In the autumn, the trees turn golden in preparation for emptiness. The air gets crisp, ready to be cold. The light begins to fade into Gray. Crops that have been growing all year are harvested before they die, and many of us already begin to feel wistfulness for the life that is disappearing
before our eyes. But of course, before the chill Gray truly moves in, there are fall glories, apple picking, favorite films, harvest festivals and celebrations, annual culinary favorites, and yes, pumpkin spice lattes. A harvest feast takes things that are dying and in a way, marks them for eternity in the form of unforgettable flavors
and memories. In fact, in the waning days of the long green season before Advent, the church has long celebrated All Hallow Tide, 3 days of feasting that connect our gratitude for the past with our hope for the future. The world around us is quick to dismiss the past, and we Christians have sometimes been too quick to join our neighbors in writing things off that don't last.
But autumn is an opportunity to do something different, to recognize that our timeless God works in things that appear to be fleeting, and to consecrate the moment for eternity. Welcome to the Imagination Redeemed podcast, everyone. I'm Sarah Howell, and I'm joined today by Brian Brown and our special guest today, Caroline Williams.
Caroline is our associate editor and outreach coordinator here at the Anselm Society. And while you think you probably haven't heard her voice before, I would argue you have. She's behind the scenes, but her voice is very much present and all that you read and see from us. And so it's great to have your literal voice on the show today, Caroline. And thank you for reading our introduction story as well. Thank you, I'm so happy to be here. So today is a new kind of
episode. We are kicking off our quarterly episode in which we are going to discuss the new quarter seasonal theme. We're going to talk about what drew us to the theme, why it seems timely and we're going to also offer up a little preview of what's to head. But before we do so, I wanted to kind of set the scene. Why are we doing a kick off episode?
I like to think about this kick off episode as setting the table because it reminds me of the story, the short story, but that's Feast. That story in and of itself deserves its own podcast episode. So I I won't belabor on the the summary too much, but if you can imagine these Puritan like community villagers who live in the north North Atlantic seashores where there's really nothing to eat but fish. They live a very ascetic lifestyle, like a true life of simplicity.
But at the climax of the story, of course, there's a thief. And when I first came across the story, I watched a film adaptation of it. And it just struck me that at the feast I didn't. I didn't expect that the villagers would have no idea what they were eating. But why would they? They were all like 12 year olds trying to eat caviar for the first time, kind of disgusted but but trying to understand why this would be an important or or good thing. But the author does something
really interesting. He puts this wildly out of place character right at the feast with them, this general who really understands high French cuisine, and he freaks out every time a new dish is presented. He just starts giggling, almost in delight at certain points. And the villagers begin to understand what they're eating. And as they kind of loosen up and enjoy the way that the general is enjoying, they begin
to actually feast. And so I think this is a profound idea, just a beautiful image that if I can relate it to our own lives, I would argue that we're all those villagers in some way, shape and form, and that the Father of this world sits down with us and delights over his creation.
And it really does us all good to see what God has set before us. And in this context, what we're attempting to do is take a theme and set our table, so to speak, for what we prayerfully think are some of the rhythms God is set before us in the autumn season. And so let's dive into those rhythms. I want to start with you, Brian. I want to ask you what drew you to this theme for the fall that we are planning? Well, I've been itching to do something with feasting and food
for a while. Because if you, if your only connection to the Anson Society is the podcast, you may not know what some of the folks who are local do, which is that we love to feast. We love to not just the eating piece of it, but the the warm, communal piece of it. And often singing and storytelling, feasting is, we'll get into this in other episodes, but it's, there's so much more
to it than that. And, and, and autumn in particular is one of those seasons that a lot of us, I think have kind of an aesthetic pull towards. A lot of people will say fall is their favorite season. And, and you know, there's memes and jokes about it, right? Like Mr. or misses Autumn with her pumpkin spice latte and her thick sweater and her trips to Target and all the things.
And, and I'm totally guilty of most of that, except for the trips to Target. But the the autumn piece in particular was something that I thought was really important for us to work in because contemporary Christianity in the United States is very good contemporary. Pretty much no matter what kind of church you go to, chances are your day-to-day faith is very much present driven. That's our natural inclination as humans anyway.
