accepting and enduring this moment: the promise of the close of autumn

The past weekend's feast on All Souls Day - an autumn celebration uniting us one to another in a love that endures beyond the limits of time and space - comes at the close of the season. You can feel this ending in the air, see it in the fields and sky, and taste it in the foods gracing our tables. It is, as the poets know, the afternoon of our days where shadows lengthen and the hint of winter's evening hides just beyond the horizon. It is my favorite time of year.

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted grey
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise

(Robert Frost, "My November Guest")

The late Madeleine L'Engle, wise woman of creativity and faith) wrote that at this moment of the year, we anticipate not a new world, but rather an apocalyptic end of the old that must be both "anticipated and endured." For "a new year can begin only because the old year ends."

As rain turns to snow, puddles to ice, the sun rises later and sets earlier; and each day it climbs less high in the sky. One time when I went with my children to the Planetarium, I was fascinated to hear the lecturer say that the primitive people used to watch the sun drop lower on the horizon in great terror, because they were afraid that one day it was going to go so low that it would never rise again; they would be left in unremitting night. There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and a terror of great darkness would fall upon them. And then, just as it seemed that there would never be another dawn, the sun would start to come back; each day it would rise higher, set lower. Somewhere in the depths of our unconsciousness we share that primordial fear ; and when there is the first indication that the days are going to lengthen, our hearts, too, life with relief. The end has not come: joy! and so a new year makes its birth known. (Winter: a Spiritual Biography of the Season, eds. Schmidt and Felch, p. 6)

Anticipating and enduring both the closure of creation and its renewal strikes me as the right temperament for this moment in our culture. Like apocalyptic stories across the ages, ours is grounded in grief: grief over squandering the beauty and resources of the natural world, grief over our assault upon all vulnerable people regardless of age, race, gender or class, grief over our greed, grief over our addiction to consumption, grief over our lost innocence, and grief over the necessary death of our empire. Sr. Joan Chittister spoke to her own grief recently when she confessed that her naivete in confronting the evil and violence of our generation strengthened rather than dismantled the power of institutional oppression: 

There really are forces that are working consciously against cultural change. Built into society, it seems, is the wanton destruction of creation for the sake of personal profit. The casual dismissal of scientific concern for the care of the Earth, the ongoing destruction of nature for money, and the gall to enshrine a minimum wage rather than provide a living wage, and under it all, a new political goal: the increasing concern by politicians to create a political base for themselves in order to retain their seats for years rather than secure the future of the country.

What's more, she lamented like one of the prophets of ancient Israel, the very constellations of people professing a calling to justice and compassion have, "become more committed to ensuring privileges, to hiding church scandals, to tolerating church corruption than it is to exploring new and theological questions like priestly celibacy or clericalism or sexism or accountability, all of which strike at the very meaning of 'church.'"

We have ignored the question of what it means to be a real community in a church when less than 1% of the body purports to control the other 99%, its lay population, with no input from them at all theologically. The church has forgotten the kind of genuine pastoring Pope Francis calls 'shepherds smelling of the sheep.'  Instead, "the visible church lives in bishops' palaces in the style they have become accustomed, far from the people and even farther from the prophets of the street," she said. "We have watched the bishops of the church become sanctuaries for pedophile clerics rather than sanctuaries for undocumented aliens. And if we have a heart and soul at all, we have been saddened, actually sickened, totally shattered by it, while their victims were shattered for life. In the midst of it, I have heard too many Christians go silent in both the church and state in the face of moral, ecclesiastical, economic and political collapse."

Grief is what the afternoon - the autumn - of our era requires: without it we are avoiding truth. And truth or reality, writes Fr. Richard Rohr, "is the greatest ally of God for God is fully aligned with Reality, both in life and death." Quoting one of the insights of philosopher Loyal Rue, Rohr adds: "The most profound insight in the history of humankind is that we should seek to live in accord with reality. Indeed, living in harmony with reality may be accepted as a formal definition of wisdom. If we live at odds with reality (foolishly), we will be doomed, but if we live in proper relationship with reality (wisely), we shall be saved." 

