Pastor's Corner: The autumn and the fall

The four seasons have been a constant since the earth's inception. Depending upon climate, terrain and many other variables, the specifics may vary drastically.

Our whole culture gears up in the fall for beginnings. Business, family, church, school, all are ready in the autumn to begin new programs and projects. So the fall of the year is perhaps the best place to break into the circle of the seasons and begin considering specific things we can do to care for creation.

But autumn is also a kind of end. Children may be more aware of this: however much they might look forward to new things, they know that the endless days of summer are over. Autumn is the time of harvest. We live close to fields and some close to orchards to experience that harvest directly, but even in the heart of the city we are aware of at least one inconvenient harvest fact: in eating fruit or vegetable we throw away a great deal. Some of this is inevitable: fruits have inedible cores, carrots and potatoes have skins, lettuce has wilted leaves, and nuts have shells.

About 11 percent of residential garbage is made up of edible items. So, although harvest brings a stream of good things into our stores, kitchens, and stomachs, it is offset by a stream of waste flowing back into creation.

This immediate waste from (and of) our food is only a tiny part of the stream. When we add to it the fuel and fertilizer needed to grow crops; the energy needed to harvest, process, and transport them; the glass, plastic, metal, and paper with which we package and promote them, it becomes obvious that harvest, which is the source of our food, is the end of great many other things. But when we think about throwing things away, it becomes obvious how our language has trapped us. For there is no "away" is a basic ecology.

So in the fall of the year, as we enjoy creation's harvest and begin our own individual projects, it is good to think about two other kinds of "fall." One is the created autumn in which fruit ripens, gardens wither, and the seeds fall into the ground and die. The celebration of Thanksgiving is a good way to recall those created gifts that are both an end and a beginning. But we need to remember as well, in repentance, a second kind of fall: the fall which we enact daily in our selfishness, which makes us treat creation as though it were only our tool or toy, good only for our convenience.

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Pastor Michael O'Hearn

Hi-Line Lutheran Churches