And a lot of kind of post second grade awakening Christian influences in the United States make it even even more that way. And when you're locked in the present, it's much harder to wrestle with these questions of how to relate to eternity. How does my grief relate to eternity? How does my joy relate to eternity? How does that thing from my past that has shaped who I am relate
to eternity? In other words, how do I enter into the life of God and feasting in Jennifer Eternal and Autumn in particular, give us a chance to wrestle with a lot of different things that have to do with marking the present and and a lot of things to do with how to wrestle with the past so that they're all wrapped up in one thing that we're entering into the life of God with I. Like that, Brian, that's exciting. I, I'm excited about thinking
about time. I don't know if it's my place in life, if it's how I've been raised, but to me, I see the beginning of the year so much more in the fall than on the arbitrary January 1st, just with the start of school. There's something about the death all around and that wistfulness that makes me feel connected to what happened last year at this time, what happened the year before that.
There's a, a timeless nature as I see the season kind of shifting where I, I begin to think about those questions of, oh, am I the same person as, as, as change around me is happening, Am I changing with it? And so that idea of new beginnings change time and, and I guess perhaps for me, there's also just a, a reflective nature that happens in the fall because things do start to slow down.
Things do start to get a little quieter in terms of the seasonal time and the nights getting longer and the days getting shorter. But that's me Caroline. When you think about the autumn and this idea of redeeming time, what comes to mind from your own experience? Well, I relate to a lot of what both of you are saying and I will say to you, I was the most excited for this theme when we first came up with the idea last September because I love a pumpkin spice latte as much as the next girl.
But my feelings have always been very conflicted around this season. Spring and summer are very easy to celebrate. Time kind of stretches very long and liquid in the summer. And once autumn rolls around and the school year starts, time can start feeling very rushed and there are a lot of demands on it, especially as a mom.
And even though Christmas is in December, a lot of the preparation, a lot of the scheduling and planning starts happening as soon as October. And so I think I my excitement around exploring this this topic more this season comes from a realization that I really have a lot of answers I need to find for myself in terms of how I approach my time without a cynical, stressed, rushed approach.
Also, my birthday is in November so I think I I tend to face my own mortality and the passing of time a little bit more in the season maybe than most people. We'll dedicate the November kickoff episode to your birthday. Just theme it around mortality and. Right. Caroline though I appreciate you saying that because even in your response, you can see the two different kinds of personalities and mine and then yours that
enter into the fall. I think that it's the slow, wonderful time of thinking about death. And and I, I, I, I am such a romantic in the traditional sense of the word, where I, I love the wistfulness and the kind of more mortality of the change of seasons. And rightly so. You're you're calling to the other kind of person who I'm absolutely ridiculous. I love that about you. Yeah, the, the, it's, it's that
back and forth. Like one minute you're, you're sort of reveling in and, and not everyone's like this, but clearly the three of us are. One day you're sort of reveling in it and you've got your, your coffee or your tea in your toasty sweater and you're looking at, you're looking at the fall leaves and it's also perfect.
And then, yeah, the next minute you're, you're absorbing the Gray and you're contemplating your mortality or you're depressed because you're thinking that winter's coming or, or yeah, you have there's, there's those pangs of looking back toward the past. Why do we do that? Why does pretty much everybody who loves fall do that? The back and forth between the really deep, rich positives and the the really deep rich negatives.
And at the same time as those practical themes, there are theological themes that we want to weave in there because there is a reason for this. There's a reason, frankly, that a lot of us spend a great deal of time either trying to avoid our past, personal or collective, or going to therapy to try to wrestle with them. Then let's dive in. Brian, can you give us a little bit of a false preview of what is ahead, what we want to try to wrestle with we.
Want to talk about this idea of redeeming the time? Saint Paul says that I think twice in his letters and TS Eliot thought that the it's it's the default posture of the Christian. But it's so hard. Like we are supposed to do this thing called redeeming the time. What is that? So we want to get into that because it sounds hopeful. It's a beautiful little phrase, but it it needs some some unpacking. Why is there in the 10 commandments?
Why is there a command to honor your father and mother that it's different from children? Obey your parents. They're different. They're different commands. And, and Christians have historically had a very honoring posture toward the past and a very grateful posture toward the past. How does that add up to a healthy rather than an unhealthy theology of tradition? Even something as simple as as Halloween, right?
Christians have all kinds of fights every year about whether they should celebrate Halloween and how they should celebrate Halloween, and we want to dive into that. There's a lot of thought that we can do with this. One thing that I that I will say a lot in when I, when I'm teaching is that the Christian imagination is a corporate imagination. I think in a lot of ways the contemporary American evangelical imagination is an
individualistic imagination. It's about my relationship with God, my conversion at its worst, my, my happiness. It's not that there's no corporate element to it, but it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking it's kind of me and Jesus. But the Christian imagination is, is corporate. It connects us not only vertically to God, but horizontally to the people on on either side of us and around the world. But it also connects us to to the cloud of witnesses, to past
and future. So it's one thing to say that as rhetoric, but how does it work? And to get in our most classically and Selmish place, what do stories and songs have to do with building this imagination in US? I'm really excited about recording and not necessarily one specific episode that I think this this little strand that I I hope we follow through the season of understanding how wistfulness and death help us understand the gift of life.
