My favorite time of year is finally, finally here.
Summer persisted long past its formal end, and endless days of dry weather and sun gave me memories of my summer vacation a few years ago to Portugal. Even with the fading of the light, warm weather persisted: an occasional dip into what I affectionately call “sleeves weather” never lingered more than a day or so.
But today autumn blew in with a cloudy sky and a solid twenty-four hours of rain. The 10-day forecast hints that the seasonal climate will hold at long last; we have lows that promise light frosts in the near-future.
The walks I will have! The rain I will watch through the windows! The sweaters I will wear!
A long time ago, a non-believing acquaintance of mine made a stray comment once that bemused me. “I really think,” she said, “that you’d have made a good pagan if you hadn’t wound up a Christian instead.”
I knew, then, why she said it. I’m a woods-walker, a forest-prowler, a marker of seasons and days. I believe in living according to the rhythm of the seasons: drawing in and cozying up during the cold months, unfurling and emerging into greater activity during spring and summer. Nothing excites me like walking in a rainstorm. I collect leaves and rocks and sticks like a child.
Perhaps ironically, I befriended several pagans during my college days.
They knew I was a Christian because I evangelized them loudly and constantly and in ways, in retrospect, that I wish I had leavened with more grace, compassion, and curiosity. But they tolerated my presence, perhaps because in spite of my obnoxious interruptions they sensed I did genuinely wish to love and serve them.
We went shopping together and we studied together. One memorable night, we drove my friend’s ancient Cadillac door somehow sprung open and wouldn’t close: we tied it shut with a jump rope from the Dollar Tree and shrieked all the way home on the interstate. They brought me coffee when my first great love unceremoniously dumped me on my birthday.
I knew they worshiped nature or characterized embodiments of it. I worshiped the God that I believe made it and gifted it to us. A pretty significant difference, and yet at the time I was so insistent on distinguishing it constantly that I neglected the commonalities we did share: we all cared for creation and wished to steward it well, we all found a lot of joy in welcoming the seasons and noticing the turns of the year, and we enjoyed things like laughing and talking under the stars.
For a long time, though, I disavowed much of this thinking at all.
I don’t know why. Enjoying God’s creation is part of being a Christian. Being in our bodies matters to the Christian faith. Being creatures experiencing the worlds in these bodies matters. Being in flesh—being enfleshed—matters, enough that Christ incarnated and shared in that experience. And part of being in this body in this world means noticing these things: the time of year when my nose grows cold, the patter of rain on the roof, the change in light and wind and flora.
Many traditions in Christianity make use of the liturgical calendar, too, to draw attention to these changes, to remind us of Christ and God’s great love. My first All Saints’ Day as a Christian is approaching; Advent draws ever nearer with the fading of the light. Easter waits on the other side of winter, tight-budded and drawn-in still. I cherish and value all of these things. I mark the wheel of the seasons and in doing so get to tell and re-tell—or hear and re-hear—the story of God’s grace and compassion anew.
Today, I ventured out into the rain with my husband. We went to the library close to our house, which has vast windows looking out on a clutch of trees. We sat in a booth by those windows and watched the rain. Because the library’s so silent, the roar-and-patter overwhelmed almost everything else. Birds flocked to a feeder the library placed outside; in a small circle of stones made for the purpose, water gathered into an impromptu pond.
Later, we left and got hot coffee and drank it.
It was the most Sabbath-y Sabbath I’ve had in a while. Rest. Calm. A quiet deep joy that emerges not from a particular coffee or particular rain or particular autumn day but from all of these things at one time: a sense of everything good that still remains in creation under the sky, a sense of what God has given us to enjoy, a sense of His presence in the mere enjoyment of these things. Food for the journey to weary Elijahs.
The wheel of the year moves regardless of our will. God has made it so, and He works both within and without it to our good and His glory.
Happy autumn.
Samaritan's Song 