I don’t have much to say, today, by way of a message “From the Rector,” but I wanted to share one small, potentially-illuminating fact about the season we’re entering, which we often call “Fall,” sometimes “Autumn,” and in our quainter or more whimsical states of mind perhaps even “Harvest,” as in the “Harvest Fair.” (I don’t think much has been harvested in Charlestown in the last 180 years, but it’s a nice bit of marketing.) Specifically, a fun fact about the season’s name.

“Fall” is in fact the most recent of the names, dating only—only!—to the 1660s, an abbreviation of the poetic “fall of the leaf.” “Autumn” had been around from the 14th century or so, a borrowing from Latin via French at a time when much English vocabulary was being borrowed into English from French. “Harvest” was the oldest name for the season after summer and before winter. In fact, in Old and Middle English “Harvest” referred primarily to the season, and only secondarily the gathering of crops. (So perhaps our “Harvest Fair” is really just a “Fall Fair” after all, without any urban farming implied!)

And yet the word “harvest” itself comes in turn from an ancient Indo-European root that means, of course, “to gather or pluck.” So “Harvest” was an action before it was a season before it was an action again, and there’s no season more suitable for such a cycling of meanings than Autumn, when the leaves fall from the trees and become mulch, and the cycle of life and growth turns toward death and rebirth again. Everything new becomes old, and everything old becomes new again in time.

And yet time is not, as has been pessimistically said, a “flat circle,” in which we do the same things time and time again, without change or growth or decline. Time is a spiral, in one direction or another. Our language grows, and where our ancestors had one word we have three, for better or for worse. Seasons pass, and the trees don’t simply shed their leaves—they grow, or die, but they never remain unchanged.

Nor do we! As the cycles of your life begin again this fall—as schools reopen, and choirs begin, and all the September shifts of life take place—I wonder which direction God’s inviting you to grow.