HARVEST IS IN full swing now. It’s our family winery’s 33rd and I’m glad to report that it’s still exciting.
For winemakers, it is really the beginning of the new year, and it is a time of miracles. How could the ancients not think that grapes turning into wine seemingly all on their own was anything but a miracle of the gods?
Louis Pasture discovered otherwise in the 1850s, but the fermented transformation still seems like a miracle to me. Grapes turning into new wine, with a little skilled help from the winemakers, perfume the winery now and sometimes the neighborhood when we open the rollup doors.
I think my patron saint, Hildegard von Bingen, would agree that something about the winemaking process is truly miraculous.
Hildegard was a German mystic of the 12th century known for, among many other things, her inspired understanding of something she called “viriditas,” the greening flame of the Creator’s power that energizes growth and change in all living things.
There is no better example to me of the Creator’s ability to make something incredible from something so far removed from its simple origin as grapes getting transformed into wine.
I could go on and on about this miracle process, but for now, I will leave you with a poetic muse I wrote. I call it Autumnal Birth and it goes like this:
Autumnal Birth
Spring’s planting into warm moist earth,
the fertile seed trenched in womb-like soil
there to grow and sprout in the power of
greening Viriditas.
Longer summer days
enveloped prenatal fruit of vine, tree, and flower
and nurtured the making of the Mystery of ripeness and true birth.
Greening grew into Autumnal golding and purpling, reddening and umbering,
saplings hardened,
leanness fattened,
thinness plumped,
sourness sweetened.
Birth emerged not as seed sprouted but as fruit ripened!
My heart, dear Lord,
a ripe fruit in making.
Nurture it in your greening power
and pluck it in your time
to make it into wine through the yeasty power of your resurrection.
AMEN
One of my favorite verses in the New Testament is Ephesians 3:20. Part of the verse goes like this: “Now to him who by the power at work within us to accomplish abundantly more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory … forever and ever.”
Is this a time for you, too, to become a transformed version of yourself? It’s a miracle just waiting to happen.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an Ordained Deacon in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He is also the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.
