“ ‘A magic time of year,’ Caddie called it to herself.  She loved both spring and fall.  At the turning of the year things seemed to stir in her that were lost sight of in the commonplace stretches of winter and summer.” – Caddie Woodlawn, Carol Ryrie Brink

Let me begin with this disclaimer:  I love every season.  The still silver of winter’s hush, the shy budding of chartreuse spring, the riotous symphony of abundantly golden summer—each touches me in a special way, unlike any other.  But if I had to name a favorite, if I could select one season to stretch its days and linger longer than all the others, I would choose autumn.

When autumn arrives, some hidden part of me throbs to life.  This is the time when the fall flowers flaunt their flaming hues—goldenrod and asters and balloon flowers.  Wedges of wild geese slice through the sky, their cries a harbinger of adventure and freedom.  Fields are bronzed with nodding heads of wheat and dotted with rotund hay bales.  In the ethereal mornings, a faint mist hovers over the landscape like an angel, filtering the early light, and the breeze has a sharpness to it, a tang that wakes up all that has become drowsy or deadened during the heat of summer.  

Autumn is a quieter time than summer, a time of reflection and gratitude.  It’s a milestone of fruition, of realizing that all the energy and adrenaline of the growing season has led to the moment of harvest.  Soon the torpor of winter will seize the world, but for now, we rest in an interlude, a time of blessing and abundance and rich riots of beauty.

Some, however, don’t share my love of autumn.  They say autumn is a time of death, a season of decay and darkness and mourning for the bygone glories of summer.  And certainly in autumn the night comes earlier, the earth is starker, and the many summertime birds have soared southward on fast-beating wings.  I admit that when I gaze across the fields of serge stubble, when I hear the croak of a fast-flying crow, then amongst all the beauty, loss hangs heavy in the October air.  

Interestingly enough, many theologians believe that October was the month of mankind’s original sin in the Garden of Eden, when the silk-speaking serpent whispered his nectar-laden lies and Eve plucked that fruit and her teeth crunched into its forbidden skin.  It was October, they say, when she shared the fruit with Adam, when all creation shuddered to its core, when we received the tragic gift of the serpent—a moral compass without a moral backbone, a knowledge of evil and a lust for it.  It was October, they say, when the earth was cursed, when the innocent leaves of the trees twisted into thorns and thistles, when friction clogged the gears of the universe, when the embryos of all that would come—disease, war, famine, tsunamis, hatred, child abuse, murder, misunderstanding, genocide—began to be conceived and grow slowly to their dreadful conclusion.  

As evidence for this theory, Christian anthropologists point to the prevalence of autumnal festivals celebrating the dead.  This season seems to be designated by nearly every culture as a time of focusing on the afterlife and commemorating ancestors—sometimes even descending into necromancy and the occult.  Consider, for example, the Samhain observance of Celtic peoples, the Día de los Muertos in Latin American culture, the Hungry Ghost Festival in China, and our own Halloween observance in the United States.  Biblically-minded anthropologists presume that this autumnal obsession with death and dying has been a part of our shared story since Adam and Eve’s first descendants commemorated the day of their parents’ sin.  Since then, the fragmentation and dispersal of people groups around the world has created a diversity of ways to mark the occasion. However, at the root of each festival, no matter how we attempt to “celebrate,” we are all actually mourning a millennia-old event—the autumn day when we let the golden grain of paradise slip through our fingers.  

So what, then, is autumn? Is it a glorious exhibition of beauty or a ghastly reminder of death?  When we stroll through the autumn woods, are we touring an art gallery or a cemetery?  And in this season of both Halloween and Thanksgiving, is it more appropriate to enumerate God’s blessings or mourn our own inadequacy?  In the tension between delight and death, to which side do we lean?

I’ve wrestled with this question a few times, and I’ve come to the conclusion that, as with so many things in this life, approaching this season properly doesn’t mean resolving this tension but embracing it.  Yes, autumn involves great loss—possibly the greatest loss of all history.  Yet, at the same time, the message this season offers is not one of bitter regret but of resounding hope.  And this paradox is symbolized by one of the most universal and widely acclaimed hallmarks of this season—the beautiful leaves.

To understand this symbolism, it’s necessary to first investigate the scientific process behind the annual loss of leaves.  While some trees are “evergreen,” retaining their foliage year-round, many others are “deciduous” trees that sprout leaves in spring and shed them in the fall.  In the case of deciduous trees, leaf loss is necessary for a variety of reasons.  First of all, although leaves are the tree’s method of deriving food from sunlight, the weaker winter sun dramatically reduces the effectiveness of the process, making the retention of leaves inefficient.  Also, in its dormant winter state, a tree simply doesn’t require as much food. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the issue of added weight.  Although a single leaf weighs only five grams, the combined weight of all those leaves can produce an extra 1700 pounds on the tree!  In addition, the broad, flat leaf surfaces are perfect for catching sunlight, but in the winter, they’ll catch something far less helpful—snow.  And if a tree’s branches hold too much snow, the tree is at risk for losing large limbs or even toppling entirely.  (You’ll notice that the leaves of evergreen trees are mere scaly needles that won’t collect snow as readily.)

