the testimony of Fall

Maybe it started with the letterboard sign that caught my eye in September, when it shouldn’t have felt like Fall outside but did, when something inside my heart pulled me toward surrender.

I decided to actively anticipate the change of season, to savor the subtle shifts in the light of day, the darker nights, the quiet chill over our sleep forecasting a slow descent into Winter.

Nature has so much to say about what is, what was, what will be.

I unpacked plastic bins, decorative pumpkins as various as people, made of polished glass; dried reeds and vines; foam, painted in rich amber and olive tones, sugar-coated with beads, and a tiny one of bright orange velvet, which I held between my fingers as I considered how I wanted to decorate the mantel. Also, I pulled out the blocks Adam painted with little boy fingers one year at school, spelling out our sloppy eucharisteo, the words in his childish hand echoing the ones always affixed to our front door, always reminding us, give thanks. I wound twinkling lights around, nestled cozily scented candles, plucked letters out one-by-one from the plastic container for the letterboard.  I wanted a sign to speak to me, thoughtful and plain, every time I walk through the front room on a crisp Fall morning to open curtains on the world and the day, to measure the season by the changes in the sprawling Japanese maple just beyond our front windows, and so it says:

The leaves are about to show us just how beautiful it can be to let things go.

It’s interesting that Fall, beloved for its stunning vibrancy, for its turn away from the attention of the sun and its nestling chill, is really a season of surrender, of letting go, a time when the outside world succumbs, curling up, drifting down to the sleepy dormancy of winter.

Something about that phrase, how beautiful it can be to let things go, and the leaves outside already beginning to dance floaty twirls in the air on their way to the ground, the trees touched with gold and red like flame, had me staring out the window flexing my fingers, realizing my hands felt sore from gripping life a bit too hard.  It can be like that, everything unfurling and falling outside, and inside I’m a silent scream, scrabbling to maintain what amounts to hardly a hold at all on anything.

Or maybe this receiving of mine started much, much earlier.  It’s hard to tell really, these things unfolding from impressions, from shifts in shape, but maybe this conversation began months and months ago, maybe years, God showing me the posture of surrender as a new posture for prayer, my body sighing with relief—I still remember—as I began resting open hands, palm-up and still, in my lap for prayer, for listening, aligning body and soul as I trained in letting go.  For a while it felt like falling, still does sometimes actually, those first breaths of surrendered prayer, of acknowledging it’s never really me holding myself upright anyway. 

Then this morning I look out across our backyard, searching to see if there is yet enough light to note changes in the color of the leaves, to see how much the trees have already emptied their hands, their twisty arms, or if, right now they contribute their breezy, rustling dance to the worship of the dawn chorus.

My finger rests on a passage, the book splayed open in my lap, propped up a little on a pillow, the golden edges of the pages brightened by those twinkling lights, the candles, flickering. In a fresh way, I have just caught in the words the glint of that truth about the beauty of letting go which has lately felt so captivating to me.  Turning away again from the window, from that speech in every language, I return to the text.

Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.

There it is, I think, staring and re-reading, the testimony of Fall, the lone kernel letting go, falling beautifully, making its elegant dance to the ground.  There it is, the dying-off, that rest through which the kernel, so packed with potential for life, loses itself to become a fruit-bearing seed. And this is beautiful to God, I realize, this is the everlasting beauty worth pursuing, not the fight to hold on to everything—to orchestrate, to self-determine, to control, to present, to manipulate, to insist, not the grapple for grip as I dangle, despairing the drop, but the letting go, the fall in full surrender to the Wind, that is, to God. Either the kernel dares to die to bear fruit, or the fruit bound up within the seed dies as unrealized potential.

Letting go, then, has far more significant implications than refusing my propensity for worry, or choosing, this time, not to lead, or learning, at last, to say no, though these points of practice may be needed and beneficial for me. The most beautiful Fall, it seems, is rather the open-handed release of what I most naturally believe will fuel and protect the fires of my own vibrancy, a dying-off of self-will in favor of a hiddenness that is truly living.  This is what it means, ultimately, to believe Christ and trust in His resurrection.

Out the window, I watch as one tender yellow maple leaf, bright even in the dim dawn light, falls from a tree in our backyard, fluttering, coming to rest on a crunchy, bark brown pile of curled and broken leaves, husks, already collecting beneath the shelter of her limbs. So much of the turning we don’t even get to witness, I’m thinking, surprised, because the dead leaves hardly draw any attention for all that their deconstruction will mean for fertility come Spring.

There is the lie of forgetfulness in the waiting season, the bland suggestion that nothing ever rises, that nothing ever will, after the seed dies.  But the promise of the passage, and the promised cyclical testimony of the visual world, the testimony of Fall, is that in dying, the seed always eventually produces much fruit.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Christian martyr, wrote in his significant work The Cost of Discipleship, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” Reflecting on all this, I have been, as part of this whole lengthy conversation about letting go, about just how beautiful it is to fall to the ground to die, asking God to help me understand more about what it means to lose my life.  I don’t want to walk around only turning a nice phrase when I’m the one needing to turn, when I’m the one He’s inviting, let go. Scripture sketches this out for me, the losing of one’s life in this world, which is not merely meant ultimately, in the sense of the body losing its breath. In fact, this testimony points to something far more compelling, and that is a life taking as its shape the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

This is the part no one describes in elegant terms or photographs or files away for safekeeping on Pinterest, that once the passionate leaves have fallen, they pile up like dry, brown bones, and when the rains come and carry them away, they clog drains in the street, appearing to become nothing more than dark sludge smelling sweet with rot. We rake them up in piles and blow them away, away, away from our lawns, afraid that they’ll kill away what’s left of the grass, never mind the fleeting facts, that we will all only be here today and will be gone tomorrow.  Winter has a barren, tomb-dark look as gray as those waiting days after the cross, when the disciples hid and prayed, shaking with fear, believing they had lost absolutely everything.

In the waiting silence, God’s promise reverberates like a lone pulse, if it dies, it produces much fruit, which is only an emphatic rephrase of what Jesus says but a chapter before in John’s gospel to a mourning Martha, that the one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.

But it is the passion that draws our attention, the vibrance of a life surrendered, still lifted up on the tree for all to see, that holy fire, the leafy flames of red and gold resolutely pointing, by their stunning surrender, to the dependable promise of life, to the rebirth of blossoms and fruit, of warmth and consummation and juice eventually dripping, once again, from our sun-warmed chins. All that stunning color only hints at the potential, the not yet we’re already realizing, the heady reality that will be the restoration of everything.

So, it is important to remember, to keep on remembering the passion while we wait, when later bare black limbs reach toward shrouded skies like arms absolutely emptied.

Letting go feels hard, when at last we surrender, and the dying always painful.  But look, the leaves are showing us just how beautiful it can actually be to let go, to trust more fully in the promises of God, in His nature to bear much fruit through a life yielded and entrusted to Him, a life buried with His, than it ever could be to break our bodies in a fight with the dirt, slamming ourselves against the side of a cliff, as we hopelessly try, with our chronically sore hands, to save ourselves.