By John Carroll
Some call them beautiful; others call them a reminder of our mortality — the changing leaves of autumn. Some find the brisk air refreshing; others find it a remembrance of winter’s coming. Some appreciate the shortened days and slanting sunlight as times to turn inside; others lament the loss as a passing of summer’s grand activities.
Autumn is my favorite season, not just for the positive reasons listed above, but for all of them. It is a season of gain amidst loss, of beauty amidst change. It is a season in which playful activity and inward reflection complement and strengthen one another. It is my favorite season; it always has been.
I thought that would change when a few major life events rocked my world during separate autumns — one being the divorce of my parents, another being the heartbreak of my first niece being diagnosed with cancer, and the other being the sorrowful news that my first nephew would be born with a genetic defect and would not live long, if at all. I thought the crashing in of these events during the transitions of fall would make it my least favorite season. But these autumnal episodes of change and loss have become for me, with time, quietness, pain and prayer, times of transformation and presence.
All of this, along with some reading I am doing this fall, has me thinking about autumn as a good metaphor for the spiritual life. Unfortunately, we have come to think of things spiritual as self-help things — things that make us feel happy-go-lucky, things that make us productive, things that simply feed our ego-need to be in control, productive, and religiously respectable. However, I’m not so sure that is the way the Bible sees it.
Jesus spoke of losing our life and bearing our cross. He also spoke of pruning as the only way to fruitful growth — and pruning, of course, means cutting away the dead but also even the living pieces of ourselves until we are stripped bare enough to bear vital things instead of just pretty things. And Paul spoke of counting all things as loss. He even said, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Resurrection does not come until there has been a death.
Perhaps our collective love and misgiving about this season is wiser than we know. Perhaps it’s a reminder lodged deep in our bones that we must give up some of our frantic activity if we are ever to turn inward long enough to grow deeper, that we must expose ourselves to some of the brisk realities of life if we are ever to awaken ourselves to vitality, and that reminders of our mortality do not have to be fearful but can, in fact, be beautiful and holy.
And, perhaps it’s a reminder that all true spiritual journeys, pilgrimages perhaps, must journey through loss/pruning/stripping bare if they are to, in the end, be beautiful and worth the taking. After all, we can’t get back around to spring if we do not take the journey through fall and, yes, even winter.