today is the template for winter...

The day is gray and wet: most of the leaves have now fallen off and there is a slight chill in the air. It looks and clearly feels as if the season of autumn has tipped towards winter. Not completely - there will be a few more unexpected bursts of sunshine - but the Berkshires have certainly started to slip towards all that is cold and dark. Yesterday radiated warmth while I raked up the lush yellows and reds. Today urges me to stay inside while the hills shimmer in their sodden silver and brown. Even our dog, Lucie, who thrives outdoors, asks to be house-bound today.

It is a taking stock day that will soon become a season to do likewise. My Growing the Northeast Garden guidebook tells me that: "Winter in the Northeast is when the garden and we, as gardeners, take a rest. Like it or not, winter is the coda of seasons - a chance to stop and regroup before beginning again." (p. 203) That feels right. And yet over the winter I will have a great deal to work on. Not so much in the garden, but with my community of L'Arche Ottawa. They are preparing today to return from a 10 day pilgrimage of trust at Taize, France. Soon there will be a November community retreat and then the start of Advent. Driving the six hours each way to Ottawa not only gives me an extended time of solitude in my mini-monastery on wheels, but also dazzles me with the changing terrain of each season in all its beauty. The mountains will be stark for a time but without snow. The rivers will be strong and full. The fields will sometimes flood as streams overflow their banks. And the sky will rarely look blue.

Before all of that happens, however, my tradition asks me to get grounded in the wisdom and beauty of All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day. When I was active in ministry, our communities soberly marked this time by remembering those who had died in the past year. Sometimes it was a joyful remembrance; other times there was solemnity and anguish. In the culture of 21st century North America, most of us don't have time to remember those who have gone ahead of us into death. Christopher 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 Cratchtis these days, chained in our money-changing cubbyholes for hours that even Ebeneezer Scrooge would hesitate to demand... Yet for most of human history, people have experiences time very differently. The patterns was not a line, but a circle or cycle.
(Holidays and Holy Nights, p. 4/7) 

That is why pausing to enter the holy wisdom of the All Saints/Souls feasts has become increasingly important to me and how I try to live in this world. Hill goes on to say that three things must line up in order for us to experience time as holy: "sacred rituals, cultural and/or family traditions, and the natural cycles of the environment." I know that spending this past year closely connected to the ebb and flow of the land has increased my interest and desire for celebrating sacred time. For too long I have been "cut off from the moon, the night, and the waters of mystery" and now yearn for a deeper intimacy. Small wonder I have constructed a family altar dedicated to those faithful departed. Same, too, for my love of pumpkins and autumn colors and smells. My other gardening primer, New England Gardner's Handbook, reminds me that the fallen leaves of this season contain 50-80% of all the nutrients our trees have created and stored. Applying their richness - even in death - to the soil brings healing and strength to that which is tired and helps ensure another season of verdant wonder. 

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Christian tradition tells us that we have received two books of diving revelation: the book of scripture and the book of nature. Creation itself is a sacred text through which the presence of God is revealed to us... (No wonder Thomas Merton wrote) How necessary it is for monks to work in the fields, in the rain, in the sun, in the mud, in the clay, in the wind: these are our spiritual directors and our novice-masters. They form our contemplation. They instill us with virtue. They make us as stable as the land we live in."
(Christine Valters Paintner, Water, Wind, Earth and Fire, p.2)

The poet, Maggie Dietz, put it like this in "November."

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do
A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries
Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.
Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,
While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage
And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.
Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster
Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,
Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in
To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:
TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.
The hapless customer who'd wanted something
Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

Today is a template for the season to come: a time to rest and pray, a time to be still and remember, a time to practice staying warm and alive in the midst of so much aqueous decay. Some loved ones are flying home from France. Others are hunkered down at home. Some colleagues depart today for mission conversations in Cuba. Others are lifting up the host and chalice in worship. Or welcoming in new pastoral leadership. And if memory serves me, my grandson has just finished singing in a children's choir in a Manhattan sanctuary. In love and gratitude, we hold them all quietly in prayer as we await a family feast together next weekend.