, how can we allow God to use our limits to cast warmth and light into each other’s hearts and homes?
—Brian Brown
In Closing
The Imagination Redeemed podcast is a production of The Anselm Society. It’s easy to see this world as disenchanted, and to give up hope that there’s more. But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven. And to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God…like in the great stories. To help make this show possible, go to anselmsociety.org/podcast25 and make a donation.
The Anselm Society is a place where you can come in and experience that beauty, joyful celebration, and ancient wisdom. And go out renewed, bringing that life to your vocation, home, & church. Learn more at anselmsociety.org, and join us next time as we pursue a renaissance of the Christian imagination together.