I get all excited when autumn starts and I'm not really sure why. I can be spotted (indeed was, this week) collecting conkers on the side of the road, running my thumb over their highly polished brown skins, massaging off the soft white vernix, wondering how long till they'll decay, taking photos of them in sunshine, still harbouring anger at the banning of conker fights in schools, circa 2002.
Some people think that seasons correspond to personalities; you can be a summer person, or an autumn person, etc., and there's a whole colour/fashion/make up course (Colour Me Beautiful) that's linked to this conviction (explored in a previous post http://parttimepriest.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/lent-for-extroverts-16-colour-me.html).
Maybe it's true that I'm an autumn person, but apart from having light brown-ish hair (with imagined copper highlights) and brown eyes, are there also character traits that accompany being 'an autumn person'?
I have applied some pop psychology to myself and reflected upon three reasons I might feel drawn to autumn above other seasons. If you feel the same, maybe you're an autumn person too, with your own fascinating reasons for being autumn-y. In which case, don't wear navy or scarlet. They're NOT autumn colours, unsurprisingly.
Why do I feel drawn to autumn?
1. School days.
Maybe the mention of school days makes you think of summer, those lazy hazy days in the playground, sitting under a tree if you were lucky, doing 'he loves me, he loves me not' with a daisy head (yes, this is what girls do). Or if they were bleak, your school days may remind you of winter. Spring brings to mind revision, so we instantly forget that season, and are left, therefore, with autumn.
In addition, if, like me, you became a primary school teacher, or had kids who were good at singing, you could well be drawn to autumn simply because of this one fact: that all time best kids assembly song, 'Autumn Days', with the smash lyrics:
'Autumn days when the grass is jewelled
and the silk inside a chestnut shell,
Jet planes meeting in the air to be re-fuelled (is that even possible, I'm now wondering)
All these things I love so well
Oh, I mustn't forget, no I mustn't forget
To say a great big thank you, I mustn't forget.'
2. Conkers.
A memorable three years of my school life consisted of walking up an extraordinarily steep hill on both sides of which grew horse chestnut trees. My school memories are all bound up with those trees and their autumn fruit, stooping down to collect them, planning fights with my brother, feeling like they were so much treasure, a veritable free windfall of burnt umber.
About aged ten, I went conker hunting with my grandfather in suburban north London. We took a bag, walked round the municipal golf course and loaded ourselves up with a modest but well earned brown shiny cache. One street from home, a woman came out of a house with a huge bag, on the way to the dustbin. The bag was full of conkers. Seeing our own, much smaller haul, she offered the bag to us and we took it, hesitatingly. It seemed to me, who had been brought up with a Protestant work ethic, something of a cheat, a benevolent bounty we had not deserved, which spoke of the mysterious, even risque. But we took it anyway.
3. Something ending, something beginning.
Here we get more metaphysical, but feeling drawn to autumn has to do with its being the season than most resonates with our humanity. Summer is over, stuff is going to die, and yet I find I'm often more relaxed about it than sad. One may as well be realistic. Summer is heralded by protracted ends of term, outdoor social events - in wealthy Thames valley, anyway - ever more splendid, and/or exhausting, depending on how you look at them; holidays away - more planning, travelling, angst about how to get sun, and for me, dreaded airplanes; ill fitting skimpy clothes and women's figures. I greet all this with less enthusiasm than the autumn back to school routine, children growing up into new classes, trees relaxing into brown and gold, a nip in the air.
Because after something is ending, something new can begin. Out of all the seasons, autumn is the most like actual life: not always summery and happy, but it's not all bleak either. Such a life is viewed with what Richard Rohr calls 'a bright sadness' (Falling Upward, p. 117).
And so on this National Poetry Day, I concur with Wordsworth's admission to being:
'a melancholy (...) that lov'd
A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds,
The twilight more than dawn, Autumn than Spring' (The Prelude, p. 90).
School days, conkers, and endings/beginnings. Three reasons to wish you a happy autumn.