I think that the the biblical themes of a seed dying so that life can be born feels very close to the heart of the fall in in my experience. Obviously you plant seeds in the spring, but the fruit comes in the fall. And one thing that I know we're excited to talk about is the way in which a feast is taking that life off the vine right before it's, it dies. And as it's decaying, to offer it back, to offer it back to the Lord, offer it to the community.
And that from that death there is born great life, great life of community, of worship, of, of sacrifice. So whether it be a food like I just described or in seeds, I think at the heart of that the the wistfulness that comes about and harnessing that in a healthy way is what I am particularly curious to see how how we explore that concept. And Caroline, from a list of the center standpoint, so you in addition to being involved in all of our podcast planning, you
also run our sub stack. So you see the comments that come back, you are dialoguing a lot on both social media and sub stack, more specifically with our listeners. What do you think is is is going to be particularly resonant with our listeners? What do you think they're going to be most excited about? I'm really excited to dive into feasting, and I really think that that's something that
people tend to resonate. We even saw that in our Bombadil reading group and I think these episodes that explore food and feasting and something a concept that can be so wildly misunderstood in our society, especially on different groups of people. I just, I'm really, really excited to revisit that and I think our our readers and
listeners will too. Earlier I mentioned that I tend to vacillate a lot between a lot of highs and lows in the fall of enjoying the season so much and then also falling into it's so silly. But the the line from the Disney remake of Beauty and the Beast where the beast is cursing the fading of the light. I find myself cursing the fading
of the light in the fall. And I think the things that our listeners heard on the podcast in the summer about pipe smoking with Malcolm Guy and being present and slowing down, that all sounds really wonderful when school is out. But the rubber definitely meets the road in the fall when your
time becomes so scarce. And I think there's a lot of potential for these concepts to really be brought home in what it looks like to find that merriment and that joy while your time is the days are getting shorter, so. Yeah, for sure. Caroline I like that because the summer does feel like this really nice, simple training ground, right? And training grounds are meant to be a kind of an easy plane that you get to make the obstacles that you want them to be right.
You get to decide where you're going to go and what you're going to work on. But the terrain of life that happens in the fall, like you're saying, when like kind of hits you and you have to kind of start again. You have to learn all the rhythms of school routine for either yourself or your kids or what it's like to not have a school routine if that's something you're used to.
I I like that because I think at the time of fall, when the light is fading, when the training wheels come off and you're set off into actual terrain, we get to defiantly come together as a community. And I think that's something that's really important about the concepts of feasting and honoring the past that we're going to focus on this season. That that we're not doing that alone.
That while we're maybe out of the training ground of ordinary time, we get to come together and and make those defiant decisions too slow, or those defiant decisions to revel in abundance when all we see is a scarcity of light. Yeah, well said. So yeah, Brian, do you want to go through and, and kind of just give us a, a quick fire drill of what episodes we'll be focusing on at in what part of the
season? Yeah. And and yeah, we'll give you the give you all the the quick rundown, saving all the good stuff for the episodes themselves, of course. But but you guys jump in with if they're, you know, important things I'm missing or things you're particularly excited about or things you want to get on the record as we got to talk about this. So that then if if we fail, fail, it's it's our fault because it's set in stone. It's on the air.
All right, so we will start in September with an episode on Why We Feast and that's going to double as a session for the rabbit Rooms house moot event. If you guys are not familiar with the house moot thing that the rabbit Room does, if you listen to this podcast, you're probably already familiar with the rabbit room. If not, you can Google them, but they do a cool thing for those of you who can't make it to their October conference. They do an an at home thing with
special sessions just for. People to listen to and discuss together and we will be part of that. And so why we feast. We're going to look at feasting as reconciliation and how feasting can get into healing the divisions that the fallen world creates. And I will get to get over excited about theology of food, which always gets me excited. So that's number one for September. But we can't just stop there.
