Autumn's High Festivals

Last Friday - 26th September - I noticed the retail store John Lewis declare, "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas".  My first instinct was to be very critical.  Such an absurd lengthening of the Christmas shopping period is indeed grim.  On the other hand, however, perhaps it is understandable that in late September, with the onset of Autumn, some of the light and joy of the Christmas season is anticipated.  This is so if, in the words of Charles Taylor, we dwell "exclusively within the horizontal flow of secular time", "homogeneous, empty time".  As the days grow shorter with the coming of Autumn, as darker and colder days lie before us, the desire for Something to "lighten our darkness" is entirely natural.

Of course, an extended Christmas shopping season comes at a price, literally and metaphorically.  Emotionally sustaining Christmas anticipation over three months is well nigh impossible.  It is here that we can reflect on how the Church's liturgical year answers a quite natural need to "lighten our darkness" during Autumn, and does so in a way which does not emotionally exhaust us before the arrival of Christmas festivities. 

Michaelmas and All Hallows are the Church's High Festivals of Autumn.  As days darken and grow colder, we celebrate the glorious light of the angelic host and the communion of saints.  The collects for these feasts resound with joyous festivity, celebrating the "wonderful order" of the holy angels and "those unspeakable joys" now experienced by the Saints.  Both are festivals of light - infinitely greater than the lights accompanying Christmas shopping - comforting and reassuring us as we enter into the dark time of the year. As Malcolm Guite's sonnet for All Saints beautifully celebrates, "The dark is bright".

Autumn is also a liminal time of year.  The passing of another year, the growing darkness, the visible changes in the natural world: together these give the season its wistful character, its intimations of mortality.  It is a time, then, for the Church to remind us of the things unseen, of angels and archangels appointed to "succour and defend us on earth", that we are "knit together ... in one communion and fellowship" with the Saints.

Another consequence of seeking to fill secularism's "homogeneous, empty time" during Autumn with extended Christmas shopping is, of course, the disappearance of the rich waiting of Advent.  The Episcopalian Reformed theologian Fleming Rutledge has wonderfully described Michaelmas as "the first turn toward Advent".  In the Prayer Book tradition, the Epistle reading for Michaelmas (Revelation 12:7ff) has a deeply eschatological tone, also reflected in the various provisions for the readings at Mattins and Evensong on the feast. This is similarly the case with All Saints' Day, with another Epistle reading from Revelation, and with office readings also typically significantly featuring Revelation.

Mindful that Advent is a short season, and invariably contends with early Christmas festivities, it is a delightful insight that Michaelmas and All Saints have a role in turning us towards Advent.  Set alongside Stir-up Sunday, it means that at the beginning, in the midst, and at the end of Autumn, we are prepared for the message of Advent.

The Church's Autumn High Festivals, then, offer something much richer than a Christmas shopping season beginning in late September.  They ensure that the distinctive texture of Autumn is not eradicated by homogenised time or by Christmas lights twinkling from September.  They reflect our seasonal experience of growing darkness and sanctify Autumnal intimations of mortality.  And they prepare us for the coming sounds of Veni, veni Emmanuel.

Against the bland, flattened homogenisation of time that has accompanied globalisation and marketization, there are signs that our culture is seeking renewed experiences of place, community, and time.  The Church's Autumn High Festivals can be a part of an answer to such desires, grounded in place and season, and, in opposition to the desiccated homo economicus, celebrating humanity's incorporation in 'the vision glorious'.