reflections on relinquishing and renewal part two...

NOTE: This is part two of an unfolding reflection on relinquishing and renewal.

Over the past week, our small family marked the Feast Day of St. Francis and celebrated our grandson’s 12th birthday (they’re the same day), harvested our first 10lb pumpkin from our own garden, brought most of our plants indoors to escape the first frost, visited Ioka Farms for yet another family search for the Great Pumpkin, and blessed about 15 dogs, along with a few cats and a bunny, at church. It has been a full time. Autumn is now full-blown in these parts as the trees shed their colors and the squirrels and chipmunks snatch up the acorns. Soon, all the yellows, oranges, and browns will give way to silvers and greys, and the stripped-down hills and wetlands will invite us to return to the inward journey. All Hallows’ Eve is just around the corner, so too All Saints and Souls Days – thin places in time and matter where ordinary people sometimes sense something of the Creator’s vast albeit mysterious presence within and all around us. Parker Palmer puts it like this:

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. Today, as I weather the late autumn of my own life, I find nature a trustworthy guide. 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 hardest of times.
(check it out: https://www.yesmagazine.org/orphan/2018/10/22/parker-palmer-on-autumn-aging-and-acceptance)

One layer is diminished – and dies – while another simultaneously sends seeds of new life outward to prosper and grow in their own time. On Indigenous Peoples Day in the USA – a national holiday saturated in our culture wars – I find my heart singing the wisdom of the ancient prophet Isaiah, who captured the paradox of creation in his poetic oracle.

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near; For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose and succeed in the thing for which I sent it. For you shall go out in joy and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle, and it shall be to the Lord for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.(Isaiah 55)

This sounds to me like both the first inhabitants of this land—the Pocomtuc and Nipmuc nations of the Machican/Algonquin region—and St. Francis of Assisi. Without appropriating their respective cultures, I am grateful to recognize that my own Western spiritual tradition celebrates a holistic spirituality that honors the unity of creation, too.

To be sure, the Franciscan way is a minority report in Christianity – what Richard Rohr calls a generous and alternative orthodoxy - but so too the practices of ancient Celtic spirituality that peeks its head up in culture from time to time. For those who practice, we have now entered one of the unique, but all too often ignored, liturgical season called Allhallowtide. Officially, it spans only the three days between October 31 and November 2. Aesthetically and incarnationally, however, it feels like it has already begun. In this, nature clearly manifests a wisdom greater than the contemporary church, as the greenery, mammals, birds, and reptiles of this region prepare to withdraw from their outward activities in anticipation of winter.

Those who live close to the land grasp this as their once-abundant fields are

harvested and ploughed under before the frost. But rather than honoring the rhythmic wisdom of nature with rest, New Englanders initiate a new cycle of activity: schools reopen and students return, organizational budgeting ramps up, and church programming kicks into high gear after the summer hiatus. This feels increasingly wrong to me. Could it be yet another contradiction of domination long embedded into our culture, economics, and politics? Trisha Hersey of the Nap Ministry is on to something when she observes that:

We are grind culture. Grind culture is our everyday behaviors, expectations, and engagements with each other and the world around us. We have been socialized, manipulated, and indoctrinated by everything in culture to believe the lies of grind culture. For a capitalist system to thrive, our false beliefs about productivity and labor must remain. We have internalized its teachings and become zombie-like in Spirit and exhausted in body. So, we push ourselves and each other under the guise of being hyperproductive and efficient. From a very young age, we begin the slow process of disconnecting from our bodies’ need to rest, and we are praised when we work ourselves to exhaustion… Our bodies and Spirits do not belong to capitalism, no matter how it is theorized and presented. Our divinity secures this, and it is our right to claim this boldly. I’m not grinding ever. I trust the Creator and my Ancestors to always make space for my gifts and talents without needing to work myself into exhaustion.

Small wonder the ancient Celts created a 40-day Advent season that not only mirrors Lent but constructs an intentionally counter-cultural season of rest and respect that resonates with Mother Nature. In Celtic Advent, a wheel was removed from one of the farm’s working wagons to become the prototype of our Advent wreath. It thus slowed work down while providing a frame for candles to illuminate a darken home. Ms. Hershey adds:

Rest is as natural as breathing and waking up. Rest is part of our nature. Resting is about getting people back to their truest selves. To what they were before capitalism robbed you of your ability to just be. Rest is anything that slows you down enough to allow your body and mind to connect in the deepest way. We must focus on knowing that our bodies and our worth are not connected to how many things we can check off a list. You can begin to create a “Not-To-Do-List” as you gain the energy to maintain healthy boundaries. Our opportunity to rest and reimagine rest is endless. There is always time to rest when we reimagine.

I rather like the way Randy and Edith Woodley, co-founders of the Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm and Seeds, put it: “To overwork—that is, to spend time working for what one does not need—means that one’s life is out of balance, and it breaks the circle of harmony.” I have come to trust that the liturgical calendar I have inherited – and cherish – holds some additional possibilities for reclaiming a more balanced way of being. Like the great Red Maple in the wetlands behind our home that first bursts forth in wild yellows before becoming gray and bare, there is a time for every purpose under heaven – and now is clearly a time to journey inward.