We have to do more feasting. So then we're going to do an episode on the three feasts of Lord of the Rings, which will be a conversation with our very own Amy Lee. She gave a talk at the Weight Center at Wheaton about new catastrophe and hospitality and mental health. And she touched a little bit on this idea that there are three key feasts in the Lord of the Rings that that represents an exploration of past, present and future. And we really liked that. And we said, Yep, you got to do
more with that. So we're going to have a conversation with her about that. But she's also giving a talk on that at our long expected feast fall event, which will be right around the same time in in late September. So by the time you're listening to this, it might already be sold out, but we will do our best to squeeze as many people in as we can and sell some online tickets if we can. And then we'll hit October. And this is just something that Christians, I think Christians
don't talk about enough. And that is, what are we to do with the past? So we're going to do an episode getting us ready for Halloween, or more specifically All Hallow Tide, the three day period that includes what is now called Halloween and was originally a Christian holiday. And we're going to get into this idea of honor your father and mother and what that means, what that has meant in historic
Christian theology. What does it mean for a theology of tradition that isn't just if it's old, it's good, but also doesn't leave us sort of rootless, making everything up as we go? I'm so excited about this one. I have zero place in, in my historic past of understanding what the heck to do with October 30th, 31st. And, and I, I, I so resonate, Brian, with that concept that, you know, a lot of modern American Christianity is, is kind of making up what we could do next.
It's it's always trying to address the present from the present. And yet, tradition for tradition's sake literally makes my bones ache if I have to do something just because I automatically want to do everything I can to foil that plan. Oh, and we will talk about that. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll never forget one of our earliest standstone lectures. We had the poet Scott Cairns. And Scott is Eastern Orthodox, and he was talking about that instinct in US.
And it's to some extent it's, you know, maybe sort of a artist's instinct to creative's instinct. But it's also, it's also to some extent, just a rebel's instinct. You know, you can't tell me what to do. And, and, and as Americans, we also have this instinct towards
innovation. Some of my earliest jobs when I was in my 20s, I couldn't help notice everyone my age lost their ability to influence corporate culture in the these workplaces really quickly because they charged and saw something that didn't make sense to them and tried to change it. They have this immediate instinct.
If it doesn't make sense to me, it can't possibly make sense, which essentially theologically speaking makes you just your own private Pope. If it doesn't make sense to me right now, in this moment as a 22 year old, it can't possibly
make sense, right? And Scott said when it comes to tradition, especially something like ritual, something that's repetitive, you have to let it work on you before you try to work on it. I can see the tie to the next episode in October being what you're calling the songs, Brian, because songs have to be learned and embodied and and sung, right? Like you have to become one with the song in order for you to learn it, like know it. And so it works on you before you get to work on it.
And to think about doing that on a corporate level. You know, songs that aren't just about I, but it's about us. It's about we. And not only songs that are about us, but that we actually sing together. It's not just one voice, but there's something special that happens when a bunch of mediocre or beautiful voices come together and start singing together. It takes on a whole new thing. It it's, it's not just your
voice anymore. In fact, your voice is kind of taken up and transposed into this this new instrument called us. Yeah, well said. Yeah. And that episode and I, I started using that, that term we songs and, and we stories for that matter, to, to describe songs that are specifically written out of a corporate imagination, out of a sense of memory. There's an us that was here before I got here and will be here after.
And songs and stories that are oriented toward word uniting us with that us, uniting us together and pushing us together toward God. A lot of the contemporary music of all sorts, not just Christian that we deal with is, is individual. It's me singing about my thoughts and my feelings and my relationships and my you know what not. But most of the most powerful songs, even when they're written from an individual perspective, connect us to other things as part of the reason Taylor Swift
is so powerful, right? She sings things and her target audience goes, I've been there. We songs are songs that are written that way intentionally to to communicate not just the feeling of the moment, but the permanent realities that are that are universal to humans and that have shaped us over time. So we've we've had some good episodes in the past about singing like, like you guys should go back and listen to our episodes with Amber Salad and they're wonderful.
These ones are specifically going to be about what happens when we prioritize old songs that are oriented towards this kind of corporate imagination and write new ones. This is also why we should join our local community choirs too. Nice. We should definitely give a good pitch for why every person can sing. And Brian, would you say that that's something that Amber has already done a good job with making a case for?
Well, yeah, Amber. So Amber is the the director of a a church, Well, actually a bunch of choirs, but she's also the music director at her church in Manhattan. And she's on the board of the CS Lewis Foundation. And she goes so far as to say the idea that you Can't Sing and, and especially you Can't Sing to God and you should shut up because nobody wants to hear you sing is a lie from the pit of hell. And I agree with that.
Like if, if, and this is true of singing, but it's true of singing as a metaphor for everything else too. That that if I were the enemy, I would very much want you to think that all of the flaws and insecurities and defects and just idiosyncrasies that you bring to the table disqualify you from speaking to God and lending your voice, literal and metaphorical, to the body of Christ.
