Faith and Values: A child’s admiration of a brown leaf is a reminder to admire the ordinary

In mid-October, my wife and I strolled around the rim of our Paradise Creek retirement community. It was a lovely fall day, with many leaves having turned shades of yellow, orange and red. We met a host of kindergartners on a nature walk. Each kid carried a clipboard with a checklist for recording their discoveries. I asked one boy what he had found. “A brown leaf,” he replied, beaming with pride and joy.

I’m not sure why, but of all the pronouncements on the wonders to be found in the world around us, this has moved me most. What a revelation for us – a brown leaf is worthy of admiration. It’s beautiful!

Perhaps any adult who has been presented with a bouquet of dandelions by a child has received the same revelation, felt the same call to admire what we tend to overlook, even disdain.

I too tend to love the extraordinary, overlook the ordinary. Shortly after encountering the boy with the brown leaf, my wife and I flew to my homeland, New England, where we viewed spectacular foliage, blazing around a dark blue Walden Pond.

But the boy with the brown leaf reminds us to see with fresh eyes all that we see daily, all that we may shuffle through, step upon, without a thought.

Since this brown leaf revelation, I’ve been bugging family members and friends to tell me what such a leaf signified for them. A nephew saw it as the lowest common denominator; a niece as something whose work was done.

With a brother and sister-in-law, I reminisced about raking up and jumping in piles of brown leaves, then setting them on fire. This conjured forth a scene from an old “Dick and Jane” in which the handyman Zeke shows the kids how to roast potatoes among the burning piles.

A friend connected brown leaves with grief, loss and death. I imagined an autumnal still-life painting with goldenrods, asters and brown leaves, the last taking the place of a skull as a memento mori.

An artist friend noted that when one mixes the Christmas colors of red and green, one gets brown. While we Christians like to decorate our homes with evergreens at Christmastime, perhaps brown leaves might better represent the fullness of the life of the one whose birth we honor.

Jesus and the ordinary

Jesus himself honored the ordinary. In parables he spoke of the miraculous potential of the kingdom of heaven to spread by referencing common leaven (Matthew 13:33) and the tiny mustard seed (Matthew 13:31-32). He called his faithful followers “the salt of the earth” (Matthew 5:13). And when he wanted to wean these followers from caring about what they wore, he asked them to “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like one of these” (Matthew 6:26 RSV).

When those close to him tried to keep children away, presumably because they thought little ones were not worthy of his attention, Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14 RSV).

Though they have no status in adult society, children have the kingdom of heaven since, as Jesus knows, they are fresh images of God on Earth in the here and now.

In the here and now of a mid-October day on a walk by Paradise Creek, a child with a brown leaf opened my eyes to the heaven falling on Earth all around us.

Walter Hesford was a professor of English at the University of Idaho, where he taught American Literature, World Literature and the Bible as Literature. He currently coordinates an interfaith discussion group, and is a member of the Latah County Human Rights Task Force and Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Moscow.