There is a phrase I have used for years to describe my spiritual life: My home is Christianity, but I have many cottages.
Christianity is home. It is the place from which I understand God and humanity, love and suffering, life and death. Its stories have shaped me, its prayers have carried me, and its sacraments have taught me to look for the holy in ordinary things. Christianity is the language I speak when I am trying to make sense of the mystery of being alive.
But I have cottages, places beyond the boundaries of my own tradition where I occasionally wander and encounter wisdom that helps me notice something I might otherwise have missed. I do not need to move into the cottage to appreciate the view from its windows. Sometimes I return home seeing my own tradition differently because of what I discovered while I was away.
One of those cottages is the Wheel of the Year, the cycle of seasonal festivals observed by many contemporary Pagans. These moments scattered around the turning year invite attention to the changing relationship between light and darkness, growth and dormancy, planting and harvest, life and death. I do not observe the Wheel as my religious calendar; the Christian year remains my home. But I appreciate the way the Wheel asks us to pay attention to the earth beneath our feet and the seasons through which our lives are actually passing.
This week brings us to Mabon.
Here in New England, September announces itself gradually. The days can still be warm, sometimes surprisingly so, but the light has changed. Darkness comes earlier. Gardens that seemed inexhaustible only weeks ago begin giving their last tomatoes and squash. Farm stands fill with apples. Along the coast, the grasses in the salt marshes begin exchanging the bright green of summer for gold. You can feel that the year has turned even before the trees put on their more dramatic display.
September 22 marks the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, the moment in the turning of the year when day and night stand in near balance before we begin the long journey toward winter. In contemporary Pagan traditions, this festival is often called Mabon.
There is a temptation when writing about festivals like Mabon to give them an antiquity they do not actually possess. The autumn equinox is ancient, of course, as are harvest festivals and the human impulse to mark the changing seasons. Mabon himself belongs to old Welsh tradition. But Mabon as the name of a festival celebrating the autumn equinox is modern, emerging within contemporary Paganism during the twentieth century.
That does not make it less meaningful. Religious traditions have always developed practices to help people remember old truths. Sometimes a particular age reveals that we have forgotten something and need a new ritual, feast, or season to call our attention back to it.
Christians do this too.
While our Pagan neighbors are marking Mabon, many Christians are observing another relatively modern addition to the religious calendar: the Season of Creation, sometimes called Creationtide. It begins on September 1 and continues until October 4, the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi. Its modern roots reach to 1989, when Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I invited Christians to observe September 1 as a day of prayer for creation. Over time, that single observance grew into an ecumenical season of prayer, gratitude, repentance, and care for the earth.
Creationtide sounds as though it ought to have been observed by monks in the Middle Ages. It wasn’t. As a defined season, it is younger than I am. Yet the truth it asks Christians to remember is as old as Genesis: creation is good.
That is what interests me about Mabon and Creationtide existing alongside one another. Two modern religious observances, from different traditions, call us to recover something our ancestors could hardly have avoided knowing: we belong to the earth, and the rhythms of creation shape us whether we notice them or not.
Modern life makes forgetting remarkably easy. We turn on lights when darkness comes and adjust the thermostat when the temperature falls. Grocery stores offer strawberries in winter and apples in spring. Most of us no longer watch fields anxiously wondering whether there will be enough grain to survive until the next harvest. Technology has freed us from many of the dangers and limitations imposed by the seasons, and for that I am grateful.
But it has also made it possible to imagine that we somehow stand outside them.
We do not.
Our bodies remain creaturely. We inhabit this turning earth. The light changes, the air cools, gardens stop producing, leaves change color and eventually fall. Geese gather overhead. Darkness arrives earlier each evening. However sophisticated our technology becomes, we remain creatures living among other creatures.
Christianity should understand this.
At the center of Christian faith is not the story of a God who rescues humanity from the material world but of a God who enters it. The Word became flesh. God entered body and blood, hunger and exhaustion, water and soil, bread and wine, birth and death. Jesus spoke constantly of seeds and vines, wheat and weeds, fig trees and vineyards, birds and weather and harvests. These were not merely convenient sermon illustrations. They were the world his listeners inhabited. Creation was not scenery surrounding the spiritual life. It was where life with God happened.