So we're going to dismantle that lie and try to rebuild back up something better poured, something that we're going to get into in November, which is there. There's a story in, I don't remember which of Chesterton's writings it's from, but he talks about how Christianity is in some ways, yes, it's ancient and it yes, it's eternal, but it's also the sort of eternally young religion. Because God himself has the ability to look at something
good and true and beautiful. And in this case that he has made like a sunrise and never get tired of it and sort of clap his hands and say do it again every time. That's something that we struggle with. I remember having a conversation with a friend once who had the exact same pizza from the exact same restaurant next to his workplace every single day. And I and I remember saying that's quite aside from any health concerns that that crazy
like, don't you get tired of it? And he said, well, no, because if something is good, it's good every time. No. I'm not advocating his point of view, but we've all sort of had the opposite experience. We're familiarity breeds contempt. You get tired of stuff, and there's so much about fall that has to do with nostalgia and wistfulness, on the other hand, but also just things dying around Kanju, the reminder that
things are fleeting. How can we move from this wistfulness to a recognition of abundance with both the past and the present? Yeah. I'm really excited about that episode because it's very easy to look at the past in a general sense and romanticize things like antique furniture, you know?
But even just looking back at your own life and past versions of yourself and it can be a real struggle to find compassion towards those you know, you and the past, and finding that eternal approach to yourself and your own life amidst that woods fullness. So I'm excited about that episode. Yeah. And then most likely after that, our, our current plan with, with all of this, we, we reserve the right to move things around if,
if things happen. Sometimes we find ourselves in possession of a great idea that we want to record right now or an audio recording for something. And, and, but right now we're, we're keeping the, the 2nd November slot free for one session of audio from the retreat at our, our, our fall gathering. And that'll get us up to December, which kicks off our winter season. So that's our current plan for the fall. Ladies, thank you for everything that you've put into making it what it is.
And for you listeners, this is your chance to sort of jump in any, if you're using an app like Spotify or YouTube that allows comments or you're seeing this post on social media, this is this is your chance to jump in and say, I'm particularly excited about such and such an episode. Would you please tackle this topic along the way because we have not recorded any of the episodes yet. So this is your, this is your chance to ask your questions on the front end. Absolutely.
And an invitation to all the listeners out there, including Caroline and Brian, is there are two questions that I'm going to try really hard to consider for myself as we go through as we go through the season. I confess that I mean, if anyone's listened to the podcast for more than two seconds, they're like, duh, Sarah. But I confess to nonetheless, that I love to stay up in the clouds. I love to think about these beautiful big topics and how they relate to the rest of the world.
And, and I love to spend this little amount of time thinking about my own personal life and, and what happened yesterday and what's going to happen tomorrow. With that being said, though, that's where the that's where these big ideas get tied down. And beauty happens, right? If beauty doesn't happen in the clouds, it happens in, in the, the milieu of all the different organisms on earth bumping into each other.
And so the two questions I have in my mind are, first, what fall traditions in my own life can be seen through the lens of redeeming the time? And so that's really going to force me to start asking myself when I put on that sweater and I start wanting to go outside to crunch the leaves, that crunch the leaves tradition. But I revel in so much. What about that is helping me redeem the time?
And then the second question is, how might my Thanksgiving celebration, specifically this year, embody some of these things? I think that Thanksgiving is oftentimes wrapped around the axle of particular personalities coming together and the social dynamics. Or for some people, it's the intensity of how much they care or despise certain ingredients that will be on the table. But to, to bring all of life, right, right.
Like the the past and all that we are to the table to bring honor to one another in a more global sense to to bring the the cloud of witnesses to the table with us as we're having Thanksgiving and as well to understand, like, why does it matter? How can I be excited about just eating food together or feasting? Those are things that I hope to bring into preparation for my Thanksgiving celebration as we kind of dwell and think about
these ideas. So those are my 2, my 2 pitches to you too, and to our listeners to think about your own fall traditions in the lens of redeeming the time and to start thinking about Thanksgiving. We spend a long time preparing ourselves for Christmas, and I feel like Thanksgiving happens and I give it about maybe a week's notice in my head. Well, Caroline, Brian, thank you guys so much for this
conversation. I'm really looking forward to the season, and I pray that God prepares our hearts as well as our minds to dive into these beautiful stories that we get to explore as we look at feasting and redeeming the time through not only our food, but also in the way that we honor the past. The Imagination Redeemed podcast is a production of the Anselm Society. It is easy to see this world as disenchanted and to give up hope that there's more.
But you were made to see the world with the eyes of heaven and to live a bountiful life that participates in the life of God. Like in the great stories, the Anselm Society is a place where you can come in and experience that beautiful, joyful celebration in ancient. Go out renewed, bringing that life to your location. Home enters. Join us next time as we pursue a renaissance for the Christian imagination together.