When it comes to preaching, is it sermons from The Lectionary or discreet Themes that get your vote?
For many years a typical Sunday at church for me would involve listening to someone preach through either a theme or else a large chunk of a whole book of the bible. In the kinds of churches I attended, you'd be likely to receive a list of themes in advance, in the form of an attractive coloured leaflet, so keen people (yes, I confess I was one) could look up the preacher's theme that week. When it came to whole books (six week on Ephesians - hooray!) I don't know how the vicar decided which to choose, but, being a gently charismatic sort of Christian, I simply assumed they listened to the Holy Spirit on that one. Such innocent days...
Knowing in advance what was being covered gave you a sense of something systematic and was very stimulating. Need five weeks on being a Christian at work? No problem. Not read Habakkuk for while? Never fear, the preacher had it covered. Exodus would take longer, granted, but you get my drift.
I thought this was what happened in all churches till I started going to village church. At village church, I experienced a sense of fogginess and losing the thread, as week by week it wasn't immediately obvious why we were having, say, something from Matthew one month followed by something from somewhere else the next, with no discernible pattern. I was no doubt unobservant, unlucky or just very dense, but it didn't occur to me till I was training for going into the church myself, that there was a thing called a Lectionary and people simply followed the set reading each week and after three years, they would theoretically have heard the preacher steam through the whole bible. What a great plan!
And there was more. I remember the first time someone turned to me in the theological college chapel to ask, nonchalantly, 'Which year are we on?' I looked completely baffled, thinking what planet is she on, clearly we're still in 2007. She eventually explained that the Lectionary readings rotate every three years: Years A, B and C. I was grateful for the enlightenment. There was clearly more to the C of E than first met the eye.
For the record, I will also always be extremely grateful to the person who patiently explained to me what a Canticle was for, and why it was that in The Daily Office, different bits of the bible were called, confusingly, different names, viz. Psalms, Readings, Canticles and The Gospel, though to me, they were all just 'a bible reading'.
The first time I had to prepare worship for other ordinands, just following the Lectionary, and not around a theme, I confess I was completely at sea. It seemed so prosaic, so unimaginative, so non-creative.
I got used to it.
So is it Themes or the Lectionary? Which is best? There's a possible tension between different churchmanship here. Are you more evangelical (themes) than Anglican (set readings)? Or are you the other way round? Honestly, I cannot rightly say any more.
Since I've now preached twice through the entirety of Years A, B and C, I'm quite at ease with the Lectionary. In fact I have umpteen sets of sermons filed on my laptop under A, B and C. And they can even, in some circumstances (say it in hushed tones) be re-used. The Lectionary also has the wonderful advantage of relieving the pressure to invent the wheel every Sunday, which thinking up themes threatens. Even the most creative amongst us get tired. And preaching from set readings is a good discipline.
Another upside of the 'Common Lectionary' is the sense of solidarity with other preachers all over the country, even world, being formed around the same reading week by week, especially if you're in the Early Morning Sermon Club on Twitter, which is an attractive, yet for me, very scary prospect. Not being a morning person, this isn't really an option, but I like the idea of those clerics that are on Twitter at 6.30am on a Sunday, hurriedly writing their last minute sermons 'together'. It must be nice and communal.
I suppose the downside of the Lectionary is that unless your parishioners go out and buy one themselves, or go online and work it out, people may well be sitting there on a Sunday morning quite oblivious to where we're at each week, preaching-wise. And as a feature of multi-parish rural ministry is multiple services in different buildings, your continuity can get upset anyway, which makes remembering where we are in the preaching pattern tricky. In point of fact, sometimes we can't even remember which building we're in, let alone which book of the bible we're in.
Tension between the Lectionary and discreet themes was highlighted in this week's Church Times column. The writer complained about the profusion of themed Sundays the church seems to be bombarded with - Sea Sunday, Education Sunday, Racial Justice Sunday, Homeless Sunday - to name a few. Glossy leaflets come through clerics' doors, or we get emails urging us to engage with whatever Sunday is coming up, and I have some sympathy with her frustration, up to a point.
