trusting the sacramental wisdom of the seasons: the autumnal equinox

Yesterday a little package arrived: my used copy of Christopher Hill's 2003 book Holidays and Holy Nights - Celebrating Twelve Seasonal Festivals of the Christian Year.  To say that I have eagerly been awaiting its arrival would be an understatement. And right out of the gate in the introduction is the reason why. Under the heading "Patterns and Rhythms" Hill writes, "We in the West are oriented to the future. We strive to be ever new, to regenerate the world. Our civilization has accomplished a lot this way. But we've lost something, too."

We have gone along with a flow of events that has somehow ended up making us too busy to respond to that buried sense of the heart that says there must be more: more meaning, more color, deeper excitement. We live in a world where so many authoritative voices - the successful, the influential, even the scholarly - say that commerce and power are all there is; a world where we work fifty-hour weeks for years, then get five days off. We are all Bob Chratchits these days, chained in our money-changing cubbyholes for hours that even Ebenezer Scrooge would hesitate to demand... (Remember at the time Dickens was writing) Christmas and the whole ritual calendar of traditional Britain was fast vanishing... A Christmas Carol... was his response to the crisis created by the Industrial Revolution, and it was a major victory in the struggle to keep humanity human.

The rest of the book explores how the experiences of nature in the Northern Hemisphere give shape and form to the deepening cycle of Christian feasts and fasts, holidays and holy nights. Parker Palmer has testified to trusting the sacramental wisdom of the seasons. "The older I get," he notes, "the more I find nature a trustworthy guide."

For years my delight in the autumn color show quickly morphed into sadness as I watched the beauty die. Focused on the browning of summer’s green growth, I allowed the prospect of death to eclipse all that’s life-giving about fall and its sensuous delights. Then I began to understand a simple fact: all the “falling” that’s going on out there is full of promise. Seeds are being planted and leaves are being composted as earth prepares for yet another uprising of green. It’s easy to fixate on everything that goes to ground as time goes by: the disintegration of a relationship, the disappearance of good work well-done, the diminishment of a sense of purpose and meaning. But, as I’ve come to understand that life “composts” and “seeds” us as autumn does the earth, I’ve seen how possibility gets planted in us even in the most difficult of times.(Parker Palmer, Autumn: A Season of Paradox, https://onbeing.org/ blog/autumn-a-season-of-paradox/)

In a serendipitous way, a reading from Henri Nouwen this morning re: The Created Order as Sacrament, made me smile.

When God took on flesh in Jesus Christ, the uncreated and the created, the eternal and the temporal, the divine and the human became united. This unity meant that all that is mortal now points to the immortal, all that is finite now points to the infinite. In and through Jesus all creation has become like a splendid veil, through which the face of God is revealed to us. This is called the sacramental quality of the created order. All that is is sacred because all that is speaks of God's redeeming love. Seas and winds, mountains and trees, sun, moon, and stars, and all the animals and people have become sacred windows offering us glimpses of God.

This weekend is the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere: a time when

day and night are equal in length. Then, ever so slowly, the darkness grows stronger in the sky as we travel towards the winter solstice. Hill introduces the wisdom and challenge of living into the Christian Year like this:

The first lesson that the Year of the Lord teaches is, appropriately, a paradox - it begins as the natural year ends. As such, it teaches us to watch for the signs of a beginning when, to all appearances, the world seems the least promising. The fall of the year in nature and in the liturgical calendar is a rich and nuanced drama, a perilous and turbulent time, full of conflict, when the seen and unseen worlds come together. They dynamics of the fall of the year have the sweep of a great symphony or an epic poem. From the vast conflict of light and dark, the greater powers of night and quiet emerge.

In this year of "beholding" - a time for us to watch and wait for the wisdom of the Lord to be revealed through what already exists rather than rush towards self-made decisions - I find it increasingly important to be grounded in the liturgy of the seasons. The steady assurance of nature's rhythm mixed with its surprises - like the weird tornado in Ottawa yesterday - is simultaneously comforting and humbling. So, this morning we sat out on the deck to take in the cool autumn air with our tea. We are going to an apple festival later in the day. The band is playing a Fall Farmers Harvest Market gig next Friday. And our extended family will frolic in the fields of a pumpkin festival next weekend as part of our celebration of our grandson's fifth birthday. In my soul I sense the need to savor this season. Hill suggests we savor the word fall, too:

At this time, we watch the fall of the reign of summer, a great triumph moves deep into a darkness full of danger, promise, and mystery. We pass through a wild night of apparitions into a quiet that grows deeper until it is infused with the lights of candles and stars. The time narrows down until it comes to a turning point, as all creation holds its breath in the silent night and waits for the entry of something new and unimaginable.

In a political climate of profound mistrust - where partisan hatred is stronger than the common good and hatred of women, people of color and the stranger has become normative - the equinox invites us back into balance. Not the heresy of quietism nor the inclination to withdraw into bourgeois privilege; but rather the witness of a balanced presence in a broken world. One in which the beauty is honored as creatively as the injustice is challenged. One where we each own our personal capacity for evil and self-deception so that our opponents are never demonized. And one wherein we give ourselves time to rest, renew, and remain silent in order to let grace give shape and form to our words and acts of compassion. 

Because we live in a culture that prefers the ease of either/or to the complexities of both/and, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, the pleasures of life without the pangs of death. We make Faustian bargains hoping to get what we want, but they never truly enliven us and cannot possibly sustain us in hard times. When we so fear the dark that we demand light around the clock, there can be only one result: artificial light that is glaring and graceless and, beyond its borders, a darkness that grows ever more terrifying as we try to hold it off. Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. The moment we say “yes” to both of them and join their paradoxical dance, the two conspire to make us healthy and whole. When I try to fabricate a life that defies autumn’s diminishments, I end up in a state that’s less than human. When I give myself over to organic reality — to the endless interplay of darkness and light, falling and rising — the life I am given is as real and colorful, fruitful and whole as this graced and graceful world and the seasonal cycles that make it so.  (Palmer, ibid)

This is my desire as the paradox of darkness deepens. Words from the New Zealand Book of Prayer get it right:

We wait in the darkness,expectantly, longingly, anxiously, thoughtfully. The darkness is our friend. In the darkness of the womb, we have all been nurtured and protected. In the darkness of the womb, the Christ- child was made ready for the journey into light... It is only in the darkness that we can see the splendor of the universe - blankets of stars, the solitary glowings of distant planets. It was the darkness that allowed the Magi to find the star that guided them to where the Christ-child lay... Sometimes in the solitude of darkness, our fears and concerns, our hopes an dour visions rise to the surface. We come face to face with ourselves and with the road that lies ahead. In that same darkness, we find companionship for this journey. We know, O Lord, that you are with us - in the darkness and the light - in our fears and in our courage. 

In quiet expectation, then, we await your signs among us, O Lord.