Tuesday, September 05, 2006


The Implications of Autumn
The Best Is Yet To Come

For me, it is not so much the here & now that impress. It is not the grandeous awe of the moment, but the intangible promise of the next. It is not this life, but one not yet known, which I yearn.
Pilgrims feel this way.
Strangers feel this way.
Pilgrims & strangers of the world have another world to which they go, & it is this world which they yearn.

Whitman once said:
"O we can wait no longer,
We too take ship O soul
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas.
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail."



C.S. Lewis once wrote:
"All joy (as distinct from mere pleasure, still more amusement) emphasises our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings."

The desire for this just-beyond has been expressed from the furthest regions of heathanism to the deepest Christianity, but its only answer lies in the promise of Salvation. The desire itself is one of intense longing...
Lewis says "This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire...The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given - nay, cannot even be imagined as given - in our present mode of subjective and spatio-temporal experience."

Autumn, I find, expresses in the best manner, this desire for what I know lies just beyond what I can humanly touch. It is not the full burst of Spring, which is new life, though we all experience this spring in our spiritual selves if we have met with new life through God.

It is not the pregnant weight of Summer; the representation of a mature self...life at its zenith, with full power, though we all experience this as we grow.

Autumn is not Winter; exhausted and spent, weary of its toils, & finished at long last, although we will experience Winter as we age, and come to an end on this earth.

Autumn is the sigh in the breath of the World. It is the steadfast prayer that looks toward the Dawn with keen anticipation of the Light.
Autumn is the Christian Joy in the ressurection: a promise that things here will grow older, and though many hearts may be in the Winter of their life, we may look forward to something beyond.
& Autumn is the longing that awakes within us the knowledge that we were meant for something more...as Lewis put it,
"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

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