Another woman of wisdom, Joanna Macy, amplifies the role sorrow plays in our anticipation and endurance: "The insights and experiences that enable us to make a shift of reality (so that we might discern) a new way of seeing...  arise from grief for our world that contradicts illusions of the separate and isolated self." Like Walter Brueggemann noted, prophetic grief aligns our souls with reality so that we might break free from bondage, illusion, and privilege. Macy calls this realignment a "shift in our perception of reality... and it is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening."

While the shift may not be obvious in my own generation, we need look no further than the ongoing powerful and prophetic presence of young leaders, like indigenous teenagers Tokata Iron Eyes (a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe who plays a key role in the “Rezpect Our Water” campaign) and Autumn Peltier (also a water protector and a citizen of the Wiikwemkoong First Nation); they have been joined recently by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who spoke at the United Nations Climate Action Summit and helped inspire Climate Strikes around the world. In the face of criticism, Greta calls her Asperger’s syndrome a “superpower” that gives her a clear perspective on the climate crisis. May we be motivated by these committed young advocates and lend our voices and strength to heal our wounded world.

(As quoted in Richard Rohr's recent CAC reflection: November 4, 2019)

Many of my friends and colleagues hate the close of autumn. It is all too true that seasonal depression at the loss of sunlight fills many with anguish and dread. It is no surprise that "the metaphors we often use for winter - the ground is as hard as iron, snow blankets the landscape, the cold numbs, the frost whitens the locks - can be applied to the spiritual life as well: the winter of our discontent." (Schmidt/Felch, p. 6) 

Without ever trivializing their experience - and always striving to honor the bleakness born of organic depression - I am noticing something else going on within me: I am starting to glimpse the counter-intuitive wisdom of both autumn and the apocalyptic stories of my tradition that testify to the living presence of God's new song arising from our lament. "In hunkering down, we recognize that the existence of such a season - in both an external and internal sense - is inevitable... and in acceptance of the inevitability - even necessity - of winter, we find a way to live in its cold blows." (Schmidt/Felch, p. 7) The apocalyptic tales in Scripture are bleak, to be sure. But they point to a new heaven and new earth a'borning from our grief. The very emptiness of our sorrows creates space for sacred creativity to take up residence within and among us. Macy and Rohr put it like this:

We may find ourselves inspired by the wisdom traditions of native peoples and mystical voices in the major religions; we hearken to their teachings as to some half-forgotten song that our world is a sacred whole in which we have a sacred mission. St. Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), a Germanic nun, mystic, and healer, was doing this 800 years ago. In her book Scivias she wrote, “You understand so little of what is around you because you do not use what is within you.” Somehow, she already understood what science is now affirming: “The macrocosm is mirrored in the microcosm.” Science is finding that the world is an integrated whole rather than separated parts. Nothing in the cosmos operates independently. We are all holons, which are simultaneously whole in themselves, and at the same time part of a larger whole. This understanding is moving us from a narrow, mechanistic, Newtonian view of the universe to a holistic/ecological view. Nothing is static, and if you try to construct an unchangeable or independent universe for yourself, you will be moving against the now obvious divine plan and direction.

This year we have made a conscious effort to anticipate autumn's end so that we might better endure the season of hunkering down. Today I will take one of the rotting pumpkins on our front porch out of our autumn tableau so that it might go to seed in what I hope will be next year's pumpkin patch. This past weekend, in-between feasting with my beloved family, grandson Louie and I repaired rotting wooden slats on a walkway both as anticipation of enduring winter as well as anticipating the passage of love from one generation to the next. Last night I even took in the late news on TV to learn that some of the destruction of this current regime was being challenged and changed in Virginia and Kentucky. In our own small, scrappy little city it was happening too as the voters returned a progressive slate of public servants to office.

What is it about November
that always gives me the blues?
Is it the sky, heavy as sin
or is it the wind that seems to whistle
through the caverns of my skull?
Is it the earth, once warm and loving
but now grown hard and cold? Is it
all the fallen fruit that lies
and rots upon those grassy places
where I tread? Everywhere there is
the decadence and hush of dying leaves —
decay and death, I seem to drift,
a disembodied wraith, through mist
that settles like a shroud
upon that plain without a name —
though some would call it Limbo —
that land of stranded souls,
lost, damned or just forgotten.
Oh let me soon climb out of this
slough of despond, and cast aside
November blues to find delight
again in love, colour, laughter, light.
(Pete Crowther, "November Blues")