Autumn is for beginning: a homily.

Take care of the vine you yourself planted; Restore us, O Lord; give us new life.

Psalm 80

I am getting close to the end of a goal I set for myself: reading all the stories by my fellow Minnesotan, the Catholic novelist Jon Hassler. We both know Lake Woebegon territory intimately: it is a world framed by the anticipation and the aftereffects of long, bitterly cold, unbearably dark winters. But Hassler always manages to find profound hope in this world seemingly "north of hope," and so I have become a missionary spreading this gospel of Jon.

The project had me recently finishing up Hassler's novel, Simon's Night. Simon Shea is a seventy-year-old professor of English at a small college in upstate Minnesota. Anticipating his mandatory retirement from doing what he loves, he makes plans to move into a boarding house in a town in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by absolutely nothing he loves. Here, with five other inmates, he plans to live out his last days. But the hitch is that he has lost his will to live before his appointed time; in fact his life is just beginning. The novel turns on a contest between two forces: life's incalculability, and Simon's obstinacy. It takes a powerful moment of grace - a startling visit after forty years - to make Simon see, suddenly, not so much what he has done, but rather what he has become. In the event, he repents of his self-wounding willfulness and opens himself to the violence of grace - so that it might fill him with new life.

I have also recently been rereading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. And I was stunned - having just turned thirty-nine myself - by the opening lines of Charles Ryder as he lies in his bunk and compares his military life to a marriage. "Here at the age of thirty-nine," he says, "I began to be old...Here my last love died.... I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who...suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, of tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster...." Like Simon Shea, Charles Ryder sees, suddenly, not so much what he has done, but rather what he has become. And he is filled with despair. But this is not the end of the story! Just as Simon Shea must come to terms with his past, so must Charles Ryder revisit Brideshead. He too must open himself to the violence of grace - so that it might fill him with new life.

Take care of the vine you yourself planted; Restore us, O Lord; give us new life.

It is no coincidence that the Jewish Scriptures over and again juxtapose images of the vineyard and of marriage. Both begin with great hopes and high expectations; both require tremendous work and cultivation; both are notoriously fragile. Sometimes, both a vineyard and a marriage produce "sour grapes," a seemingly total failure. One morning we wake up and we despair, not so much of what we have done, but of what our life has become. We despair of the totality of things.

Both the vineyard and the marriage, then, evoke times in our lives when we suddenly recognize that the problem is not so much what we have done, but rather what we have become. These moments - whether they come at retirement or in midlife - have this particular quality: they are moments of vision, of revelation, and of repentance. And that is why the scriptural image for this insight is the autumn harvest: because this kind of overall vision is only possible at harvest time, when the grapes have finally picked, when we finally know whether the vineyard is going to yield life-giving wine, or merely sour grapes.

It is no coincidence, either, that the church uses these images of vineyards in this autumn season, this time of harvest, when the days grow short and the nights grow chilly, and thoughts turn toward endings, winter, and our own numbered days. For centuries, our liturgy has used the month of October to reflect on harvesting and the month of November to reflect on death. The point, though, is not to fixate on death, but to gather up our lives as a whole in order to prepare ourselves for possible new beginnings. Simon Shea and Charles Ryder alike are given the violent grace of seeing their lives as a whole so that they might further see them restored.

In short, the images of vineyards, of marriage, and of harvest embrace our deepest desire: to refind and refound the capacity to love. After all the betrayals, disappointment, heartbreaks, tragedies, illnesses, separations, and deaths, autumn leads us, paradoxically, to the threshold of life. Autumn leads to the solstice, to the darkest day of winter. But on that day, when life seems as cold and dark and lifeless as it can possibly get, when life seems "north of hope," we Christians celebrate the astonishing grace of a new life, of a newborn child, of a light the darkness cannot extinguish.

Stephen Schloesser, S.J., is a doctoral candidate in modern European history at Stanford University.