Perhaps this is why I occasionally wander down the path to the cottage of the Wheel of the Year. I do not go looking for another home. I go because sometimes another tradition notices something my own tradition also knows but that I have forgotten to see.
Mabon opens a window onto autumn.
At the equinox, light and darkness stand together. Neither conquers the other. After the balance comes increasing darkness, but that is not a failure of creation. Darkness belongs to the rhythm. Seeds do some of their most important work beneath the soil. Roots deepen where we cannot see them. The earth is not dead simply because the field appears empty. There are times for growth and dormancy, planting and harvest, holding and release.
The earth does not apologize when summer ends. Perhaps we should pay attention.
Harvest itself is not simply a celebration of abundance. Anyone who has tended even a small garden knows that harvest can be untidy. Some tomatoes split before we pick them. Some vegetables are eaten by insects. Some plants produce abundantly and others hardly at all. What comes from the soil does not always resemble the picture on the seed packet, and life rarely does either.
Still, there is something to gather.
Harvest requires discernment. Some things are gathered for immediate use. Some are preserved for winter. Some become seed for another season. Some are composted, their usefulness not ended but transformed. And some are simply left behind.
So, as we cross this autumn threshold, I find myself asking three questions.
What will I gather?
What has grown in my life this year that deserves gratitude? What relationships have deepened? What lessons have I learned? What unexpected grace appeared while I was busy looking somewhere else? The harvest does not need to be enormous to be worthy of thanksgiving.
What will I preserve?
Not everything we gather is meant to be consumed immediately. Some things need to be carried into another season: a memory, a friendship, a practice, a story, a truth we discovered about ourselves. What needs to be carefully stored because we may need its nourishment when winter comes?
And then there is the more difficult question.
What will I allow to fall?
There are things we carry long after their season has ended: expectations, resentments, identities, habits, even dreams that once served us well but no longer give life.
The trees will soon begin letting go of leaves they spent an entire season growing. We tend to notice their beauty at the very moment the tree is preparing to release them. For a few weeks we admire the reds and oranges and yellows, and then comes the less picturesque part of autumn: bare branches, wet leaves along the roadside, piles gathered at the edge of the yard.
But the leaf that falls from the tree was not a mistake. It gathered sunlight. It nourished the tree. It offered shade. It participated fully in the life it was given. Its falling does not erase any of that. Its falling is part of that life.
There is something here I need to remember. We sometimes treat endings as evidence that something has gone wrong. A relationship changes. A vocation reaches its conclusion. A community we loved is no longer what it once was. A dream we carried becomes impossible. Grief can tempt us to believe that because something ended, everything that came before the ending has somehow been diminished.
Autumn tells another story: something does not have to last forever to have been sacred.
The falling leaf does not deny the summer. It completes it. Perhaps some things can be loved, honored, and released. We can grieve their passing without pretending they were meant to remain unchanged forever. We can give thanks for what they were, gather what they taught us, preserve what still gives life, and allow what remains to return to the earth.
What falls is not necessarily wasted. The leaf settles into the soil and becomes part of what will nourish life we cannot yet see. Compost may be one of creation’s quieter sacraments: what appears finished becoming nourishment for what comes next.
I do not mean that every loss happens for a reason, or that every ending must secretly be a beginning. Some losses are simply losses, and grief deserves more respect than an easy promise that something better is waiting around the corner. But relinquishment does not have to make the past meaningless.
There are simple ways to mark this threshold. Take a walk and notice what is actually changing rather than merely passing through it. Bring a few fallen leaves or apples into your home. Bake bread or prepare a meal from something grown nearby. Light a candle as darkness arrives and resist turning on every lamp for a few minutes. Sit at the table and name something for which you are grateful.
And perhaps ask yourself those three questions: What will I gather? What will I preserve? What will I allow to fall?
My home is Christianity, but I have many cottages. The Wheel of the Year is one of them, a place I visit from time to time because its windows offer a different view of the same earth beneath my feet. This week, Mabon has opened one of those windows.
And when I make my way home again, I find something familiar waiting for me there: bread on the table, a candle burning against the gathering darkness, and an ancient promise that there is a season for everything under heaven.
Even letting go.
