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Dear Parish Faithful,
In response to yesterday's Meditation on "The Glory of Autumn," Spencer Settles responded with his own wonderful reflection which captures the tension between the "very good" of creation (Gen. 1:31) and the fallenness of this very same creation wherein fear and death are daily realities. We probably fluctuate between these two poles in our own minds and hearts. We cannot pretend that our faith is not challenged on a daily basis!
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Thank you for this wonderful reflection, Father! I too have always loved Fall and often experience the same sense of God’s exorbitant blessings when looking at the skies and trees and feeling the cool breeze of an Autumn afternoon. I appreciated you sharing memories from your childhood. Especially striking was the juxtaposition of such fond familial and communal reminiscences with those of the looming terror of war (especially nuclear war, the specter of which has never truly left us, though it has perhaps never again risen to the level endured by your generation).
It’s appropriate now as we ourselves enter into Fall with our attention suspended uncomfortably between the beauty around us and the strife in our own nation and abroad. It’s a reminder that, beneath all the good that remains visible in God’s creation, there is yet that persistent whiff of corruption, death, and evil. Or perhaps we should look at it the other way around: that overriding the discordant tones of human sin that echo on, we can still hear the glorious reverberations of the original strains which serve as the promise of the inevitable resolution! Thanks again for spurring such thoughts!
In Christ,
Spencer
