Day: November 2, 2025

“Blessed are you”

The soft autumnal colours of October give way to the sombre grey of November. There is a meditative and contemplative quality to this 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,” as Shakespeare so memorably puts it.

His whole sonnet (#73) applies the imagery of the dying of nature’s year to human mortality, seeing in ourselves “that time of year,” “the twilight of such day as after sunset fadeth in the west,” and “the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth doth lie, as the death-bed whereon it must expire, consum’d with what which it was nourish’d by.” Though beautifully put, such observations are rather commonplace in the poetic, philosophic and biblical traditions. “Lord, what is man,” the Psalmist asks “that thou hast such respect unto him, or the son of man, that thou so regardest him?” and answers that “man is like a thing of nought: his time passeth away as a shadow” (Ps. 144, 3-4). There is no escaping the reality of human mortality.

The sonnet ends on a different note that suggests a deeper sensibility about the perceptions of mortality pointing to something greater. “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, to love that well which thou must leave ere long.” These poetic reflections “make [our] love more strong” and challenge us “to love that well which [we] must leave ere long.” That the world, ourselves, and others are to be loved well even in the face of mortality indicates that they are worthy of love. That can only be so, because they are known and loved in God’s eternal knowing and loving of all things. Things mortal are seen in relation to what is immortal.

This belongs to ancient wisdom and truth albeit in a number of registers. “There is no permanence,” the hero Gilgamesh is told on his quest for understanding in one of the oldest literary works of our humanity, The Epic of Gilgamesh, regarded by the German poet Rilke, shortly after its being discovered five thousand years later in the 19th century, as the great Epic of the Fear of Death; mortality, in other words. But there is a wonderful paradox. Gilgamesh is told this by Utnapishtim, a mortal who has been granted immortality (along with his wife) after the great flood by the arbitrary and capricious gods of ancient Sumeria. Utnapishtim is the precursor to Noah and the flood. But what kind of immortality are they granted? Not one in company or communion with others or even the gods but just the two of them in the Land of Dilmun, an imaginary place beyond the imaginary ends of the world. A kind of no place.

Shakespeare’s sonnet connects to the readings that belong to the great Feast of All Saints and its Octave. Yesterday was All Saints’ Day and today is both The Twentieth Sunday after Trinity and The Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, better known as All Souls’ Day (transferred to Monday). In the season of scattered leaves, themselves an apt image of the dying of nature’s year, and in the culture of scattered souls, another apt image of things passing and falling away, there is a gathering into something more. This is shown in the readings that belong to All Saints’.

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