Minister's Musing

Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

November 2006

Every season in the Mountains has its own charms, but nothing beats the fall here for head-turning beauty. I am reminded of that this time of year every time I look out the window of my church study, where several spectacular Sugar Maples are currently putting on a show.

When I see such things, part of me just wants to gaze at the glory of it, but another part is wondering, I wonder why that is? From back in my science reporting days I vaguely remember some biologist speculating about whether there was adaptive or evolutionary value to fall color. What does the tree get out of such showy displays? We know, after all, that leaves change color at the end of their life cycle, when trees shut down the flow of sap to prepare for the chill of winter. The colors represent certain nutrients that are concentrated in leaves in different ways by different trees. Those substances are present in the leaves from the beginning, but they are masked by chlorophyll, which trees use to create food and gives them their green color. Since the color change comes at the end of the leaf’s life cycle, when the tree is finished with it, it’s hard to see what value it gives the tree, except perhaps to assure that the chemicals in the leaves are returned to the tree’s roots in the mulch the fallen leaves create.

All this has me wondering what this cycle might teach us. This has been a difficult fall for our church in the way of deaths. Since late August, we have lost six people from our community. On a personal level, Debbie and I are marking the anniversary of my father’s and her mother’s deaths. Many of you, I know, are grieving similar losses.

Grief is hard. When death comes to people we love, we want to remember them, but we also want the pain of grief to go away. We learn that it really doesn’t go away, but it does change. We find different ways to remember and integrate the memory of those people into our lives.

My hope is that just as the brilliant leaves of autumn reflect the nutrients the tree has taken in over the year, so might our grief help us concentrate in our memory all the richness that we received from loved ones now gone. They are not lost to us. Our task is merely to find new ways to make them ours.