Autumnal Longing

"The ancient intuition is that autumnal longing does not go unrequited."

--James Carroll

Human life is a snap of the fingers, a flash of green-into-gold, a handful of rotations around the earth, even fewer rotations around the sun. And that's it.

But human life is equally the refusal to be reduced to a mere cycle of nature. As the leaves turn to humus, human beings insist on something more. The ancient intuition is that autumnal longing does not go unrequited.

Without knowing it, I once shared an eventful evening with James Carroll, which he describes in his memoir An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us. It was 1969, the height of the Vietnam War. At the time I was a freshman at Boston University, and Carroll was a Catholic chaplain at the Newman Center there. He was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. A demonstration was being held to protest the visit of a military recruiter to the BU placement office, and as usual Carroll was in the middle of it.

A not completely innocent bystander, I had crossed over Commonwealth Avenue from my dorm at number 700 with a friend to see what was going on. Before we could get to Bay State Road, the site of the protest, the BU President had called in the Boston Tactical Police Unit, which arrived on the scene from seemingly every direction with nightsticks swinging. Suddenly we found ourselves trapped on the wrong side of the subway tracks running up the middle of Commonwealth Ave, with apparently nowhere to go to escape.

Fortunately, my friend, a Navy veteran with whom I enjoyed sharing poetry, was a quick thinker. He led me to safety up and over the fence separating the subway tracks.

I've looked at that eight foot chain link fence many times in after-years and wondered how I was ever able to climb over it, but I guess fear is a pretty good stimulant because I don't remember it being a terribly difficult chore at the time.

Those were difficult and divisive years, years which I have no desire to revisit or romanticize. In some ways, though, I feel that we have entered on a similar time. The culture wars are once again raging. The Anglican Communion is wrought over the election of a gay Bishop in nearby New Hampshire. The issue of gay marriage is also causing an uproar in conservative Christendom. The War in Iraq shows signs of quagmire, and seems to have done little to assist in ending the so-called "War on Terrorism" or understanding Islamic discontent. Some generous Americans are even suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for all the damage we inflicted upon them, which will produce what, even more good will towards us?

Many in power today see the world as black or white, good or evil, with little shading or nuance. Foreign Intelligence seems anything but. Few make the connection between the incredible wealth and power of the United States, and the relative poverty and weakness of much of the rest of the world, as a motivation for terrorism. Christian chauvinism confronts Islamic fundamentalism without even realizing how similar they are to one another.

Perhaps the world has always been thus. We've been able to co-exist, just barely, because of the geographical barriers which separated us. But now all of that is changing. Now there are too many of us, and we are bumping up against each other all over the place. It's inevitable that others, less fortunate than we, are going to want what we have, and understandable also that they wish to maintain their own cultural identity in the face of rampant globalization. In their relative weakness, they have discovered a tool with which they can hurt us, with which they can get our attention, the tool of terrorism. The tool does not need to work well, because in our fearful efforts to counter it we are in far more danger of destroying ourselves from within that they are of destroying us from without.

These are opinions, of course. You may or may not share them. Personally, I am more fearful about our own ignorance and provincialism than I am of any Islamic terrorists. I am dumbfounded by the vitriol thrown at the soon-to-be Bishop Robinson and glad that I belong to a religion that welcomes the talents of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters as ministers and members. I believe in offering gay and lesbian families the same rights that are given to heterosexual couples. (As if, as some have pointed out, gays and lesbians can do any more harm to the "institution" of marriage than we heterosexuals already have.)

I was pleased when the Boston Globe in a July editorial came out in favor of Gay Marriage [7/8/03], and I am appalled by those in Massachusetts, including Roman Catholic Archbishop Sean O'Malley, who are calling for a Massachusetts Constitutional Amendment to prevent it. All of the so-called "family values" advocates remind me of Thoreau's quip that if he saw someone coming after him with the intention of doing him some good, he would turn and run in the other direction just as fast as he could.

I don't want their "good." I simply want my gay and lesbian friends and loved ones to have the same legal rights that I do. Why is it that those who claim the politics of least government interference in our lives are the ones most interested in what goes on behind our closed doors?

What has become of the ethic of live and let live? Where do conservative Christians, who most of the time disdain the Old Testament for its "Jewishness," get off on making its few, ambiguous anti-homosexual references a platform for their homophobia, when their Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in the New Testament, made absolutely no reference whatsoever to homosexuality? None? Don't they have anything better to do with their seemingly inexhaustible energy for disapproval?

Perhaps it is these waning days of autumn that bring these melancholy thoughts into prominence for me. I don't like to see the leaves turn and I don't like to see the days get short. They remind me. "How many leaves must fall from the trees for you to get the message?" asks James Carroll.

Human life is a snap of the fingers, a flash of green-into-gold, a handful of rotations of the earth, even fewer revolutions of the sun. And that's it.

human life is equally the refusal to be reduced to a mere cycle of nature. As the leaves turn to humus, human beings insist on something more. The ancient intuition is that autumnal longing does not go unrequited. . . . What you long for is the fifth season.

As much as that heightens your respect for the lessons of what went before and your tilt toward what is coming, it makes you rather desperate to grasp the here and now.

The present, if you live it, is the absolute and the afterlife both. The fifth season is come.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, born 200 years ago this year, believed that it was so. "Other world!" he said, "there is no other world. Here or nowhere is the whole fact."

I find this claim, this intuition, to be both a comfort and a challenge. It is a comfort imagining that it is eternity now, that all that was, and is, and is to be is contained in this precious, present moment, this minute, this hour, this day. That God is with us and within us.

But it is a challenge, too. The challenge, as Carroll recognizes, is "to grasp the here and now." It is, in traditional parlance, to create the "Kingdom of God" here on earth. What if heaven is now, only veiled by the fog of human ignorance, hatred, and misunderstanding? What would happen if we really tried Jesus' commandment "to love God, and our neighbor as ourselves"?

As the leaves turn from green to red and gold, I find myself contemplating this possibility and this question. It gives me hope that the peace and reconciliation we seek is close, maybe closer than breathing. What if, as Emerson held, we are "part and particle" of God? What would happen if we acted out of the divine spark within each of us?

In my despondent moments, I wonder if the world will ever change. In my autumnal longing, I want desperately for there to be something more. By looking without for some ray of hope, I may be missing the point. Better that I look within. Our job, as Carroll and Emerson suggest, is to live our lives in the here and now. We must not let the cares and sorrows and frustrations of the present moment obscure the fact that we are called to live life, or keep us from acting. We are called to try; perhaps to fail; but in the living we will taste a little bit of what we long for. Hope, "that thing with feathers which perches in the soul, and sings the tune without words, and never stops at all," in Emily Dickinson's immortal phrase, will take wing.

In his great poem "Threnody," written after the death of his five year old son Waldo, Emerson wrote

. . .What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain;
Heart's love will meet thee again.

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners in the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds;
Or like a traveler's fleeing tent,
Or bow above the tempest bent;
Built of tears and sacred flames,
And virtue reaching to its aims;
Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing.

"Nostalgia and longing," wrote Carroll, "are nothing compared to wonder and gratitude before what--and who--there is. And that includes, yes, the turning leaves. The trees tell you what you need to know." Disappointment and loss are real, but they are not the whole picture.

Let our coming together here remind us of that truth, so that we remember to live our days gratefully and with light in spite of all that threatens to darken them. May we live life hopefully and positively, insisting on the "something more," and may we ever work to make the world the heaven on earth that we know it can be, and already is.

Amen.

The Rev. Harold E. Babcock