T. S. Eliot said, “April is the cruellest month,” but autumn is
the most poignant of seasons. Richard Peck’s lovely poem, “The
Geese,” captures this sentiment precisely:
My father was the first to hear
The passage of the geese each fall,
Passing above the house so near
He’d hear within his heart their call.
The leaves turn, gorgeous in their variety, color and tone. The
cold snap in the air is invigorating after a long summer at this
latitude, bringing with it the expectation of winter, gray,
without purifying snow, at least in Virginia.
Father suffers a stroke, and mother drifts into a distant mental
world. The household of one’s youth will be no more, scattered,
existing only in memory. Blessedly, my parents will still be with
us for a while longer.
A son-in-law, an Army surgeon, ships out to Iraq leaving behind
his wife, our daughter, and a rambunctious brood. Another awaits
orders next year for Afghanistan.
A dear friend observes the anniversary of a son’s death. And the
list of ailing or departed friends remembered in our prayers
grows longer each day.
And then at breakfast time he’d say:
“The geese were heading south last night,”
For he had lain awake till day,
Feeling his earthbound soul take flight
Our children, some well into adulthood, plunge into the life of
the mind in college and graduate school, move to a ranch in
Wyoming and a job in New York. Again, two daughters keep the home
fires burning at military bases down south. Grandchildren are
coming, quickly it seems, although most are far away, only one
close at hand.
My wife recovers from knee surgery reminding us both of our
mortality.
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise.
The house seems too quiet, unusual after three decades of near
chaos and energy reverberating throughout. My father, enduring
similarly anarchic circumstances in his household, used to say,
“The situation is hopeless, but not serious.”
Our old cat, a stray, adopted by our children nineteen years ago,
craves our affection, more than we can ever recall. Given the
many other warm hands and hearts which used to minister to her
needs, she is very demanding of the two of us. My wife swears
that the feline misses our dog, a brute five or six times her
size, for which she displayed nothing but haughty contempt after
he intruded on her domain many years ago. Yet, she seems
disoriented after his departure.
Knowing that winter’s wind comes soon
Alter the rushing of those wings,
Seeing them pass before the moon,
Recalling the lure of faroff things.
Career, politics, getting and spending — unhealthy
preoccupations for too many years — seems to recede further and
further, less and less a part of consciousness except for a few
jarring episodes and very few epiphanies. Faith, family, friends,
work and love — all these are now foremost in one’s thoughts.
Thinking back over the decades, the following passage from the
Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of
the Jesuits, seemed a very hard teaching back in the halcyon days
of prep school. Now it reads like self-evident truth, a consoling
one at that:
Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and
by this means to save his soul.
And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man
and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is
created.
From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help
him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as
they hinder him as to it.
For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all
created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free
will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want
not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty,
honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so
in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most
conducive for us to the end for which we are created.
It is hard to feign indifference to the loveliness of fall, but
the point is well taken that our lives, like the seasons,
inexorably change. But unlike the seasons, our lives seek a
destination, not just another return.
At the end of another beautiful, heart-rending autumn, Advent
begins, drawing us from time into eternity, which is a thing not
to be missed.
