“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness…”
That’s the first line of John Keats’s ode To Autumn. And after last weekend’s autumnal chill and Tuesday’s Autumnal Equinox, we are officially in that season now.
That season of shorter days and longer nights, of treetops aflame with red and yellow and orange, of thick sweaters and mugs of hot apple cider, of squirrels busily burying food for the all-too-soon-arriving winter.
As Mary Oliver writes in her Fall Song,
“Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows…”
Autumn is a season of great beauty and I love it. God’s grace is made readily and gloriously available in the natural world and in those familiar rituals of my own remembered Midwestern falls past: apple-picking and football, bonfires and hayrides. It is absolutely my favorite time of year. I’ve heard from some of you that it’s yours as well.
But it is also a season of death, of loss. Of the natural world retreating into itself before the cold and ice shows up.
It’s been a season of death and loss for me personally as well. Last week I sat through a long night at the hospital bedside of my aunt before she died. So many of my memories of her are summer memories. I spent summers as a teenager at her house in the Catskills. And now there is the emptiness of grief where there was, only recently, her vibrant and hilarious presence.
We are all grieving this year – the loss of normalcy and closeness to one another, perhaps the loss of loved ones or jobs or businesses. We are grieving the deep racial wounds and political divisions in this country. And we are, perhaps, dreading even worse to come. Perhaps a second wave of the virus, perhaps more bitterness around the election, perhaps further economic pain.
In this season of loss and grief, it helps me, anyway, to remember to pause and look around for signs of God’s grace, of the Lord’s presence, even when it seems most absent. The beauties of fall are all too short lived. They last mere weeks before giving way to winter. So we must cherish and savor them. Like those memories of life before the pandemic. Like my memories of my aunt and those joyful summers together.
In pausing and experiencing grace around us now in beauty and goodness, in pausing and remembering grace in our past we ground ourselves in the faithfulness of our God who will never leave us. Our Lord who eagerly seeks to bless us at all times. Our Lord who offers us the hope of life amidst and beyond death.
I am reminded here – in this season of grief and at the beginning of fall – of Jesus’s teaching about the dying and growing seed. The fallen acorn of autumn, buried under the snow, that will become the new oak in spring.
Oliver writes,
“This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumnflares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shiftingfrom one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.”
Sincerely,
Father Adam Spencer
Associate for Pastoral Care
