Belated Autumn
by Jane Curran

It’s been a belated autumn. Here we are making plans for Thanksgiving and we’re seeing colors we expected in mid-October. Still lots of leaves on the trees. Still lots of green not yet turned to red or gold. Still warm, rainy nights with grass growing. But it’s not September or October. It’s November and getting near to winter. It’s been a belated autumn.

Some seasons are like that, aren’t they? They don’t come on schedule (remember October with its green trees?) and they don’t stay on schedule (weeks of brilliant colors instead of that “peak weekend”). Some seasons arrive late and stay awhile. Some come and leave before we’ve drawn a breath. Seasons of the year and the seasons of our lives have a rhythm and a timing of their own. We participate in the timing, but we surely have no control of the tempo.

Remember when you believed that the seasons of our lives were predictable? We would grow up somehow, go to school, get married, have children, get better jobs, send our kids off to college or wherever their paths might lead them, and wait for the grandchildren to come home for Thanksgiving. There existed a cycle and season to all things, an order, that we could follow to keep things straight—and safe—and predictable.

And, of course, we’ve all learned in the hardest way how quickly this set of expectations can turn to dust. Sorrowful things burst into our lives and change these cycles and seasons forever. Sometimes it’s divorce. Or the death of a child. We might experience the loss of dedication to the work that was to change the world and right all wrongs. Someone too young is diagnosed with a life-threatening disease. Enormous, soul-wrenching events that are seasons out of order. Perhaps the seasons are premature. Perhaps belated. But the seasons somehow end up way out of order and way out of our expectations or control.

In creating our dreams and expectations for our lives, it’s so easy to forget the fragility of our humanity, our vulnerability to hurt and disaster. Just as the summer drought has created a belated autumn, events that we can neither control nor understand become seasons that aren’t what we anticipated. Then the tearing apart of our dreams of the happy marriage or family or vocation or financial security can make us feel cheated, bitter, or just plain miserably sad.
Life becomes an April without dogwoods or an October without golden leaves. And we are left gasping in the grief of seasons disrupted and hopes dissolved. How are we to live through these torn seasons?

Well, it’s November and everywhere lie great sweeps of beauty on the earth. It’s not the usual November beauty; it’s October beauty. It’s a belated autumn, but it’s beauty none the less. It’s beauty with a timing that has nothing to do with our expectations. It has only to do with the grace to receive what is offered and acknowledge the season—when it comes, as it comes.

For all the splintered expectations, for all the belated cycles and seasons, for all the grief in broken hearts—there is a rhythm felt, but mysterious to us, that does bring back the crocus and cycles around to flaming dogwood and a frozen earth at rest. What for us seems belated or premature may be the perfect time. We cannot know. We can only participate with as much kindness and hope as we can manage on any one day. And trust the rhythm beneath us all.

It’s been a belated autumn. It’s been a shining reminder of cycles and seasons that don’t match the calendar of our expectations. Belated autumn. November’s glory.
“For every thing there is a season, a time for everything under heaven.”

Jane Curran is a United Methodist minister and the chaplaincy supervisor at Carepartners/Mountain Area Hospice where she has served for thirteen years. Along with her chaplain’s responsibilities, Rev. Curran has worked extensively with ethical issues around end of life care. She also provides education in the Asheville/Buncombe County community on the emotional and spiritual aspects of end of life issues. Recently she has written a book for caregivers on the ongoing work of “being there” for others. Rev. Curran is also a certified spiritual director.