Fall

 

In early elementary school we learned that here in Southwestern PA we have four distinct seasons.  It was a good thing. We are fortunate. I agree and when asked the question, "What's you favorite season?"  I answer by saying I like and enjoy all four seasons, yet, have always been a major fan of fall.

It's the season of gathering in, as a kid I helped my mother to bring the plants inside to the basement set-up of growth lights.

It's the season of securing and hunkering down, it was fall when my father put up the storm windows that he fashioned from wood and heavy plastic.

As we prepare for the slow descent into winter, we also keep hope; I remember my parents planting the flower bulbs for bloom time in spring.

Fall is the World Series. This has always been my favorite sports event and when played outdoors on a grass field it's even better!  

Autumn is when the temperature turns to see-your-breath-cold.  Anyone else stand outside waiting for the bus and "smoke" a candy cigarette or a pretzel rod stogie???

Fall is donning sweaters and sweatshirts (the bigger the better), turtlenecks and tossel-caps.

This is the season of home and hearth and drawing in, a time for books and soup, fires, all things apples and recently that blasted pumpkin spice everything!

Happy Fall!  Enjoy all the gifts and lessons of the season!     

 

Time stopper

 

September 10, 2001. 

It was a Monday. For me, the day after that year's Rally Day, the "official" kick-off of the autumn's education program and the congregation's fall schedule.

On my "To-Do List" for Monday, September 10, 2001 was:

• Review the Rally Day ---- what succeeded and what was great on paper yet not so grand in real delivery.
• Read the lectionary texts for the upcoming Sunday and begin to percolate and see what bubbles up in preparation for writing my sermon.
• Call the young couple to remind them of our meeting that week to finalize plans for their daughter's baptism that coming Sunday.
• Prepare the agenda for the next day's meeting of the Methodist Federation for Social Action (MFSA).
• Finalize my gifts plan for my niece's fast approaching third birthday.

Not on my list and I dare say yours either was to prepare for the world to change. 

On this 20th Anniversary of September 11th, I've been more reflective. I watched Spike Lee's short documentary and was newly horrified by the images. I listened to a great podcst, SACRED GROUND, and cannot get out of my thoughts a mother whose 19-year old daughter was on board Flight 93 and her saying, "I realized this year that my daughter has now been dead longer than she's been alive."  

Each of us alive during that time has stories and reflections.  Where were you? What did you do? What do you remember?  It was a complete stop to hear someone respond by saying, "I was in First Grade and we watched movies all day. It wasn't until I got home that I learned what had happened." 

I'm a quote person and one of my favorites is "God made humans because God loves stories."  That love of stories may be the most significant God-print we carry. Remember your stories of that day. Listen and learn from another's tales. Reflect upon how that day was one that collectively the world stuck-a-pin in it and know how we were before and how we are since that day.

One of my mother's favorite sayings was, "Life goes on."  Indeed it does. Make the most of the moments given....there always seems to be a before and an after;

Bread on the water

Be it a new day, a new month, a new season, a New Year --- I'm all for it!  I like the idea of a clean page, a new beginning!

With yesterday being Rosh Hashannah, Jewish New Year, I made it a point to claim the newness and to do my personal participation in the ritual of Tashlikh.  Meaning to "cast away," the ritual invovles tossing bread upon the waters as a symbolic action of casting away one's sins with the intention to return to one's true self.

I gatherd my bread, tore it into pieces, placed it in a bag and headed to a bridge over a creek in a nearby park.  With each piece of bread tossed, I named the sin and threw the bread into the water.  It was quite freeing to toss and then watch the bits of bread land in the water and be carried downstream.

Alas, one piece of bread landed on a rock.  The water flow was not swift nor high enough to move it. When I finished my bread-toss-confession and release, that piece of bread was still on the rock.

Hmmmmm....what did that mean and what to do? 

I hoped a duck would swim by and eat the piece of bread and in doing kind of become a "scape duck" upon whose feathers the sin and blame was placed. No such luck there and it's also shaky theology.  I took it as a nudge that I still have a lot of work to do in moving forward and freed from that particular misgiving.  

I'm a work in progress and every day am thankful for grace.