Why Must We Fall? All Souls Meditation

While it has been very unusually cold and wet this fall, the leaves are late this year in turning colors and falling in Chicago. The several sugar maple trees outside have turned bright colors and this morning as I walked to the train their large leaves spread carpets of color covering most of the green grass.

I could not help but think of this scene from the children's book, Bambi, by Felix Salten, described by James Sauer  years ago in Touchstone in "Lessons from the Nursery":

Two leaves discuss mutability and the afterlife:

They were silent a while. Then the first leaf said quietly to herself, “Why must we fall? . . .” The second leaf asked, “What happens to us when we have fallen?” “We sink down.” “What is under us?” The first leaf answered, “I don’t know, some say one thing, some another, but nobody knows.” The second leaf asked, “Do we feel anything, do we know anything about ourselves when we’re down there?” The first leaf answered, “Who knows? Not one of all those down there has ever come back to tell us about it.”

Not one? Well, Salten is defining the human predicament, not presenting the gospel. And as a definition of the human situation, it is marvelous. The parable goes on and achieves that brave agnosticism that is found in parts of the Old Testament Wisdom literature. There is a sad, solitary pain as the leaves fall one by one. And so we will wither; all flesh is grass. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher.

Sauer's piece of writing is a classic, I think, as well as his "Everlasting Life" (both appear in our ISI Book, Creed & Culture, by the way.) It's a poignant account of the premature death of his infant daughter, Mary. More people have commented on that article in Creed & Culture than all the others combined (and they're all excellent.)

While the Preacher says that eternity is written into the heart of man, I think this also means that he is haunted by mortality. And not just his own mortality, but the mortality of others.

I am reminded of two passages I've read this past year. The first is from Tom Steel's The Life and Death of St. Kilda, which tells of the evacuation of an island population from the Scottish Hebrides in 1930. Years later, one of the original inhabitants revists the island, St. Kilda, where there are no longer permanent residents, but just military personnel:

Over a dram in the Puff Inn, one of the last remaining St Kildans told the young military occupiers of his island what life was like in his day. Lachlan's reason for visiting St Kilda one more time was a simple one. 'I want,' he said, 'to stand in the graveyard where my ancestors are buried and to pray in the church.'

Second, in his marvelous new book, Twice a Stranger: The Mass Expulsions That Forged Modern Greece and Turkey, Bruce Clark, international security editor for The Economist, writes:

On half a dozen recent occasions, parties of Turkish citizens, mostly in their eighties and nineties, have made pilgrimages to places in Greece where they were born; to the lands from which they or their families were expelled in 1923 or 1924. . . . Wherever possible, the visitors from Anatolia would be guided to the homes and burial places of their parents. Sometimes they would gather up soil from their forebearer's graves and bring it back to Turkey.

Say what you will about man and his place in the cosmos, he knows something is amiss and that he reaches out to those who have left him behind all the same, desiring not only life eternal for himself but for all those whom he has loved and who have loved him from his earliest memory.

Is this simply wishful thinking or something writ into the heart of man to pull him away from the beasts to a higher way? We have sufficient signs to know the grave is not the end, and we do not rest easily with mortality as the final answer.

Comments

[Bill R]

A very poignant piece, Mr. Kushiner. You touch here on the evangelical (small "e") chords of my heart, for this desire, this hunger, to see those whom we love with us beyond this life is what motivates me (and, I suspect, many Christians) to raise the issue of our faith in more than an abstract fashion with our family and friends. In a sense God made each of us an "evangelist" for those around us. I note that the Lord didn't have to explain the reasons why he gave us the Great Commission.

[Convallaria]

I'm perplexed by all the Christians who praise the book Bambi. I hadn't read it since childhood and re-read it a few years ago. It truly chilled me to the bone. James Sauer's critique falls wide of the mark, I believe. 'Man,' in the book, is not a "false god," he IS God. The 'One' who is above all, even Man, is DEATH.