Fall, to me, has always been the most transitory of seasons. Maybe my life in Oklahoma is to blame here, but Fall always seems to bring Winter far sooner than I feel Winter merits arriving. It seems as if one day the weather is warm, the colours green, and inviting, and with little warning but the calendar months changing, the green has been lost, the weather is crisp, the wind chilled, and life's outlook bleak.In short, I never liked Fall, because Fall brought Winter. And to someone who studied literature, even as briefly as my collegiate career can attest, it is hard to disassociate Winter from death.
The leaves fall, the grass withers, and where the breeze brought relief, it now brings a soul-searing chill. The world loses all colour during the Winter, and what is Fall but Winter's prelude? It is Fall where the world sheds its warm, inviting skin, mere skeletal limbs left nakedly reaching to the sky. Hollow shadows of the life and vitality they once claimed.
I know I am not the first, and I shall not be the last to make this claim, but Fall invites sorrow and mourning into the world. It seems, subconscious as it may be, that as the seasons change, and Winter approaches, our moods become tense, our tempers a reflection of the days' shortness.
But Fall is not Winter. And dying is not death. These things are mere heralds of what is to come. Shadows of the reality that shall soon be bursting forth. And before the death, the dying brings with it a sort of beauty.
It is a sobering beauty, a beauty as grand as it is sorrowful.
The world knows, in these fleeting Fall moments, that its moments are few, that its gasps are ragged, its pulse erratic. And so, with the last of the dignity maintained by any self-aware metaphor, Fall goes out in a blaze of colour, of life, a display that marks the vitality to which it once made claim.
And this dying man's last hurrah is one of the greatest moments lived. The beauty is stark- the sorrow is deep.
But my new-found appreciation of Fall, marked as it was by an incredible moment of insight belonging to someone else (like all good moments of insight in life!), brings to life a truth more profound than the imminent death that approaches and threatens as Winter.
Because the true beauty of Fall's glorious, incredible, and naively defiant last stand lies in another arena all together.
Hope.
Because beyond Winter, is Spring. And those beautiful dying gasps, defiantly uttered by Fall, are but mere shadow when compared to the staggering display of new life lovingly created in Spring's triumphant debut.
From here, the lesson of Easter, of Resurrection, of new Creation is clear. Just as the totality of Death, of Winter, sets in- Spring bursts forth into the world. Bringing with it a new life that is deeper and somehow more real than any of the life previously known. This is the hope of the Christian claim.
It is through death that death itself was defeated. It is through Resurrection that this defeat was made known, that a Kingdom was proclaimed, that the claims of its Lord were made known in their completeness. The Christian life hinges on the literal metaphor that is the yearly seasons. From death will spring life. Jesus was raised as the firstfruits, and we Christians claim that we too shall share in the Resurrection. Eventually, we too shall find our Winter transformed into Spring. Literally. Jesus was raised- and so shall we be.
It's a surprising view. And it changes the way life itself is lived. For if all things shall be made new, if this life, this body, this earth shall give life to the new, well, my life here matters. Instead of the old "Just passing through, the world is going to end destructively, so why bother changing it?" mentality, we have a life of importance. If through Christ His own shall be Resurrected, in the same manner as He was, if this world shall be transformed through the realization of God's presence in all things, well, why should we not strive to be the herald of this Kingdom? As Fall is the herald not of Winter, but of the hope that is Spring?
I'm no longer interested in living life to survive and escape off to Heaven in the clouds. As metaphorically as those words could ever be. I'm interested in living for a Kingdom that shall one day be fully inaugurated here. It is here now. It will be here in the future. Now and not yet. It is a divine tension that inspires the truth of the love I have touched on prior. It inspires that love into action.
From now on, I endeavor to Fall through Life.
***
This is a sort of rambling essay on Fall, Death, Beauty, Resurrection, and Mission, all in one. It's not what I set out to write. But I suppose it's what I needed to write. The Christian overtones may not be appreciated to their fullest by all. Or by any. But as much as I sometimes wish to escape the mentality of so much of my brethren, brethren they remain. These are the thoughts that inspire me, motivate me, define me. I suppose there are times for greater coherence, for thoughts that are written from anywhere but the Christian wilderness, there are times for cynicism and realism. There will be a time for the essay on my perspective on Forgiveness, as I intended to lay down in this entry. And that is a time for more caution, perhaps.
But now is not the time.
(And yes, I am patting myself on the back for the less-than-creative, yet snarky usage of my blog title in the body of the blog.)
