Fr La’s weekly ‘Pause and Ponder’ from along the Pilgrim Path at Lough Derg. This week’s reflection, ‘Harvest in Spring’.
Harvest and Spring – how rare they come together!
Yet this year it is so. On the forest slopes
above the Pilgrim Path they are harvesting timber,
the men and their great machines. At the end of the week,
when they have been and gone, I come to walk
and pray the Path below. How puny my pilgrim steps
below these stacks awaiting the transporter.
What hope that my poor prayers might move big burdens?
In one fresh-cut stump I count the rings of patient growth
And I make it thirty-five – just half my age!
Some rings are broad, I see, and some are narrow.
The image replays in my mind as on I walk.
Which among my years, I wonder,
have been those when the growth was good?
Fr La Flynn, Prior
26 April 2021