Fall is everybody’s favorite time of year, so it seemed, decades ago, to a young person, who thought, who could be so shallow as to choose any other time of year?
Autumn is dramatic, as is life, and moody, as is anyone beset with troubles from the earliest age.
Summer is gone with its wearisome abundance of heat, light, and cheer, and the monotony of Winter recommends itself but little. Spring has its irrepressible, unquenchable vigor, but Autumn will come, with the wisdom of another year of disappointments, with the empathy cold, dark, rain, and wind have for a weary soul.
As a teenager, a then-obscure singing group released their second album and called it “October,” lending further cachet to this month.
By a certain age, a well-rounded person might have at some point preferred each season as his favorite.
Winter, when everything begins. Spring, joy and innocence. Summer, long days outside with little ones. Fall, with its majestic tumult of the psyche.
Winter, with Christmas, and New Year’s. Spring, with St. Patrick’s Day, and Easter. Summer, with July 4th and Labor Day. Autumn– Halloween!
Jesus spent a lot of time exorcising demons. It’s a full-time job, combating the forces of darkness within us, the selfish, anti-social, self-destructive anger within us, always afraid that someday the fuse that is forever being lit won’t be extinguished in time, and havoc will ensue.
Within ourselves, a lot of traffic goes back and forth between our good sides and our bad sides, the subconscious and the conscious. Intuitively, it’s easy to believe that we are surrounded by invisible legions of spirits who have gone before us, who watch over us, who threaten us, who intervene for us, who rejoice when we fall. We haven’t slit our wrists yet, and that’s a relief, but maybe someday we’ll be pushed too far, and we will, and that’s genuinely scary. That’s the dynamic of the holiday, and the season.
Happy Halloween!