A Celebration of Autumn
Rev. Mark Hayes
October 7, 2001

Reflection on Autumn: Part 1
     I love this time of year.  Autumn is easily my favorite season.  And so we take some time out this morning to celebrate Autumn; to pause and let its experience sink in; to savor it.  I realize that some of you may have a different favorite time of year.  When those times come, by all means celebrate and enjoy them.  But meanwhile, I encourage you to sit back, relax, and find some part of the experience of autumn to enjoy and savor.

     When listening to the poetic expression of others, I particularly like those that focus on immediate experience.  Like Tagore’s experience of the joyous dance of the atoms at every level of creation: in grass, dust, body, planets, sun, and stars.  Like Keats’s images of the cider press and the crickets and the stubble-plains.  Such words and images evoke in me feelings of my own from other times and other places.
 When I take the time each year to re-experience autumn’s joys, that too takes me back to other times and other places.  The beauty of a poem is its ability to capture and to articulate a small piece of life, and to relive it, at least in the imagination.

     The seasons repeat themselves each year, and there are certain aspects of each season that repeat themselves in my experience.  They do so in such a way as to evoke in me, much as a poem can do, feelings and memories of times past.  And so my immediate experience becomes a living poem, if I have ears to hear and eyes to see.

     So how does autumn stir me?  Well, first there are the cool breezes that bring relief from summer’s sometimes oppressive heat.  I grew up in a cool part of the country, and so the falling temperatures take me back home.  When I venture out on those first Fall evenings that actually require a jacket, I’m transported back to those October and November Friday nights in high school, getting ready for the big football game.

     Autumn means getting out the flannel pajamas and the electric blanket.  Ah, the coziness of a warm bed on a cold night is priceless.  And what a good excuse to sleep in a little bit longer when the cold morning beckons.

     Then there are the visual and aural signs of the season.  The geese, heading south in their V-formations, honking for all they’re worth.  The uniformly green leaves making their gradual shift to an explosive diversity of colors: yellow, red, orange and brown.  I like to imagine having a vantage point some miles off in space and watching the change of color proceed from north to south, something like watching the development of a Polaroid photograph or the slow ripening of a huge apple.  And speaking of apples, autumn also means the crispness of a ripe apple fresh from the tree, and the sweet-tart flavor of fresh-squeezed apple cider.

     After all the leaves have fallen off the trees, there’s the sound of them crunching underfoot on a walk through the woods.  And there’s the fun of jumping in a big pile of them after finishing the chore of raking.  And the smell of leaves burning, not so common today, but a constant presence in the autumns of my childhood.

     About this time a couple of years ago, I was thrilled to read a column in the Washington Post extolling the glories of Autumn.  I knew then that I wasn’t alone.  I’d like to share some of Carol Kando-Pineda’s words:

      Autumn has always been the real time for my new beginnings.
 Granted there are no budding tulips and sense of incipient greenness; no
 New Year’s resolutions, crammed so desperately with hopes for change.
 What has arrived are those crisp days from my New England youth.  Fall
 is a fresh, clean page in a brand new notebook.  It’s shiny never-been-
 used pens and pencils.  It’s the excitement of starting a new grade in school.
 I’ve always enjoyed the rapid succession of holidays that proceeds
 from September.

      I miss the extra daylight as much as the next guy, but there’s
 something to ethereally beautiful about mid-afternoon in early October as
 the day fades into dusk.  The light shimmers, casting a golden glow
 around the room.  As autumn progresses, the leaves blaze.  I anticipate
 those weeks all year . . . I can’t resist shuffling my feet through mountains
 of leaves, falling into piles of them, saving the best of them.

Reflection: Part 2
     Beyond immediate experience, autumn takes on symbolic meaning.  It’s the end of the growing season, the time of harvest, and the move into a time of dormancy, even death.  One definition of the word ‘autumn’ is “a time or period of maturity verging on decline.”  When we say that someone is in the autumn of their life, we basically mean they’re over the hill; the end is in sight.