She lamented the 'agendas of a themed Sunday': 'they are a chance to put ourselves on the side of the nice and the good, to think well of ourselves by what has become known as virtue signalling'. A bit harsh? For although it might take more effort to depart from your usual reading, what themed Sundays say to me is, the Church has something to say on important topics that people on the fringe of the church also value. Themes like race, education and homelessness are bridges across which the less churched and the unchurched might walk. In all the writer's critique, there was no mention of the missiological possibilities of a themed Sunday. Instead the implication was that they were gimmicks.
Mothering Sunday and Remembrance are themed Sundays and, though amongst the hardest in the Church Year to pull off well, are often those which are the most 'permeable', attendance-wise. You can invite someone to Mothering Sunday and it might just connect with them. You see people at Remembrance who might not otherwise come, because it's a theme we all understand. So from the point of view of mission, aren't themes advantageous?
The writer reserved special ire for 'new seasons'. Apparently there's such a thing as Creation Season now, something to do with the present Pope. Seeing as the threat of ecological armageddon is real these days, it would seem a good idea...
But there was a small concession in the aforementioned 'liturgical rant' (her words): Kingdom Season was at least welcomed as an 'opportunity to wear the under-used red vestments'.
I admit, I felt mildly depressed. I had to ask myself, generally speaking, is my priestly heart beating that little bit faster at the thought of connecting, through a shared theme, with people outside the church?
Yes.
I had to ask myself, generally speaking, is my heart beating that little bit faster at the thought of wearing liturgical red?
No.
It's probably just me, but that's the truth. Maybe I'm not so Anglican after all...
I went to have my 'colours' done once and discovered I was 'Autumn'. Apparently I should wear 'mosses', 'heathers', 'teal' and various shades of brown. Nothing stark; it's bad for my skin tone. I was a bit freaked by the pop psychology which accompanied my colour assessment: 'Autumn' is the season of change - Autumn people often have a life change in their mid thirties to forty... I was considering vocation to the church at the time so this exactly fitted...spooky. What they didn't realise was that as an 'Autumn' person heading towards Anglican Ordination, trying to avoid wearing both black AND white was going to be a problem.
For a while I carried around a little 'colours' card in my pocket to prevent me buying something in scarlet or navy which would take me down a non-psychologically appropriate fashion dead end, but whether it was auto -suggestion or not, from that time on, I never could get the hang of bold colours. Give me a sludgy brown/green any day, or a faded purplish grey. Or anything brown/aubergine/vaguely maroon. Maybe it was just middle age, but I wanted everything to be in-between-y. And Autumn-y.
It will come as a shock to life long Anglicans, but I managed to reach the age of 40 before realising that the C of E employed a kind of 'Colour me Beautiful' approach to the liturgical seasons (without the pop psychology). It was only when I was let loose in the Church vestry to show off the vestments to some local primary school kids that I pieced together the whole 'purple, white, red, green' thing. And they match the altar frontals, see? Clever!!!
But liturgical colours are not very autumn-y - no intermediate browns; no greys or 'aubergine', no 'mustard'. It's just straightforward penitential purple (Lent and Advent); white or gold for celebrations - Christmas, Easter Day; red for the blood of the martyrs and for Pentecost (and Palm Sunday, just to catch you out) and green for growing, or 'Ordinary Time', stretching out across the summer and into harvest.
Does this make the church (or God) uncompromising? It is certainly true that you cannot be an 'in between' martyr - if you are going to spill blood, it had better be properly red. Similarly there's nothing at all half hearted about the fire of the Spirit. Then it's white for purity - holiness cannot be intermediate. Perhaps we're permitted a bit of variation in liturgical green or purple....
Then I came across this chart (right). In terms of liturgical definition and reserving the right to give those bold colours a generous dash of poetic license (lift them above the mere 'red, green, purple') there are clearly those in the church who want to have their cake and eat it. Would anyone like to own up?
