Little Deaths

This may sound ever so slightly macabre, but I've been thinking a lot lately about death. Don't worry, I have good reasons for it. Not so much the celebration of Halloween, which I wrote about in my last post. That holiday I view more as the ultimate postmodern celebration of our limitless potential to create and live out of alternate selves, anyway. But, the nearby holidays of All Souls Day, and in Hispanic cultures, Dia de los Muertos, started the ball rolling on this one. This was the first year that All Souls Day was really brought to my attention through the church I attend here. The music chosen for that morning was the most beautiful requiem mass, composed by someone called Gabriel Faure, about whom I know nothing, but I suspect Dan knows a whole lot, so you could ask him if you really wanted to know. They also had a reading of something called a necrology, which is just a list of all the names of people from the church who have died since last All Souls Day. I didn't know any of the people named, but it was a time to remember people in my own life who have died. And then this Sunday we again had a very somber tone in a sermon talking about the passage in Matthew about the narrow way, how difficult it is to follow Jesus, how demanding, how so much is expected of us. And also we directed our attention for a while to the needs of the world, war and hunger and human cruelty.

The way I see it, this is all very timely because fall to me is a season of many little deaths. Even if it's only the death of the beautiful weather that we'd enjoyed all week, the last gasp of summer that we awoke to find so abruptly extinguished on Saturday (!!!) morning. Each leaf is dying for another winter, the grass is dying, the flowers in our front yard are dying. The summer season is dying, more slowly and gently than I expected, but it passes nonetheless. I don't really think of winter as a time of death, but more as a time of rest, a long nap where the world dreams white dreams, a time of quiet and reflection and hopefully building strength. It's hard, though, to give up summer. It's hard to give up the leaves and the warm days and the busy calendars. But I feel like the most important thing to do is to become at home with the change. I think that's why fall is gradual, why things go slowly, bit by bit. Alicia and I were talking recently about how we need to learn to be at home with the cold, at home with winter, to not resist it with the way that we talk or think about it. It's a neutral thing, really, winter is. Even a good thing. And we'll make it through so much better if every puff of icy wind doesn't make us grumble about the wretchedness of life.

That's a thing that seldom gets mentioned when we speak of all these little deaths. A death can, in fact, be a good thing. It could be the death of a part of yourself that was holding you back, that didn't belong to the truest version of yourself. It could be the death of a terrible season of your life, allowing you to be reborn into something new. It could be the stripping away of something which you clung to which is no longer necessary to your life. Little deaths.

So here are my reflection questions for fall: What is dying in my life right now? What do I need to let go of, whether with joy or with regret? And what could I lay aside for a winter rest, knowing that I can take it up again in another season?