It is a liminal time, an evocative time. And in this liminal time, the Church celebrates the feast of All Saints' Day. There was great theological and pastoral wisdom at work in determining that All Saints should fall at this time of the year, this liminal time.
In the words of Dover Beach:
Our pre-Christian forebears had it right: there is a wistful quality about autumn that makes us mindful of the passing of things, and that reminds us that there are relationships which are stronger and more enduring than death. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, in the Church, we are given hope by the example of the Saints who, beset by the same sins and infirmities as we are, were made righteous by God and now enjoy Him forever. The good news of the feast of All Saints is that, even when the daylight wanes and darkness seems to gather, we are bound as brothers and sisters to those who live where no shadow comes, and they aid us by their prayers and wait in joyful expectation for the fullness of time in which we all, by the mercy of God, may come where nothing passes, nothing wanes, and all is made whole in Heaven’s high summer.
This reflects a wisdom which permeates the Church's traditional calendar - a taking up of the passage of the seasons into Christ, in whom all things are gathered up. Now the passage of the seasons becomes sign, in which our experience of the changing seasons is caught up in the One in whom all things hold together. As And There Is Every Quest states:
Take for example the feasts of St. John the Baptist and St. Thomas the Apostle. It would have been very clear to people who lived in closer relation to the natural seasons that there was a reason why we celebrate the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist at the Summer Solstice and St. Thomas at the Winter Solstice – John announces at the time when our days begin to darken that he, “Must decrease so that He may increase,” until we find ourselves on the darkest day of the year when St. Thomas is turned from the darkness of doubt and we begin our journey back towards light.
With modern calendars having moved the Feast of St. Thomas to July the subtle beauty and distinction is lost.
In the absence a of liturgical calendar which gathers up the experience and emotions of the passing seasons into the Church's story, the Church conforms to the disenchanted, monochrome understanding of time that is a characteristic of secularism, a denial of liminal time. However, secularism fails when it seeks to convince even a secular age that time cannot be liminal, cannot be enchanted. And so we have Hallowe'en widely celebrated with enthusiasm, with customs which speak of a 'thin' time, in the days of late Autumn, on the vigil of All Saints.
The experience of late Autumn, the darkness that falls in early evening, the approach of year's end, brings us to seek the assurance of light and life, not least as our hearts and souls remember, as they feel communion with those who gone before us. As we enter into the dark time of the year, as the year wanes, we need All Hallows, the feast that draws our darkening Autumn days into the hope and foretaste of Light resplendent.
Thank you for this thoughtful post. I agree with essentially everything you wrote, but was struck by the fact that much of it only is relevant to those who live in the temperature and subpolar regions of the Northern Hemisphere. Having lived in England for nine years, I do get the wonderful congruence of the Christian year with the rhythms and seasons in such a place. However, having moved back to my home country of Malaysia less than a year ago, I am at a loss as to how the traditional church calendars relate to my equatorial liturgical existence, given that the four seasons do not exist here. I expect a different dilemma is faced by Christians in the Southern Hemisphere, when for instance Easter falls at the start of autumn rather than spring. What is a Christian who is keen to observe the church calendar but lives where I am to do?
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for your comment. You are, of course, entirely right - I am writing from a northern European context. I think, however, that this is an important point. I can only write from within this context in which I live and seek to minister. In the southern hemisphere a different experience and reading of the Church's liturgical calendar is necessary. Ratzinger wonderfully addresses this point in this 'The Spirit of the Liturgy'. For example, reflecting on Easter falling in the southern hemisphere's autumn, he says: "The autumn of declining time becomes a new beginning". What this might exactly mean for equatorial liturgical existence, I am not sure - other than the created order in each context seems to reflect the saving purposes of God. Brian.
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