November's Autumn

Raymond Uribe

 

November begins with the liturgical celebrations of All Saints and the Commemoration of All the Faithful.  We remember the call of the Body of Christ to holiness, our place within the friendship of God, and our family and friends who have gone before us.  These days of prayer also set the stage for the end of the liturgical year which offers believers reminders of Christ’s second coming, the end times, and judgment before God.

 

Just a few weeks ago Southern California experienced the last remnants of summer heat.  The warm summer days are becoming a distant memory ushered away by the chill in the air and longer darker nights.  Creation, this time of the year, is a living meditation on death, a polaroid of the nearing end of life:  leaves that were once bright and green have shed their color for brownish-gray hues and fall from branches to create puddles of dead leaves at the bottom of trees.   November’s autumn casts its shadow over our hemisphere and nature begins to slumber while barren trees reach their limbs to scratch the cool darkening skies.  Twinkling lights, warm pumpkin-spiced or peppermint lattes, and holiday cheer bring solace on cold dark days. 

 

Many of us are uncomfortable thinking about the end of life.  We look for ways to keep death and reminders of it at bay.  Advances in medicine are helping us live longer than the people of just a couple generations ago.  The multi-billion-dollar beauty industry pushes concoctions and regimens to keep us looking youthful longer – lest we succumb to the effects of November in our lives. 

 

Regardless of age or health, as spiritually oriented people, we are each invited to take a cue from nature and contemplate the oneness of life and death.  Consider that Jesus on the cross was terrified of death, but he also had a profound trust that God was Love!  Jesus, in his dying, entered a new relationship with the entire universe.  God transformed the sting of death into the promise of infinite communion with the divine presence that permeates the whole universe.  “What eye has not seen, and ear not heard, and what has not entered the human heart, what God has prepared for those who love him!” (1 Corinthians 2:9)

 

The famous dancer, Isadora Duncan, met her untimely death on an autumn evening in 1927 in Nice, France.  Duncan stepped into a brand-new Amilcar wearing a long, flowing, red-silk scarf around her neck.  She flung it back as she waved to her crowd of friends saying, “Adieu, me amis! Je vais a’ la gloire!”  As the car departed with a great roar, the hand-painted scarf became entangled in the open-spoked wheel and axle, tightening around and snapping Isadora’s neck, killing her instantly.  Unknowingly, her farewell to her friends was prophetic: “Goodbye, my friends.  I go to glory!”

 

In contemplating death, our faith offers us reassurance that when our hour comes, we too "go to glory".  

 

I leave you with words from Teilhard de Chardin’s The Divine Milieu: 

 

     When the signs of age begin to mark my body

     (and still more when they touch my mind);

     when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off

     strikes from without or is born within me;

     when the painful moment comes in which I

     suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old;

     and above all at that last moment

     when I feel I am losing hold of myself

     and am absolutely passive within the hands

     of the great unknown forces that have formed me;

     in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I

     may understand that it is you

     who are painfully parting the fibers of my being

     in order to penetrate the very marrow of my substance

     and bear me away within yourself!