KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 28 October
Scattered leaves … that time of year
It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year … when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ upon those boughs which shake against the cold,/ bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73), the time of scattered leaves. More than an observation about the passing seasons of the natural world, the images are about ourselves in the passage of time. We behold in ourselves “that time of year”, seeing in ourselves “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west”, seeing in ourselves “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie.” The dying of nature’s year reminds us of human mortality but also about growing in maturity of understanding and love. Perceiving such changes in ourselves, the poet suggests, “makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
The sonnet sounds a sombre yet reflective note that befits the spiritual meditations belonging to the end of October and the beginning of November with the Feast of All Saints in the Christian understanding. Halloween is the Eve of All Hallows. The saints are the holy ones not by their own presumption but as seen by God. All Saints’ signals the vocation of our humanity. It reminds us of the corporate nature of our lives together in communion with God and with one another. Such is the Communion of Saints.
We are neither cosmic orphans adrift in an indifferent universe, nor isolated individuals separated and apart from one another, alone in our aloneness. We are citizens of an heavenly city, “a great multitude, which no one could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” united in the praise of God as Revelation envisions. This counters the loneliness and fearfulness that defines our current world.
Thus in the season of scattered leaves and in the culture of scattered souls, there is a gathering, a spiritual gathering. Dante, drawing upon the imagery of Vergil’s Aeneid, thinks about that gathering as the scattered leaves of ancient Sybil’s oracles being bound by love “into one volume”. Belit-Sheri’s “book of the dead” in Enkidu’s dream vision of the Sumerian underworld in The Epic of Gilgamesh has been transformed into the book of life inscribing the whole of our humanity. All Saints’ is a profound remembering of who we are and what we are called to be in the sight of God.
