I wonder which is your favourite season?
It was the question I asked our participants in the Harvest Festival Songs of Praise at St Giles last month. All of them were intimately connected with the land and its produce, so I guess it was not surprising that their favourite season was this one: autumn. It is the time of the year when the hard work of the last months comes to fruition. It’s also the time of the year when crops are turned into cash and people get paid. For many, autumn has a more aesthetic pleasure to it. Last year we drove down the Wye Valley on an extremely beautiful autumn afternoon when the slanting, golden light of October made the red and yellow trees burn with colour. It doesn’t last long, but the colours of autumn are haunting.
For many people, however, autumn is a sad and reflective time. Summer has come to an end, the nights are drawing in and it’s a time of counting the marching hours of life. There is a wonderful scene in the book Brideshead Revisited which captures this sense of the passing of time. Charles and Sebastian drive out into the country and following an idyllic afternoon of strawberries and champagne, Sebastian lies back wishing he could capture the moment in a bottle and bury it for all posterity. There is something about the waning of the summer and the coming of autumn that makes one want to bottle those precious moments so we can return to them in the dark days of winter. Unfortunately, we cannot as time literally does slip through our fingers. This may make us wistful but it is also a reminder that life is beautiful but also brief and we too will whither and perish like the leaves around us.
In his Rule, St Benedict gives his monks a set of tools by which to fashion and cultivate a holy life. One of these is ‘day by day to remind yourself that you are going to die’. If you have a yearning for the church to be radical and counter cultural, then maybe this is it. Too often we kid ourselves that through medicine we can live forever, so much so that to speak of death is a morbid taboo rather than a precious reality. For St Benedict knew, in an equally violent age, that to contemplate the idea that we may not be here tomorrow, is to see today in a different light. Each day is a new beginning, a precious gift to be savoured and enjoyed, each person is loaned to us for a brief time to be known and loved, creation is cherished with awe and delight, life is here in this moment in all its fullness and not just a future hope. In this light, life is not simply a round of doings, achievements and successes, the next job, the new house, the title or the chair, sucking out the marrow of our lives with so called purpose before they come to an end. No, it is about life itself, it is about knowing and believing that in this moment is wholeness, all is one now, life has been given to us in Christ in all its fullness, the eternal life is for us now not in the future alone, there is no pointless death or wasted life for we dwell in the eternal now.
How beautiful are the words which William Blake had inscribed on his memorial stone from the Auguries of Innocence:
‘To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.’
They are also words for us to inscribe in our hearts this autumn time.
Emma
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