     In all this symbolism and metaphor, there are at least two major ideas.  One is autumn as the harbinger of death.  The other is autumn as the culmination of a life.  Each year, the natural cycle of life reminds us that at the end of life comes death.  No one escapes.  It’s our biological destiny.  How we respond to that message, that destiny, is of course up to us.

     I would choose to focus on that second idea: autumn as the culmination or fulfillment of life.  It’s the time of harvest and the time of mature beauty.  Our harvest may include wisdom accumulated from a lifetime of effort, thought, and reflection.  Our harvest may include the material fruits of our labors, that which our effort has produced.  Our harvest may include family that we have loved and nurtured and prepared to take their own place in the world.

     Those of you not yet in the autumn of your years might use this insight to help guide your present life.  You might start thinking about that time when you will be looking back, evaluating your life.  What could you be doing now that would lead to a more satisfying look back when that time comes?  After all, the best harvests come when there has been adequate cultivation, watering, feeding and weeding.  Yes, nature is full of helpful lessons if we are open and pay attention to them.

     Then there is the beauty of maturity.  The leaves on the trees take on their blazing hues.  Then they drop, leaving another form of beauty, the branches bare, and yet intricately intertwined into endlessly complex patterns.  In the autumn of a human life, the human head often changes color too, to hues of gray, silver and white.  And occasionally those hairs drop too.  Some respond to the graying or loss of hair with dismay.  But me, I see them as things of beauty.  They, along with the wrinkles of age are, to me, badges of honor, signs of a life well-lived.  Yes, I think autumn is the time to celebrate life that has come to fulfillment.

     Let’s once again take a moment for contemplation, this time perhaps on how we might move further along that path toward fulfillment. . .

Reflection: Part 3
     When we look at autumn as a part of nature’s continual cycles, there is another idea that emerges.  That’s the idea of rebirth or resurrection.  The world turns brown and gray, but that isn’t forever.  Implicit in the death that comes with autumn is the rebirth that is to come the following Spring, with the re-emergence of new, green life.  In her Post column, Carol Kando-Pineda writes:
 

      As I dig up all the dried brown dead things in the garden, replacing
 then with bronze and cranberry mums, I’ll also put in some tulip and
 crocus bulbs for the spring.  So that when I’m tired of the pathetic trudge
 through dirty snow, weary of the wind so cold it brings tears to my eyes,
 and sobered by the thought of eating yet another root vegetable, I can
 look forward to the dawning of new life pushing up through the cold earth.

     Now, I can’t say that resurrection in any personal sense awaits us when death comes to us as individuals.  But there are many situations in life where the notion of renewal or rebirth is important.  Our observations of the cycles of nature help to reassure us that after the coldest winter, spring does come once again.  After the darkest nights, morning does come once again.  And that includes the dark nights of the soul.  And even if we pass into oblivion when we die, a new generation arises out of our dust and ashes to carry life forward through yet another cycle.  And so as we face the decline of autumn, we may take courage from our understanding and acceptance of our place in the endless cycle of nature.

     I’d like to end this part of the service with one final tribute to autumn in general, and to October in particular.

Reading:  October’s Bright Blue Weather, by Helen Hunt Jackson
 

 O suns and skies and clouds of June,
 And flowers of June together,
 Ye cannot rival for one hour
 October’s bright blue weather.

 When loud the humblebee makes haste,
 Belated, thriftless vagrant,
 And Golden Rod is dying fast,
 And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

 When Gentians roll their fringes tight,
 To save them for the morning,
 And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
 Without a sound of warning;

 When on the ground red apples lie
 In piles like jewels shining,
 And redder still on old stone walls
 Are leaves of woodbine twining;

 When all the lovely wayside things
 Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
 And in the fields, still green and fair,
 Late aftermaths are growing;

 When springs run low, and on the brooks,
 In idle golden freighting,
 Bright leaves sing noiseless in the hush
 Of woods, for winter waiting;

 When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
 By twos and twos together,
 And count like misers, hour by hour,
 October’s bright blue weather.

 O suns and skies and flowers of June,
 Count all your boasts together,
 Love loveth best of all the year
 October’s bright blue weather.