Calvin News

In their new book, Autumn: A Spiritual Biography of the Season, Calvin College English professors Susan Felch and Gary Schmidt locate spirituality within autumn's whirl of activity. 
"There's a very big sense of being engaged in autumn," says Felch. "This is not a contemplative season. It's a very challenging season."
So, in the book's 40 essays, poems, prayers and hymns apples thump to the ground, gardeners pick their final summer bouquets and begin planting bulbs, children clamor aboard school buses, animals migrate, devouring combines run down the rows and survivors of 9/11 cope with its aftermath.
The second volume in a series, Autumn (Skylight Paths Publishing, 2004) explores the deeper meaning of the season through such devices as Anne Lamott's story of a community rallying around the family of a sick child, E.B. White's account of his wife's unorthodox gardening methods, Bart Giamatti's lament for the end of the baseball season and Robert Louis Stevenson's walk through a fall landscape.
"They all speak to one another," Felch says. "If the seasons are a gift from God, then there has to be a way in which they elicit from us responses to God."
To harvest a compelling collection of writings which reflect those responses, the two editors comb libraries, the internet and even their own memories.
Gardening is a recurring theme in Autumn and poetry is a major vehicle to explore it and other topics.
There are poems from the Harlem Renaissance, from Robert Frost, from Korea, from World War I and from a more recent tragedy. The book includes two poems from eyewitnesses to destruction of the World Trade Center.
"We knew with autumn that we'd have to do something with September 11," Felch says.
The book, illustrated by Caldecott Medal-winning Mary Azarian, also features pieces by lesser-known authors, including offerings from recently graduated Calvin English majors Tim Avery and Abram Van Engen and a poem by Calvin English professor Deb Rienstra.
Like its predecessor, Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season, the new book samples a wide range of cultures and faith traditions - from a Vietnamese boat song to African harvest prayers. 
Autumn also follows a spiritual cycle: Change, Endings, Work, Harvest and Thanksgiving. 
Each of these sections begins with a portion of the Book of Ruth, a love story (as translated from the Hebrew Bible) set against a background of harvest.
"There is a rhythm to it," Schmidt says, "even though we know people aren't going to read all the way through." 
Yet, he says, even read at random the book holds together.
Skylight Paths Publishing originally approached Schmidt about serving as editor of the series in 2002, and he recruited Felch to the project.
Winter, published in 2003, was the top-selling book at the Walden Bookstore at Walden Pond.
The editors are already at work on the summer edition of the series, due next year.