G. C. Jeffers

Every year around this time I move from hating (but tolerating) the summer sun and heat to actively hating it. The reason for this (I surmise) is that this is the time of the year when school restarts, and it seems monstrous to me to have school starting while it is summer outside! In any case, this post is my latest iteration in what has become something of a tradition for me, stretching back to 2012 I think, in which I laud the fall as the source of much goodness while maligning the summer.

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I had plenty of good intentions going into summer break this year. I planned to write a 10 post series that explained my approach to education in the form of Letters to an 8th Grader. I got three of those written. I also planned to (along with Drew) write a curriculum guide for middle school spiritual formation. I haven’t written much yet, but I do have a prospectus! I also planned to read the complete works of Plato, but I only got through about half of that. And it would be tempting, at this point, to look back on my summer and view it as a failure. But I don’t think it was at all! Actually, I was able to live and play and work in a way that modeled my goal of simplicity. You see, I got a bit busy. Because we had a new baby! And because we remodeled our kitchen (doing almost all of the work ourselves)! And because we spent lots of time swimming and eating watermelon and playing in forts built of chairs and sheets and mattresses. Anyhow, this summer was the best by far in recent memory and I am going into the school year refreshed and ready in a way that I have not up to this point.

The summer is still and doesn’t move. It is trapped by oppressive heat and muted by a shouting sun. While the stillness of summer does allow focus and attention (that is, the summer slow down naturally prompts introspection), it also yields boredom and stagnation. I remember as a kid searching for ways to make the summer bearable. Once, as the summer neared its conclusion, I remember intentionally creating and then solving long division problems simply because I missed having something structured to do every day!

So, while the summer can be good (watermelon, swimming, grilling, naps), we also need the fall.

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The poets usually treat spring as the season of renewal because it follows on the heels of the icy darkness of winter within which everything good and beautiful has died. But these poets didn’t grow up in Texas. In Texas, the harsh season is not winter (that’s pretty mild). Rather, our harsh season is the summer because it lasts 4 months or so (June-September, with July and August being the worst), consistently tops 100 degrees, and is rarely interrupted by rain. Since summer is our winter (in that it is the harshest season), then fall is our spring, a season of renewal after the punishment of summer.

Fall is my favorite season. I used to think it was winter (mainly because of the cold), but I like the fall better. I am abnormal in that I dislike spring and hate summer. While this is caused by my experience of Texas, it is also largely related to the fact that I have a melancholy spirit.

I don’t like or trust flashy or glitzy things. I dislike loud noises and large crowds. I am highly introverted and am afraid of meeting too many new people at once. I really hate the noon sun, or any kind of direct light–especially fluorescent light. I use a copious number of lamps to light my house and classroom so that I do not have to turn on the overhead lights. I sit in darkness and wait for dawn every morning. Dusk is, perhaps, the most exhilarating part of my day.

I like fall because the leaves are beautiful in death; they are hopeful in suffering. I like the fall because it comes with the season of Advent, the first vague hope of a cold incarnation. I like fall because that’s when school starts, because I get to teach a renewed curriculum to new students. fall is a time of a kind of renewal, a kind of recharge after the flame and glare of an overbearing summer.

The summer sun bleaches me dry, but the fall clouds and rain help restore me to myself. And to the world.

* * *

Amanda and I really leaned into our own as parents this summer. While last summer we spent quite a bit of time learning how to do basic home repair things, this summer (even though we remodeled the kitchen) was really spent getting to know the girls better and learning how to change in our relationships with them as they continue to get older.

We also thought through how we use technology, the aesthetics of our home, how to do marriage when the little people run your life, and how to interact with parents who increasingly seem like real people and not the distant demigods they were when we were children. We even got the opportunity to spend 2 weeks with my parents as I helped my mom clean out the garage and played and swam and watched Moana over and over and over and over again.

One of the things we have learned this summer is the value of reinvesting in old relationships. Amanda and I had two months off together for the first time ever, and we grew closer to each other because of the time spent with each other. The two weeks with my parents were the longest I had been around them at once since I stopped going home during the summers while in college. And I was able to significantly deepen my relationships with both of them. Actually, it is really really neat to watch my parents be grandparents. And in this reinvesting in old relationships, I am cooperating in God’s renewal of all things.

* * *

In the book of Revelation, God declares to all of creation: Behold, I make all things new.

Growing up, I heard that sentiment in the sense that, at the end, God will make a different Heaven and a different earth. They will be “new” in the same sense as a new pair of shoes from the store is “new.” But then, a New Testament professor in undergrad clarified that a better translation might be something like Behold, I renew all things.

There will be a (re)newed Heaven and a (re)newed earth. God is not making a new Heaven and a new earth, he is making the only Heaven and the only earth new. He is renewing it. The sentiment that I grew up understanding was rooted in a consumerist, throwaway culture in which we repaired very little. Even now, I buy new shoes when my old ones wear out. I don’t get them repaired (renewed). I don’t darn my socks. I don’t patch my pants or my shirts.

Wendell Berry offers a stinging critique of the American obsession with newness (in the consumerist sense). He writes:

It is plain to me that the line ought to be drawn without fail wherever it can be drawn easily. And it ought to be easy (though many do not find it so) to refuse to buy what one does not need. If you are already solving your problem with the equipment you have–a pencil, say–why solve it with something more expensive and more damaging [a computer]? If you don’t have a problem, why pay for a solution? If you love the freedom and elegance of simple tolls, why encumber yourself with something complicated?

He goes on to describe the ease with which he refuses to own a television or a computer, but also his dis-ease with owning a truck and using a chainsaw to cut wood. The problem with our fascination with new things is that we end up destroying so much that is good in our desperate reaching for “progress.” This is true of anything from liturgy in the church to food production to teaching: we are oriented toward the next thing, the new thing. We believe in the myth of infinite progress. But this is the sin of chronological snobbery.

I love the fall because it insists that there was a time before us, before our culture, before our vision of the world. Fall offers a glimpse of cultural history, a clear memory of a time of harvest. Pumpkins (even when reduced to “spice” and blended into a Starbucks monstrosity) force us to remember. As does Thanksgiving. As do the falling leaves.
The newness that fall offers is not novelty, it is not so much the sudden sprout in a garden, the beginning of a birdsong; rather, Fall offers us a renewal of identity, a renewal of self. A recapitulation of the old in the dance of creation.

* * *

The school year officially started for me this week. I returned to my school for my fourth year as a teacher. I have had meetings, time to work on my classroom, and time to make lesson plans and revise curriculum before the students return this coming Thursday.

To my school, I am a returning teacher. But I bring with me a year’s worth of plans and a summer of new experiences. I am returning to a familiar environment (for which I am deeply grateful; I cling to familiarity like a drowning man clings to a raft. As my dad says, “the secret to the Good Life is to get in a rut and stay in it.”), but I am also returning to a changed environment with new colleagues and students. I am not a new teacher, of course, but I am renewed.

I am renewed by my work on my house and by my time with my girls and by my roadtrips to see family and by my time playing in the pool and by time spent in therapy and by mine and Amanda’s work on our marriage and by my time in the kitchen and by the reading I did and the writing I produced and more and more and so much more.

* * *

So may the weather cool down, the leaves change their colors, the scarves be warm and snug, and the fallish melancholia be meaningful!

O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty:
Open our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works;
that, rejoicing in thy whole creation, we may learn to serve
thee with gladness; for the sake of him through whom all
things were made, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.