The first true cold front of the season has rolled in from the Midwest, putting a welcome chill to our skin after months of swelter and sweat. It’s the time of woodsmoke and raining leaves. We can see our own breaths in white wisps, and just like every autumn, I hear the plinking, twanging conversation between guitar and banjo. The time has come, once again to say…
Liturgical Christians – at least the ones I know – are people of tradition. We find encouragement, strength, comfort, and inspiration in repetition. In my church, the Venite, the Collect, and the Order for Holy Communion are each repeated weekly not so that they become routine words and rote movements, but because each one is skeletal – giving form to our souls in the same way my spine and pelvis and femur give form and shape to my body – or, to switch from an anatomical metaphor to an architectural one, because each one is load bearing – holding up the otherwise crushing weight of time itself, how it matures us while simultaneously pushing down upon us, gradually hunching our shoulders and shriveling our skin, pressing us toward ground and grave.
This, of course, is the reality of time, that our passage within it is ephemeral. And yet, this need not be a dark thought. The seasons themselves can, even in their constant passing, train us to embrace both the joys and the griefs of time.
We may track the slow march of time by counting minutes and hours, by numbering calendars and adding candles to the yearly birthday cake. We redeem time, however, not by counting, but by embracing the value of tradition.
The Christian year is perhaps the best example. To tell the old, old story of redemption anew each year, we recurrently erect Ebenezers of hope within the temporal turning of the seasons. Advent’s candles, Epiphany’s feast, Lent’s ashes, Holy Week’s sepulcher – each one calls pilgrims to contemplate anew their relationship with the Savior and recalibrate their focus on the movements of His Spirit.
But there are also secular liturgies that can assist us in the hallowing of earthly time. For instance, summer officially begins for my family with a road trip through the Appalachians to visit family in Shenandoah, and then from those grand, green hills we move on to the sea-sprayed coasts of Maine. For us, the warmth and brightness of summer, with all its blazing possibilities, is typified in an early June sun shimmering upon the vast blue Atlantic water.
Then there is Advent and Christmastide. The atmosphere has finally turned – and stayed – colder, and, personally, I don’t believe this time is fully honored without the syrupy strains of Burl Ives and Bing Crosby, nor the powdery grit of baking flour crusting my fingertips.
And yet, there is perhaps no segment of the year I anticipate and enjoy more than the start of fall. Leaves cracking underfoot, checkmarks and symmetrical Vs crossing the blue sky, pumpkins and absurdly macabre ornamentations erected on front lawns. As the foliage ages from verdant green to yellow to coral to brown, it’s as if the season is asking us to reflect again on the impermanence of life, while nonetheless observing the beauty inherent in one’s latter days. There is a kind of dignified melancholy that hangs in the mild air, that weaves itself into the fabric of autumn’s early sunsets and chilly dusks. This is a remarkably short-lived season, always arriving long after you’re ready for it, yet departing well before you’re done savoring it.
Time, she says,
“There’s no turning back,
Keep your eyes on the tracks.”
Through the fields, somewhere there’s blue
Oh, time will tell, she’ll see us through.
This is why I officially mark the start of fall with the music of Gregory Alan Isakov. More than any I have found, in his echoey acoustic strains as much as his naturalistic lyrics, I believe his music captures the unique feeling of autumn – its beauty and its wistful melancholy. A South African immigrant from the Apartheid era, Isakov originally sought a degree in horticulture, but found unexpected success with his guitar and his brief, delicate songs about lost loves, complicated relationships, quiet rage, and lonely, moonlit highways. Each one of his songs sounds as if it was composed while walking in an autumn-colored wood, with lyrics that strike as efficiently and elegantly as a Wendell Berry poem, or an Edward Hopper painting.
It’s like you say all the time
World has lost its mind
Between you and I, I know
That I’ve lost mine
As he sings these words on “Appaloosa Bones,” the title track of his most recent album, the listener feels the incurious hopelessness that visits so many of us in these colder months. But then the simple, affectionate wonder of the chorus follows:
Was I that gone?
Man, I hope not
Glad you found me
When you did
I mark the start of fall with all sorts of little traditions, whether it’s regularly lamenting the perpetual mediocrity of Baylor football, meticulously cleaning out our little sitting room fireplace, or dipping into the spooky short stories of Edgar Allen Poe, M.R. James, or Ray Bradbury. But of all these annual, load-bearing tentpoles that hold up the heaviness of time and grant me the space to look and listen and breathe deeply, there is no tradition I love more than listening to Gregory Alan Isakov’s quiet consternation at the two-sidedness of this life – the beauty and the sorrow – and his admirable willingness to take both their hands, join them together, and celebrate their inseparable bond.
Isakov repeats these words again and again in one of his most popular songs. It may read on the page as a gloomy line, but when introducing the song in concert, he says with a smile, “This is probably the happiest song I’ve written.”
Indeed, Gregory. And thank you for being such an important part of my fall traditions – for helping me love the browning leaf as much as the budding rose. The Lord God made them both, and called it good.
Windblown 