EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 35

November 2003

The time of Autumn for me is the best of all the four seasons. I think it must have been for Vivaldi as well. I like the colours, the smells, the mists, and the gathering darkness in the mornings and in the evenings. I like the smell of the burning of the leaves. Decomposition and death in nature can be quite beautiful. I guess part of this is because we know that there will be green oxygen, and flowers, the bright mornings and the long evenings. But when I reflect in my own demise, that beauty which I see in the autumn of things is not quite so attractive. In a poem by Lawrence THE BURNING OF THE LEAVES, he writes this:

’Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare. Time for the turning of days ended and done. Idle solace of things that have gone before: Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there; Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind. The world that is ours is a world that is ours no more.’

With careful reading this poem is not as depressing as it might first seem. All of us are invited to enter a process. A self discovery, and sometimes getting rid of things that bind us as human beings and stop us developing, and throwing them onto the bonfire of the vanities is a very painful process. There can be no second spring in us without it.

I remember in the film ‘THE MISSION’ with Jeremy Irons playing the part of a Jesuit priest, who with his small group, is sent by Rome to the interior of the South American rain forests to bring the Good News to the Natives living there. These people and their land were fought on by the Spanish and the Portuguese, and all ended in tragedy. Robert De Niro plays the part of a mercenary who kills his brother over a woman they both want. De Niro gives into deep despair but decides to do penance and offers himself as a novice to the Jesuits, going to the rainforest. He sets off with them to the Mission but he carries with him all the accoutrements of his past mercenary life, his armour, his weapons, including the sword that killed his brother.

As they near the mission, climbing up steep terrain, some native children see him struggling with his heavy load. One of them steps forward and with his knife cuts the burden free and it falls to the bottom of the ravine. Before these missionaries had preached even a word about the gospel, the natives had unintentionally preached it to the priests, unbinding the bond and setting the spirit free.

The symbolism of all of this is more than obvious. Often we can’t unburden and unbind ourselves. We need each other to do this.

It happens here at T.H.O.M.A.S on a daily basis, and I can assure you its not just one way.

Often the fragmentation involved in stripping the spirit bare is very powerful, its about being vulnerable. The Latin word for vulnerable is ‘wounded’, and is at the centre of the journey ‘to self’ where the Kingdom of God is.

To some extent we need this process of disintegration with a purpose, because when out life’s meaning sometimes breaks down, and we feel lost and desolate – the depths of life and the depths of ourselves, and even God’s depths, can be better understood.

Whatever shadows there are for us herald the presence of God. When the Autumn of human experience happens to us, we generally want to opt out, anything will do, sex, alcohol, drugs, incessant activity and a drivenness for human company all the time - we can take our pick. God is always with us, acknowledged or not. Offering us a truly, madly, deeply relationship with him which, I feel is worth having a shot at!



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