By FATHER PAUL KEENAN
One of the amazing things about the end of summer is seeing how much shorter the days are becoming. More of our days are spent in darkness. There is no doubt about it: winter is near.
This can be challenging. We need a certain amount of light to guide us, to give us energy, to keep us from becoming sad and depressed. We wonder how people in certain parts of the world can live in almost total darkness for half the year. We realize the importance of light is for our everyday well-being.
Robert Frost wrote a poem about darkness in autumn. It is more or less a prayer to the month of October. In part it reads: “O hushed October morning mild,/Begin the hours of this day slow./Make the day seem to us less brief./Hearts not averse to being beguiled,/Beguile us in the way you know.” When I was a boy, my mother’s family, who lived about 40 miles from us, would come to visit every other Sunday, and on the alternate Sundays we would go to them. I loved those weekend visits and longed for the hours to stretch and never end.
It is thus with the light of October. It is like a welcome visitor whose presence we cherish and we grieve when it is time for our visit to end. We would do anything to extend the time so that the inevitable departure might never come. That is how Frost regards October’s light. He begs the trees to drop their leaves slowlyÑone at sunrise, one at noon, now from a tree near us, now from one far away. He prays that October will “retard the sun with gentle mist” so that its light may never fade. He begs the month, “Enchant the land with amethyst./Slow, slow!” It is in October that we come to understand just how precious a gift light is. In the spring, light grows each day. In summer, it abounds. In October, it slowly fades and we realize what we are losing. If only we had a light that would never leave us, would never fade! Of course, we do. As Christians, we know that there is a Light that, in the words of the Easter Vigil liturgy, “no darkness can extinguish.” The progressive waning of the light of day presents us with a gift—the gift of remembering the true Light that will never go out.
As we grieve the loss of sunlight in October, we remember that the Light of Christ never fades, no matter how dark things may seem to us.
If “in Christ there is no east or west” as the hymn says, then there is no sunrise or sunset, for there is no east or west in which to put them. There is only Light, pure eternal Light.
When our senses tell us that our joy is fading into an impending sea of darkness, we can remember that in Christ, Light conquers darkness and joy holds triumph over sadness.
Remembering this gives us great comfort and consolation in troubled times.
Robert Frost begs October to enchant. But in the fullest sense only the Light of Christ can enchant us. The word “enchant,” if you look up its roots, does mean “to cast a spell.” But I think a case can be made for saying it can also mean “to sing from within.” The “spell” of Christ, unlike a witch’s spell, is freely received by the one who is enchanted. It lifts us out of our ordinary world into the Kingdom of God. So enchanted, we “sing from within” much as David sang the Psalms and Mary sang the Magnificat. Our soul magnifies the Lord and our spirit rejoices in God our Savior.
So bring on October with its incremental darkness. We have a Source of Light that never fades.
