September feels like a turning point. I’ve never really lost that sense of it being a time of moving to the next stage of things, the new school year a regular reminder of moving on as a child, a student, a teacher and then a parent. Even without these, the season itself tells us of moving on as summer gives way to autumn, and harvest stores set us up for the times ahead.

The end of September sees the Autumn Equinox, the poised moment (it seems) in the tipping of the balance from light to darkness. Back in March, the Spring Equinox gave this blog cause to reflect on Time and its markers. Now, the Autumn Equinox puts us in mind of the passing between times, the movement through the stages of life.

On the night of this Equinox, I caught a glimpse of the moon – really huge, bright, and almost full. Going outside for a better sight of the beauty of this, and taking time to stand still to gaze (what a lovely thing to ‘moongaze’, a kind of contemplation), I noticed that the silver-white disc seemed to be moving upwards and slightly diagonally, through a clear sky towards the clouds. I had seen sunrise and sunset before, but never the moon like this – alone with this moon as it moved visibly, majestic, gentle, trustworthy.

As well as the sheer thrill and delight of it, it got me thinking. Two things, mainly.

One that there are times in life when the moves we make seem huge and we are very aware of change – just as I could see the movement of the moon. And yet those moves – which sometimes seem abrupt, like an end and a beginning – are part of a connected whole, perhaps the very flow of life, just as the moon is always moving, whether we can see that or not. Change is happening always – ‘To live is to change,’ said John Henry Newman, ‘and to change often is to become perfect.’

The other thing is that things are being held together. I was aware that what I was seeing was the moon’s orbit – or, more poetically, the moon encircling the earth, where I stood. The earth, where I stood, was being somehow wrapped, encircled, held. It was different from sunrise and sunset, which show the earth’s movement; rather, this was a circle being woven around us. ‘I was held together,’ as Malcolm Guite says in his new collection of responses to the Psalms, which we just read for RHC Book Club. And medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen:

O mighty course that runs within and through

the all—up in the heights, upon the earth,

and in the every depth—

you bind and gather all together.

In this moment of moongazing, this time of contemplation, the consolation of the moon and the stars ran deep.

Illustration by Elizabeth Wang, T-00039-OL, ‘When we pray in the name of Christ our prayer can enfold the whole world’, copyright © Radiant Light, www.radiantlight.org.uk

So on this night of Equinox, and in its meditation on movement and being held, I was aware of the tipping of balance, the changes of life. It used to mean new school uniform in September, a whole year bigger; now, many years later and in the second half of life (and Richard Rohr in ‘Falling Upwards’ introduced me to this sense of the two halves), I can see from experience how change weaves its way throughout life and its stages, connected and holding us together.

Maybe we can say it’s not just stages of life, but stages of spiritual life, too. A favourite image of the spiritual life comes to mind. Teresa of Avila, in sixteenth-century Spain, described the soul as an Interior Castle, a crystal ‘palace’ within us, and God (and Light) at the centre, and this centre surrounded by layers of rooms (or more beautifully ‘chambers’, ‘mansions’, or ‘dwelling places’) where the light is refracted more brightly the closer we come to the centre. One of the things I love about this image is how time and again she writes about us hovering on the threshold between rooms. Like Equinox, a time of poise, and then the balance tips… Teresa’s castle suggests that we are invited to be on the move, and that this is not linear or evenly paced.

Staying with the Mystics (as Teresa was), one word I’ve learnt afresh this year is ‘ecstasy’. I’ve learnt that apparently it means ‘movement’. Here’s Henri Nouwen: ‘‘To be ecstatic’ literally means to be outside of a static place. Thus, those who live ecstatic lives are always moving away from rigidly fixed situations and exploring new, unmapped dimensions of reality...’ In our May Retreat on Thin Places, those times and places when heaven and earth almost seem to touch, we touched on how the ecstasy that Christian mysticism speaks of might be about movement into the limitlessness of God. With God, who is without limits, there is always more to discover, further to go. An invitation to fullness of life.

And now we must move on. We take our RHC blessing with us, which we weave through all we do. From an inscription above the door of Chester’s old retreat house, it’s about movement across thresholds. Not just the threshold of a house, but the thresholds of life and our world. It speaks of life, its changes, and it is for us all. Go well.