Thus, as summer blurs into fall, the trees begin quietly preparing for the coming cold.  A layer of cells forms across the stem of each leaf; these cells, known as the abscission layer, seal off the leaf from the rest of the tree and block the flow of nutrients.  Ultimately, the abscission layer and the nutrient blockade it imposes will cause the leaf to die and fall from the tree.  However, first the chlorophyll—the bright green pigment in leaves and grass—begins to disintegrate.  And with the green coloring removed, the other pigments in the leaf are free to shine forth in a myriad of breathtaking hues.

This is the scientific process, but these sawdust-dry facts can’t begin to capture the magic of the event. Autumn trees look as if they’ve been delicately hand-painted, every leaf unique in coloration and pattern from every other leaf on every other tree in the whole world.  Almost overnight, dramatic waves of color race across the flanks of the summer’s green hillsides.  I’ve been on autumn walks in forests where the sunlight sifting through the vibrant leaves made the very air glow, as if I were surrounded by stained-glass windows.  And every year, I look forward to the thrill of rushing headlong into an equinoctial wind, with handfuls of falling leaves pelting me like a dizzying whirlwind of God’s confetti.

Yet in the sweetness of such moments, there’s an odd flavor of regret.  After all, despite their beauty, these leaves are dying.  Their dramatic display of color is a signal of changes happening deep within the tree, changes that will ultimately lead to the stillness of winter and the barrenness of the forest.  Yet even in their death—marking the end of a yearly epoch—there is great beauty that can be found nowhere else.

This dichotomy captured my attention so strongly years ago that I made it the subject of an original poem.

“Lesson from Leaves”

Leaves are fluttering down to earth,

Scarlet and Tangerine.

Dancing down, skipping down,

All people here below have seen.

All people here below have seen,

But who has remembered what this means?

The leaves must drop their hold to soar,

Must let go, and hang no more.

Must let go, and hang no more;

Must cease to live, and die before

Turning hues of red and gold,

The colors so vivid and so bold.

O Leaf! how much we learn from thee;

In thee the Christian’s life we see;

Like thee we must let go in trust

That God will use us as He must.

Like thee we must first die to self—

To self, to fame, to friends, to pelf—

Before we can at last shine forth

As beautiful, colorful things of worth.

When I wrote that poem in 2009, the truth I wove into its lines was firmly implanted in my mind. However, after a decade more of living and learning and growing, it’s now embedded in my heart.  As believers, we are no strangers to death, but the thought holds no terror for us.  In fact, we accept, even welcome, the death of our ungodly habits and behaviors as a necessary process.  Consider the apostle Paul, who in recounting the ways he had practiced self-discipline and relinquished his own will for the sake of the gospel, boldly stated, “I die daily”  (1 Corinthians 15:31 KJV).

To the world, this sounds off-putting.  Who wants to follow a religion of dying?  Even some Christians squirm at this concept.  We’d rather showcase the more photogenic tenets of our faith, like the eternal home God has prepared for us, or the sweetness found in His love, or the triumph of Christ’s Resurrection.  But we must never forget that the keystone of Christianity is found in the day when God bowed His back to a cruel whip and staggered beneath the weight of a rough-sawn cross, when He stretched out His nail-torn arms and spilled His blood in an act of profound death.  Our life began when our God died.  And each day, He calls to His disciples: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me” (Matthew 16:24 NASB).

But in the same way as the leaves, the people of God need not fear death as an ugly process of defeat and weakness.  Instead, it is an opportunity to shine forth the handiwork of our Lord to the world.  

This, in fact, is one of God’s signature habits—never, ever, allowing darkness to have the last word. Even on that dreadful October day, the day of the serpent and the deceit and the sin and the curse, God was already recycling the bitterness of mankind’s rebellion into an epic display of His grace and might. Just look at Genesis 3:15; tucked into one of the darkest chapters of Scripture, it offers the guarantee of a coming Messiah.

And thus it is with us. In our daily death, in our daily struggle to relentlessly prune away the parts of ourselves that hinder our walk with God, in our constant reiteration of “Not my will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42 ESV), we find a surprising fact.  The death that the Bible speaks of is actually the path to life.

Unless we die to ourselves, we cannot live to God.  And only in living to God can we find a joy and a purpose and a fruitfulness that surpasses our wildest dreams.  Jesus spoke on this theme during His earthly ministry: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24 ESV). Our life is that grain of wheat.  We can foolishly choose to harbor it for ourselves, stowing it away and refusing to allow it to die.  But seeds are not meant to be hoarded.  They’re designed to be sown—because their temporary death produces a harvest of fruit beyond imagination.  

This October, we’re treated to the gift—and it is a gift—of another autumn.  We’ll see the bountiful rotundity of pumpkins, hear the rustle and whisper of the breeze in the shocks of corn, and taste the delicious desserts prepared from harvest bounty.  And of course, we’ll be surrounded by God’s breathtaking palette of color, with every tree dipped in hues beyond compare.  So when you see those brightly colored leaves fluttering and shining in the fading sunlight, smile.  Because yes, autumn is a time of death.  But it’s also one of the most profound reminders that with God, death never has the last word, and from the ashes of our crucified selves are forged the lessons that will last an eternity.

Did you enjoy this post? How have you seen God bring life from death? Let me know in the comments! These striking photos were taken in my beloved Estes Park, Colorado; don’t miss my last post, “Welcoming the Elk,” which described my adventures there. Also, for a wonderful song about how we as Christians find life through death, click here. Lastly, if you’d like to read more about the process of how leaves change color, you can find additional resources here and here.