As August ebbed and the pleasant days of early autumn approached, I heard some people from New England refer to autumn as the fall. I began to think of the difference in the season's name across the Atlantic. The Americans seem to get very excited about this time of the year and are enthralled by its strength and beauty, and I realised then that autumn does not enjoy that respect in the Old World any more.
Travel agents and supermarkets have hidden the cyclic or seasonal year from our consciousness. This is a world where every season has to be summer and the others are inconvenient or at least irrelevant. We are encouraged to take winter breaks in the sun, to eat produce that no longer is constrained by having a season, to live an all-year summer of sun and strawberries, divorced from the rhythm of the planet where we dwell.
Why do we blindly accept this sameness in our lives? Does modern expediency demand that we must kill the age-old appreciation of waiting and hoping? Is it really progress when we can buy new potatoes in December or eat pomegranates in April? No, it's not progress. The variety we enjoy today is purely to do with food, but the source of our food is treated as an irrelevance when in fact she is beautiful in all her seasons.
Christian spirituality draws heavily on the images of the year in all its changes. The old images that compare the times in our lives to the seasons of the year can still comfort and inspire. Autumn is approaching and we could miss much of what we should enjoy if we do not step outside our manufactured world to see it.
Welcome to autumn - a time of mild breezes, falling leaves and low sunsets. It is a time of beauty and as we watch the leaves fall from the trees, we see the gentle decline of the year into winter. As we do, our churches prepare for the same. We gather our harvests and store them up for the year ahead, and then, just as the last leaves fall, we celebrate our dead, our heroes, our saints and our loved ones.
Autumnal imagery provides the spiritual person with more helpful concepts than any other season does. It is the gentle yet hard-working season, a time of preparation and of harvest, a time of moderation interspersed with the occasional thunderstorm - a storm that reminds us that there is always some struggle in good times. Autumn is a time of reward for the hard work and patience of the year before. Autumn is therefore a powerful season, the inspiration of artists, poets and saints; the season that encourages reflection, wisdom and maturity; the season in which we are best disposed towards seeking true values. Would it not be wonderful if we could restore our consciousness of this season and relish the beauty of a falling year as it slips into the cold death of winter?
And the short stark days of winter have their beauty as well. They remind us of difficulties and struggle, but the year will roll on and winter will become the spring and we will regenerate. At times of despondency and fear, the hope of winter is a constant consolation. Even the much-derided exchange of gifts at Christmas have a beauty within. Is it not a mid-Winter celebration of sharing with each other when goods are naturally supposed to be scarce?
Yes, these days of late summer are beautiful too, but a little change is a good thing and I look forward to it eagerly!
F. Mac E.