Chris McDonnell: Dividing the Seasons

We have nearly reached the month of October, living our way through the Season that the Americans call The Fall, for obvious reasons.

Taking a cup of coffee the other morning, at the back end of September, I wrote these few lines.

Until

Day start

Week-end

Autumn

Leaves fall

damp ground

rain

Shortening days

lengthening nights

wind

Until stripped trees,

bend their bared

thin fingers

before Winter storms,

beckoning

another year-end dream.

There is something emotive about the ‘back-end’, as farmers often describe the days from late August through to late September. The days of warmth, sunshine and clear, blue skies seem long gone. It is the time for the outdoor coat, as the wind and rain of Autumn become more prevalent. It is a seasonal change that is often used as model for our own life change, as we move from one stage to another.

No-where has this been more graphically used than in the words of John Henry Newman, taken from his Letters and Diaries

“…… after a most glorious Summer, there was a week of pouring rain, and then it was fine again and the sky as radiant as the week before.

 But the season had changed, the ground had become thoroughly chilled, and never recovered itself. Autumn had unequivocally set in,

and the week of wet divided the two seasons, as by a river. And so I think I have now passed into my Autumn”

So we use the metaphor of seasonal change for our own inevitable aging, our transition from childhood, through the teenage years, the time of marriage and the arrival of our own children, reaching forward to our old age and a gentler pace of living. None of the boundaries are absolute, none clearly defined by a date. We make our journey with a blurring of ages and a change of circumstance, sometimes smoothly and cared for, at other times with difficulty and frustration. But pass through them we must.

As we approach November and a time of memory, the words of Lawrence Binyon will again be quoted.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

With age comes the recollection of memories, the thinking back to where we have been, friendships, the tears and laughter we have experienced. For some however that is not possible, their loss of memory has deprived them of recall and they live in the present, needing our care, concern and love.

It is sometimes hard for younger people to appreciate passing years; having no immediate understanding of their parents’ social experience, they depend on the stories we tell them to get somewhere near the reality of bygone years. The world before modern technology to them seems empty and unreal. When my own son Luke was six years old, he enquired of me one Sunday at mass if “they had candles in ancient times when you were young”.

We live where we are, passing our days in the society our parents helped create and which we, in our own way, now shape and form. It is a one way street, with a clear white arrow painted on the ground indicating a forward direction.

The adage “if I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here” is quite useless. However much we feel uncomfortable with our lot, there is no going back. We might learn from experience, and hopefully we do, but the direction is firmly determined.

Reflecting on our Christian life within the Church, it is as it is. Those who have walked their pilgrim path before us did so to the best of their ability, in times and social conditions very different to our own. There is no doubt that they, like us, struggled to be Christ-like in times of change, often taking the consequences for the courage of their actions. We are no different. We cannot time-travel to find the imagined comfort of what used to be.