The Ending Season

It feels like a time of endings right now. Everything. The leaves on the trees, our gardens, the temperatures that make life outside and all the windows open bearable. And all the other endings in our governments and shared community life that I don’t have the energy to list right now. I don’t have to. You already know all the endings of everything that you are experiencing as well as I do.

It is a time of endings, especially in the old Celtic yearly cycle. Come Oct 21 – November 2, the Celtic year ends with the end of the harvest. The crops are now mostly gathered in from the fields, the wood for winter fire, the seeds to be ground for February bread. When we go out into the world looking for what the natural world is doing we see it mostly retreating back out of sight. The leaves, no longer useful to the trees, drop to the earth. Some plants pull the sugars back to the roots and other send out seeds before collapsing in frost’s great cellular disruption.

If the end of October marks the end of Harvest and the end of the year, then the beginning of November must also mark the beginning of the next round of growth, and harvest. The beginning of November marks the beginning of the new year. It is interesting to note that in this ancient way of measuring time, the seasons of growth and harvest do not begin with energy and action but instead with dormancy, retreat, and rest. It begins with the next thing hidden from our sight. It begins with nothing. Like the Celtic day that ends with nightfall, the year begins with darkness and unseen things.

We are deep and getting deeper into the hidden time.

It will be months before we see spring again. Long months of cold and darkness. In this time of retreat, we also turn low energy and sleepy. If we value only our production, our active usefulness then we often become angry at our seeming apathy when in fact we getting ready.

But what are we getting ready for?

What falls off the tree becomes something new like protective cover for insect life, a meal for a creature, minerals that become dirt and taken back up again into the tree. What was becomes something new again. What becomes a tree could become an apple and what becomes an apple could become a part of us when we bite into that apple. Does the power of this season depend on which part of this cycle we gaze upon? It seems like something of a double vision to see both the leaf fall and the fruit on the branch waiting for our reach.

The Christian liturgical calendar put the celebration of the birth of Jesus into the very middle of the darkening time, a few days after Winter Solstice. Like the natural year, the Christian year doesn’t start with the activity of a birth but instead with four weeks of waiting and preparing for that birth. The cyclical Christian Liturgical year starts by pointing toward the arrival of the disrupter, the one that challenges death itself. However, before jumping into the arrival of the vulnerable savior of the world, the Christian Liturgical practice encourages us to get ready, to prepare, so that we too can see both the vulnerable child in need of our care and also the grown adult who will stand defiantly before the occupying empire.

Theologically and organically it seems that this is the season where we are moving into a time for gathering in, for taking stock, for evaluating what remains useful or pleasing and what needs to be released back into the world around us.

This is the season where
We wait.
We observe.
We pray.
We rest.

Which is how I think we get through this ending time.

We let it end.

So it can begin again.

Because it will begin again.

For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-9