For Everything A Season

Officially, imperceptibly, the seasons change on Tuesday. On that day of the Autumnal equinox, we in the northern hemisphere find ourselves tipped a little farther away from the sun. It may still look and feel like summer, but we know that slowly, slowly, warmth and light are diminishing.

The seasons turn; the starwheel turns; leaves bud, and fill with life, and die, and decay into rich new soil. We note the changes, we mark the passage of time. In poetry and song and painting and dance we celebrate the sacred circles of life, turning around and around to repeat: spring, summer, autumn, winter; beginning, growth, ripening, replenishment.

Sometimes the circle spins violence into our lives, a hurricane of wind and rain, fear and destruction, cutting a swath through the order of our days. We emerge from the drenching, breath-holding baptism of Hurricane Isabel with renewed gratitude for our safe passage and reborn compassion for all who sustained damage or loss. We are reminded that the cycle of the year embraces Hurricane Season, as well. And summer must end so that the leaves can die, and nourish the sore earth.

The image of the turning circle is powerful and pervasive, found in cultures and religious traditions ranging from Hindu India and Buddhist Tibet through a wide variety of Native American societies and even medieval European cathedral architecture. Mythologist Joseph Campbell characterizes the circle as a representation of "a completed totality, whether in time or in space," and reminds us that "the whole world is a circle. All of these circular images reflect the psyche." Psychologist Carl Jung says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is the circle. It is deeply satisfying to consider the trajectory of our lives as a circle, closing, enclosed, complete.

And yet, I think that many of us experience our lives as following not a circular but a linear trajectory. Days follow weeks follow months in a series that stretches from present into future– and unexpected events like Hurricane Isabel make it abundantly clear that we cannot foresee the future with any degree of confidence! Furthermore, for many of us, the past quickly recedes into oblivion. I can remember many a Monday morning when a co-worker inquired about whether I had had a good weekend – and I really had to stop and think before I could remember any detail even about the day before! Immediately, experientially, we know that evening follows morning, and each day is marked off into times for sleeping and waking, for hunger and for eating. But these rhythms may feel at least as much like ebb and flow as they do like cycles recurring over and over.

No doubt it is the tension between the linearity that we experience and the repetition that we understand that prompted the earliest development of calendars. Careful observation confirms recurring cycles in the apparent shape of the moon and position of the nighttime stars, in the length of days and the seasons of plant and animal life, in the behavior of the tides. Careful record-keeping reveals patterns that can first be understood and then be used to predict. The future seems a little less mysterious, and the past assumes a reassuring role as reminder that we have, indeed, done something like this before. Peering into the near future, we know that Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas are coming (and we would, even if calendars and the displays in the stores did not remind us weeks in advance), but for many of us, each celebration is new, shaped upon our memories of the past by the people and the events and the changes in our very selves that have come together uniquely in this new year.

Thus, it is important that we are intentional about setting the present in its context, as heir to past which we honor as prelude and preparation and the very path that has led us to this time and place. And it is important that we recognize the extent to which the unknown future recapitulates the past, by rhythm and cycle and circle of completeness. When we take care to mark the seasons of our individual and collective lives, we begin to understand that the cycle of the seasons and the movements of the tides are echoed in our bodies and in our souls. For we must take care to mark the changes of our seasons – the shifts from childhood to youth to adulthood to full maturity, from solitude to community, from dependence to independence and back again. Each passage is marked by a threshold – a moment in which we stand absolutely still, poised between what has been and what is yet to be. We must take care to pause on this threshold, and take time to consider what has been, what is ending, and what may lie ahead. We mark the transition with a ceremony or a journal entry, by sharing the moment and its meaning with friends, by capturing it in poem or song or picture or commemorative action. In this way, we begin to coil the ribbon of our days into a spiral – a circle that comes back around again and again, yet never crosses exactly the same threshold twice.

For we are not mistaken in seeing our lives as unfolding, unrolling, moving from past into a future that is always new. Nor are we mistaken in knowing our lives to circle around and around, through summer after summer, and winter after fall. In the spiral, we recognize both: line and circle, newness and familiarity, rhythm and repetition.

Today we have gathered to do this good work of marking thresholds, by sharing stories with one another, creating rituals and celebrations, exchanging gifts and good wishes, reconnecting with people who are important to us.

Today we mark and honor the passage of Hurricane Isabel through the waning days of summer, through our houses and yards and woods and waterways, through our lives. We take the time to hear each others’ stories and hold each others’ hands, and add this experience to the ribbon of our individual and communal past.

Today we mark and honor the decision of 4 new members to join our congregation. As the ribbons which are the paths of their lives are braided into the ribbon which is the life of this congregation, we will all be enriched and changed by the gifts and talents, the wisdom and the questions that they bring into this community. We stand on the threshold of a new life for us all, and we take the time to mark the shift of what we each were into what, together, we all can be.

Today we mark and honor the change of seasons on all the earth, from summer into autumn. At 5:46am on Tuesday, we may imagine an instant when the whole planet pauses, momentarily suspended between the summer that just, just passed and the autumn that has just, just begun. We can remember this threshold moment in other years, and remember ourselves in those other years, too. And we can mark the memory with attention or celebration, so that we can return to the moment again, in future years.

Today, as each time we gather, we do the work of religious community. We remind one another of the circles and the spirals that are our lives. We remind one another to mark the passages from one state, one stage, into another. And we offer to one another ways and wisdom and witness for the for the paying attention, for the careful observation, for the commemoration that make of our lives spirals of celebration and meaning.

Blessed be the work of this religious community, and blessed be all the seasons of your life.

Amen.

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