As I sit in my study writing this letter I can see the trees
beginning to wear their autumn colours but with many of the leaves
already falling before they’ve really had time to change. For me autumn
is both a beautiful and a sad time. In the midst of the beauty things
are withering away and dying; winter is waiting in the wings. In
November you often start to get a sense that the coming winter means
business – gales, fog, cold and frost are all likely to be part of the
picture. And this autumn the situation seems even bleaker because we
are in a time of austerity with the announcements of the cutting back
of so much government spending. I fear for those facing redundancy,
unemployment, the withdrawal of vital benefits and welfare payments.
The debate as to whether the cutbacks are the right way to deal with
the debt situation rages on, but we must never forget that real
people and families are going to be affected – they are not just
statistics.
For me the worst aspect of November is the growing darkness and
particularly the dark evenings. Thankfully I don’t suffer from SAD (a
syndrome suffered by some folk caused by a lack of light) but I still
feel a bit like raging ‘against the dying of the light’ to quote Dylan
Thomas out of context! (see his poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good
night’). Thomas’ poem is actually about death. His father is dying and
he wants him to be angry at the coming end rather than to just accept
it:
Do not go gentle
into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And it’s perfectly understandable that we should be angry at the
prospect of death, even though deep down we know that it is a necessary
aspect of human existence, just as we know the dark nights of autumn
are as much a necessary part of nature as are the light evenings of
summer.
In November the Church might seem to share the autumnal gloom by
spending time considering death and the remembrance of those who have
died – All Souls’ Day and Remembrance Sunday come to mind in this
context. But this is far from the truth! November is the month of the
Kingdom Season which begins with the celebration of All Saints (the
triumph of Christians over death through Christ) and ends with the
triumphant keeping of the Feast of Christ the King in which His
Lordship over all creation and over all authority and power is
proclaimed. These are celebrations of Light which mean that we don’t
need to rage against death because it is the gateway to Life and Light
eternal, and we can put up with the darkness and bleakness of autumn
because soon we shall be celebrating the coming into our world of the
One in whom ‘was life and that life was the light of mankind. The light
shines in the darkness and the darkness has never mastered it’ (John
1:4-5).
