A prayer at summer's end

Why, Lord, must the good days come to an end?
Why are memories not enough?
Why is the fall-filtered beauty of light and leaves
not enough today
to help me let go summer’s warmth
and pace and peace?

Of seasons there are four, they say,
but yet a hundred seasons more
just in my one life alone, Lord:
seasons of presence, seasons of pain;
seasons of sadness, seasons of gain;
seasons of sunlight, seasons of rain;
seasons of comfort, seasons of strain;
seasons of planting, seasons of grain;
seasons of waiting and waiting for seasons
to break the seasons’ chain…

So many seasons, Lord…

And letting go of summer is not easy…

I should be grateful for autumn:
your gentle preparation
of everyone and everything
for the dying winter will surely bring…

Still, letting go of summer is not easy…

You know the seasons better than I, Lord,
and no season changes
’round me or in me
but that you first know
how those changes
will change me…

Be with me, Lord,
in all the seasons of my life
and be with me in between the seasons,
when moving from one to the next
is itself a season to bear…

— Fr. Austin Fleming, A Concord Pastor

Read the entire prayer.