The earth is preparing for cold, shedding its layers to receive the winter wind with all the nakedness of real love. That always flabbergasts me—that the earth doesn’t cover itself for the cold, but bares itself, as though the winter is one long wedding night. The leaves are leaving, and with them, the light.
The autumnal candle will soon be extinguished by the frigid breath of winter, and I will watch as each smokey wisp rises, melting into the air, and I may even try to rush out and grasp them in my needy hands. Not yet! I wish I felt the building anticipation the earth does, the kindled, fiery glory of dying, the savoring of preparation for change. All I feel is the stark, unprotected nakedness of grief. A dear friend is suffering a loss that has left us wordless and utterly confused. We cannot understand it. Nor can we believe it. What is the good of childlike trust when it’s dashed over and over and over again? I do not know. The world is shivering. I can hear her moaning: when will my bridegroom come?
“And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God; and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.”
I remember the way the cross lingered on my forehead after my confirmation, the way I smelled the oil in whiffs when I turned a certain way, the way I was conscious of it all day, laying there on my forehead, marking me as my beloved’s, telling the world I did not belong to it, for someone else had claimed me. What Christ seals, stays sealed. Nothing in heaven or earth can break that seal. Not even: Why, O Lord? How long?
“And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple: and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.”
As November begins, we feel the thinness of the veil, we feel with us our loved ones in the faith who have died. In the sleepy autumnal light, we sense their presence next to us, their murmurings and beloved voices, we feel, as winter looms, the wispy transience of our own lives, like smoke from holy candles and leaves adrift. And could it be that we even feel the presence of the one on the throne, dwelling among us? November is a month of parting, and of longing, of remembering.
“Memory believes before knowing remembers” (Faulkner, Light in August). Memory whispers to us that our loved ones and indeed Christ himself are with us in this very room, before knowing can interject with its facts to tell us otherwise.
“Remembering is so basic and vital a part of staying alive that it takes on the strength of an instinct of survival, and acquires the power of an art. Remembering is done through the blood, it is a bequeathment, it takes account of what happens before a man is born as if he were there taking part. It is a physical absorption through the living body, it is a spiritual heritage. It is also a life’s work.” (Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story 171).
Do this in remembrance of me. A physical absorption through the living body, a spiritual heritage indeed. We take account of what happened 2,000 years ago on the cross before we were born. And this is the great mystery—in terms of the Eucharist, Welty only got it half right—Christ turns this “as though we were there taking part” into “we are there taking part.” Today, the living Christ offers his body and blood to us, and we take his life into our dying frames and are created anew. We are there taking part every Sunday. Sometimes I stop and wonder: what would we do without this, without his body and blood? And I don’t like to imagine it. For it is everything to me. And I long for it to be still more.
“For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”
Only a few short weeks after All Saints and All Souls days, the church starts preparing for the season of Advent. How beautiful it is that the remembrance of Allhallowtide, the thinning of the veil, and the longing for home be answered with “Even so come, Lord Jesus.”