autumn’s easter

Autumn is typically a season in which I find myself with a catch in my throat. Over the years I’ve tried to understand it.

Too often I’ve remembered my Septembers by the losses, and inevitably I can identify them, but I suspect that I could count any season by the losses if I chose to focus upon the losing. My hunch is that this season has no more losses than any other, my awareness more that the earth itself calls to a more melancholy view this month. The days are shortening, the leaves are contracting, the flowers are gone (ok, except those hearty mums – are they really flowers?). As the earth prepares itself for the coming of winter, harvest is a euphemism for death in the cycle of life.

Aware of the familiar tension in my chest as I watch the cloud move through the sky this morning, I wonder what it would feel like to be celebrating Easter in this season. Our sisters and brothers in Australia do so each year, and I realize that the placing of our theological festivals alongside the earth’s rhythm offers particular meanings. It is easy to sing songs of jubilant new birth in the spring of the year, but how do they sound when the air begins to hiss and the leaves are crunching beneath our feet?

Indeed the traditions of All Saints Day and All Hollow’s Eve (Halloween), celebrations that of course predated the Christian words and interpretations, were likely attempts to offer witness to rebirth and new life as the earth was bidding farewell for winter. In her poem “In Blackwater Woods”, Mary Oliver describes the pain and promise of this season and it’s companion spiritual truth of impermanence.

Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

When Darlene and I had the privilege of choosing wedding vows, we chose a set of Buddhist vows to express our intentions. The vows spoke to mindfulness and centered living, but also to the Buddhist tradition of impermanence. Impermanence is the concept that all of life is continually changing, that our spiritual ground must thereby rest not in attachments but rather in the process of letting go. Attachments, by definition, distance us from our spiritual center. The sentiment was jarring in the context, and yet I suspect helpfully so. Impermanence is not a concept with which Christians are typically familiar, but the concept is of course at the heart of Jesus’ teachings about losing to gain, the last being first, and the grass of the field. Ironically and perhaps improbably, we conceded at the altar that though our instinct is to cleave, the strength of our covenant is in our promise is to hold with open hands.

As I watch the movement of the construction workers on my street this morning, brisker now that the deafening heat has subsided, I realize that though this season is markedly different than the Pollyanna of spring, there is no less hope. Intentionally now choosing to bear witness to the shortening days with gratitude rather than tallying loss, I am struck by the beauty of this season of passage. Indeed there is an unmistakable strand of delight in the rhythm as the squirrels gather their winter stash and for me as I consider the orange and red of the harvest decorations that I’ll unpack this afternoon. But it is a more seasoned delight, a more measured celebration than the dance of spring.

Easter in the context of this earth season of letting go is less about triumphing and more about humble gratitude. And it is good, very.