Autumn

Now for the harvest! All is rich and full;
The swelling grape is ripe upon the vine,
So may his blessing sanctify your fall,
And old love be remembered in new wine.
Now may your ears be open to his call,
You stand on holy ground, look up and see:
His love burns red and gold in every tree.
– Autumn III, Benediction by Malcolm Guite

There comes a point, everyone knows it, when the wind blows the right way, at the right temperature, making the right sound, through the right leaves- the wind-whipped banner and rhythmic march of the vanguard of Autumn to come. I cannot help it, I have been shamelessly, embarrassingly, transparently and effusively in love with Autumn for all of my life- and I greet its entry into the year like a liberator. As the years pass and I begin to look a little more like the autumn than summer (until one day I am winter), I feel it more profoundly. 

The interplay of light and colour, sound and smell, has that kind of earthy hue of depth and reflection. Back in the days when I had the time and focus to write music, it was my most creative period. These days I save my creativity, such that it is, for homilies and pastoral encounters, the formation of clergy, and ways to avoid unnecessary paperwork. But I still hear the music in my head and sometimes in the swirl of the leaves, even if my fingers no longer map it out on frets or keys. 

Gnosticism spent millennia being framed by its opponents as being against the material world, against nature, and ordinary life – with the spiritual being framed as superior, and the material framed as ignorant at best, evil at worst. To be sure, there are still those that take this view, because it is an easy rebellion to be against everything (for there is no everything more ready to hand than the world), rather than for something. 

This is not the way I take it, rather, I see one of the fundamental themes of Gnosticism being that of anti-imposition, rather than anti-world. This is illustrated in that example for which I am fond, of two greek words for time. Chronos and Kairos. 

Chronos is the sense of time that we impose upon life and upon eternity (and infinity is not eternity, but rather eternity is that which is outside or beyond time entirely). Chronos is your parking meter expiring, bankers hours, and the 40 hour work week.

Kairos, however, is the time it takes for a tree to grow, the seasons to change, a baby to be born, fruit to ripen, it is Divine time, the right time, the appointed time. 

As living beings, we are not separate, apart from or other than nature, and the encounter with natural world, be it as majestic as a hike in the wilderness, or as ‘simple’ as the change of season, can help us shift us our focus and our frame from Chronos to Kairos, away from at best or at least mindful of, the artificial impositions we have placed on the world around us – whether in nature, community, or in our one-to-one relationships. You need not abolish them but you do need to know where they are. 

This shift is part and parcel with the nature of Gnosis, the experience of things as they are, not as we wish them to be or wish them not to be, because it is only with that experience in hand, that we can make them what they might be – for you cannot get to where you are going unless you start where you’re at. Space and time are not separate, and shifting from Chronos to Kairos, however brief, doesn’t just enter into sacred time, it enters into sacred space.

May the red and gold banner of Autumn unfurl in the kairos and sanctuary of your heart. 

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+ Shaun Mar Iohannes