Grace and Truth: A word from pastors

It’s raining. The sky is gray. There’s a chill in the air. The trees are turning. Leaves clutter the ground. Fall is coming. Winter isn’t far behind.

I love this time of year. Summer will make another visit before lying down to rest. One or two more warm days to tide us over for the months to come. But its ending is apparent. Fall is coming.

Every season has its own beauty. For my part, I find fall to be the most beautiful. There are the leaves, of course, making every tree a bouquet of color. The sun’s power is turned down a notch, becoming less hot, less fierce, less judgmental. Softer.

Fall is the season for gathering the last produce from the garden, the last fruit from the tree and stowing them away in canning jars and cupboards, there to last us through the winter. A season for putting away the tools of summer, the lawnmowers and hedge-trimmers, the hoes and clippers, keeping them safe and dry till the next time they are needed. A season for dragging out the cold-weather clothes, brushing them off and putting them in the closet in place of their lighter kin. Fall is the season for stocking up and for taking stock. It is the season when we begin preparing ourselves for death.

It seems to me on this cool, wet, end-of-summer day, there is a gift on offer in this season when we prepare ourselves for the dead-time, the long sleep, the fallow period of winter. There is something necessary and worth celebrating in this annual reminder of mortality.

In this season we are given time for all the sorting out, all the preparing required by the coming winter. We are blessed with the time to make plans, to say goodbye, to put away and in other ways make ourselves ready for what is surely coming.

Sure, we can squander the time in denial or procrastination. But we’ll be the poorer if we do. There are gifts on offer here, the rare gift of time and the rarer gift of knowing exactly what is coming. We do well to recognize and accept such gifts.

Our culture resists death. It fears death. It considers death something to be overcome or resisted. It expends its resources on warding off death, postponing it until the last possible moment. It sees death as a failure, as wrong, as unacceptable.

And sometimes death is exactly that. Sometimes death comes too suddenly and too soon. Sometimes death could have been avoided with the proper care and attention. And, even when death does come at just the right time, we still mourn that coming. We still grieve the ending of a cherished life.

But our faith points us away from fear. It shows us what lies on the other side of death. It reveals the true ending of the story, the one in which death no longer speaks last. Our faith reminds us that death has been overcome. It may still claim us all. But its hold has been and will be broken. We will be raised.

Which means we can enter fully into this time of preparation. We can welcome this season of gathering and stowing and getting ready for death. And not just in the mundane details, not just in the material acts of canning, storing and putting our summer clothes away. But also in acts of reflection and contemplation, the spiritual stock-taking that is necessary as we consider our mortality.

What resources will we need to sustain our spirits during the long sleep of winter? What must be gathered together and preserved for the months ahead? What can be, maybe ought to be, put away? How will we avoid simply hunkering down until spring but instead embrace the quiet of the frozen earth and so find God there? What do we hope to leave behind in the grave come spring? What do we hope to see reborn?

Rather than look past this season, I invite us to enter into it gladly. For God is with us even here, in the season that precedes our death.

Ron Adams is pastor at the Madison (Wis.) Mennonite Church.