reclaiming a sacred sense of time...

"We in the West are oriented to the future," writes Christopher Hill in one of my

favorites books, Holidays and Holy Nights: Celebrating Twelve Seasonal Festivals of the Christian Year. "We strive to be ever new, to regenerate the world." And then he adds what I believe is the deep wisdom of his text.

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 Cratchitis these days, chained in our money-changing cubbyholes for hours that even Ebeneezer Scrooge would hesitate to demand. (p. 4)

In my Christian tradition, when the seasons of nature line up with the feasts and fasts of the community - and both connect deeply to an organic human/family need - true sacred time is experienced. Many of us know this when Christmas arrives in the north. Easter, too. But for most of the rest of the year, the days that once honored authentic sacred time are now forgotten. Or discarded. Or so manipulated by commerce that they mean nothing to our hearts. Hill rightly notes that "for most of human history, people experienced time very differently. The pattern was not a line, but a circle or a cycle." During the contagion, some of us have been able to watch, sense and maybe even celebrate that autumn is starting to arrive. The signs are everywhere: the fields are aflood with golden rod - the sun leaves us sooner every evening - the light is now slant. As we drove along the Massachusetts Turnpike yesterday afternoon, small patches of red and orange peeked through the trees. Sharing an ice cream cone later that day with our children took us to a lake shore where revelers - masked and not - were vigorously soaking up the sun's setting glory. 

As I enjoyed the sweetness of my butter-crunch waffle cone I was aware that one cycle is coming to a close as another is starting to ripen. Young women and men were strutting about with as much exposed skin as was legal because in less than 30 days we'll all be covered by sweaters and long-johns. Middle aged men and women were hoisting various Octoberfest brews and carrying on in public in ways that will soon be long forgotten. Even we grandparents, carefully masked and practicing our quaint social distancing, smiled to watch the ancient mating rituals manifest themselves yet again by the water's edge. Taking stock of it all, I felt ever so grateful to be alive. Thomas Merton wrote in his Seasons of Celebration that, "Christ has given a special meaning and power to the cycle of the season."

Our seasons are good and their very nature have a capacity to signify our life in God. Jesus has made this ebb and flow of light and darkness, activity and rest, birth and death, the sign of a higher life, a llife which we live in him.

Most of this happens unconsciously. We "know" in our bones that something is shifting, and we act accordingly, even when we can't give the feeling a name. I love this time of year but find myself saddened, too because so many of the traditions that once gave shape, form and meaning to the cycles of life have been tossed away. Hill writes that "many of the resources that once expressed the meaning of the year - parish life, local customs, even the rituals of professional life - have disappeared... But our DNA hasn't changed."

The dim meaning is still there, even when the customs and traditions have gone. Spring, fall, summer, and winter are still telling us something we can't quite grasp, like music heard in another room... As did our ancestors, we feel the vague but huge significance and look for a way to say something about it, to be a part of it. We cling to this yearning in sweet, sill observances - Labor Day picnics, opening day at the ball park, trick-or-treating, Thanksgiving turkeys, Christmas pageants, summer vacations.

But the old holy days and holy nights are more potent. More clarifying. More useful, too as they become soul food for our spiritual hunger. They give us words to help us grasp what is happening within and among us. They also connect us to a story greater than self. In the Season of Creation, that new liturgical experience between September 1 and the Feast Day of St. Francis in early October, we are invited, encouraged, and instructed to pay attention to the signs of the Lord as they are incarnated in nature. In addition to calling our attention to climate change, the Season of Creation invites us to join nature beyond our addiction to anthropomorphic arrogance. Last week, we were asked to honor the trees. This week we'll try to listen to what the land is saying both about praising God and crying out in grief, rage, and lament. 

Right now, in our quiet hills, we are experiencing a drought of sorts. Nothing like the horror our sisters and brothers in California know as Mother Nature burns. One PBS commentator said that California has become our future given climate change. That is a terrifying and sobering insight. And while we in the Berkshires are not there yet, the plants in our garden and the herbs on our deck are parched. Our grass is dead. And the reds and browns of autumn have arrived earlier than usual. So much of reality is shifting right now...

Padraig O'Tuama asks those who listen to "Poetry Unbound" from the program-ming of On Being: "What rituals do you use to anchor yourself?" The poem to encounter is Faisyal Mohyuddin's "Prayer."

you cleanse       the uncovered
regions             of your body
then stand        at the foot
of prayer          prayer mats facing

the qibla          unfasten
your cluttered  mind
from the          hold of secular
trances            bow down

before                                         the cascading
glow of God’s mercy                  submit
to a centripetal                          course towards the gates
of a more perfect the cascading    emptiness

here                            now

you can plunge          into the most

chamber of the          secluded

soul                            commune

with your share         of the universe's

initial burst of                    eternal light

housed within the lamp    of mystery
waiting                               to be
beheld light                        five times a day