Autumn is a funny sort of season in my fair city: it's more often a sequence of unpredictable, bipolar shifts between summer and winter, rather than an intermediate stage. Each extreme takes turns, until winter begins to be more dominant and eventually takes over altogether until some time between September and November (it changes each year). But, unpredictable though autumn tends to be, it's probably the most glorious time that Melbourne has to offer. The trees that line my street are, on cue, letting their half-green, half-golden leaves drop to the ground, and there are few sights more cosy and Melburnian than a street filled with fallen leaves. So I suppose it's the kind of time when, cliched though it is, you'll want to be listening to this jazz standard, performed here for your benefit by Stan Getz:
But when I strolled down my street early this afternoon, it occurred to me that autumn leaves, beautiful as they are, have actually died. Limited as my French may be, it's good enough to know that the original title of "Autumn Leaves", "Les Feuilles Mortes", means "The Dead Leaves". So, when I admire their beauty, I am essentially admiring the beauty of...well...death.
Now, I suppose we can take a poetic approach to the whole thing and say, as e.e. cummings said of a sunset, that if things have to die, they might as well do it beautifully. But isn't this attitude symptomatic of our death-ridden world, rather than necessarily true? We accept death as a reality, so we figure we should be stoic about the whole thing. But do we have to? Not many ages or cultures before us have felt the need to accept death. Chinese emperors drank mercury to avoid it. Alchemists devoted their lives to thwarting it. Death is horrible, and there's not much use pretending it isn't. No-one, when they die, looks like a falling autumnal leaf. In fact, if we're going to look at it that way, a much better musical description of the whole phenomenon might be the angsty - but strangely hopeful - reinterpretation by emo band Thursday, "Autumn Leaves Revisited".
In some traditions, death is seen as the beginning of something new, a necessary stage, a means to an end. This, to me, seems a much better way to think about it, and that is actually how the Christian faith views death - or is at least supposed to view it, though how we truly understand the whole process varies dramatically across the Christian church; and between professed beliefs and lived ones often, sadly, exists a vast chasm.
This is why, on searching the web for various things on returning home - versions of "Autumn Leaves" to link here, podcasts I might enjoy listening to over lunch - I was pleased to find this video of Bishop Tom Wright, a man who I always appreciate even when I don't agree with him.
The video is, naturally, very brief and very simplistic in how it represents what is, I'm sure a much more complex theory than we're getting here. There is, for instance, little or no reference made to actual Bible passages, something that I am sure Bishop Wright gives in his book, "Surprised By Hope", which I must read one day. But it is not an idea that is unfamiliar to me, nor is it quite as revolutionary as the presenter would have us think. That said, it is an idea that few Christians, I think, daily consider or apply in our lives: that God is most of all concerned with the renewal of this world rather than yanking us all out and taking us to heaven. The real life, he suggests, that we are heading for is the restoration of our world to what it should be.
Tom Wright calls it "life after life after death". I call it "autumn leaves revived", because, when I think about a new creation (an idea that baffles me as much as it's baffled almost anyone else in human history), it occurs to me that, beautiful as I find autumn leaves, when the new creation comes we'll be amazed to find that even they seem ugly compared to the beauty of the new leaves that replace them.
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