The trees, having grown in wisdom, stature, and favor over the course of the summer, begin to warm from green to marigold orange on the tips of their branches. Then the professors email me with what they want read before the first day of classes. This year it is Julian of Norwich.
You may have heard of or read Julian’s prayerful request to share in the dying labors of the crucified Christ. After her mystical experience she writes first a brief account of the visions and then years later a much longer, more intricate version. My professor tells me to read her oeuvre in its original Middle English and so I do. Julian handles gore better than I; my eyes skim over the jaundiced skin and sunken eyes, the dried blood and gasps for breath. She suffers no such qualms and recounts Christ’s pain in intimate, biological detail.
There’s a rhythm to reading a language that is half-yours. Your mind adjusts to the vocabulary and you learn to dance between the text and the annotations to confirm your suspicions about what a particular phrase means. It is meditative work. You surface with deep inhales like rousing from sleep. For days, I read Julian on planes, in my bed, or at the kitchen table while cookies bake. At the seventeenth chapter of her longer text a sentence catches me. Julian is describing the slow failure of Christ’s physical body centered around his words: “I thirst.” His body dehydrates; the color changes and becomes “a tawny coloure, like a drye bord whan it is aged.” As he dies, Jesus’ body becomes indistinguishable from the tree on which he hangs. He looks wooden, twining limbs stretched long and dark skin furrowed like bark. She furthers the image by describing his pain at the wind rattling his body which has been hung up to dry. I hear the brittle shiver of dead leaves weathering a November draft. God’s body has become a corn husk doll, tucked in a tomb for winter.
Trees are resurrection experts and these days they are rehearsing death. The dropping of leaves–the abscission process–begins when the air cools and the trees reduce their production of the hormone auxin. Their leaves carmelize in the setting sun of the calendar year and we revel in their color. The bond between leaf and branch tenderly fails, and the tree goes to sleep for winter.
In the spring they will rouse and produce new leaves, but death must not be rushed. The cycle of the seasons toils unhurriedly.
I wonder what it means to autumn well. We speak in decadent, lackadaisical tones of “summering by the sea”, or we circle the wagons and hunker together over firelight for winter. In some ways, fall is the season we have best romanticized, in cable knit sweaters and pumpkin spice. We know autumn as a beautiful death. However, I think the spirituality of the season still has lessons left to teach, to be carried over into other autumns.
The autumn of Christ’s Passion finds us on Good Friday and invites us to lean into grieving overcast skies and the brilliant blood-red of loving death. Too easily we quicken the Good Friday with placations of spring coming on Sunday. Good Friday’s autumn and Holy Saturday’s winter are skipped entirely. Hope is confused with hurry. I skim Julian’s depictions of Jesus’ shredded body waiting impatiently for her famous words, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” There must be a constant moral to the story, an immediate happy ending. Grief is unfathomable until it is productive, until there is something better to be made from it.
But there is a difference between spending all of autumn discussing spring, and enjoying autumn in its fullness with full trust that the seasons remain held like a hazelnut in the palm of a hand. There must be hope without denial, because hope is by nature devoid of instant gratification. Easter is not threatened when we end Good Friday in silence. That silence houses intimacy, a God who shares in our horror. Julian confesses that experiencing and meditating on the suffering of Christ brought her only ever further into his loving gaze as he took on death’s yoke. Deep is the darkness of grief, deeper still is the love of the God who sits in that darkness with us. Revealed in Julian’s darkened room is the man who displays the restoring vision of the Creator by turning into creation himself.
This year, when I walk autumn forests draped in fog or shot through by sunlight, Julian will ring in my ears. The trees will dry out, their leaves skittering down sidewalks and crunching back into dust underfoot. The bats and box turtles will close their eyes and find winter tombs. I will search the trees for a Savior hanging. My hands will run up their trunks hunting for a wound in their side, for nail holes hidden in their tawny branches.