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PDF versionThe liturgical season of autumn
by Eugene Cullen Kennedy on Sep. 30, 2011
Liturgical seasons, such as Lent and Advent, are meant to open us less to articles of the creed and more to the essential character of religion, the experience of Mystery.
That's not the Hercule Poirot small letter mystery with everybody grouped as if for a family photograph as the Belgian detective neatly answers the questions about and explains a death in which everyone is a suspect.
Late autumn colors frame a statue of St. Benedict on the grounds of St. Gertrude's Monastery in Ridgely, Md. (CNS file photo by Don Blake)It is rather the capital letter Mystery in which we are on our ordinary rounds, as W.H. Auden observes about suffering's taking place "while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along," the Mystery for which there are no neat answers or explanations and in which everybody is a participant.
Autumn harvests the liturgical field of Ordinary Time, laying its sheaths before the candles of Advent that burn low as swiftly as the light of the year's last days do before Christmas. If there is a time for summing up, for reflecting on the Mystery in which we are all caught up, it is tawny autumn that is infused with hints of its Mystery and our own.
Perhaps that is because, despite New Year's Day and its ever hopeful resolutions, the year really begins in autumn when schools open again and everybody gets back to work after the interludes of summer. But, despite its yeasty symbolization of endings and fresh beginnings, autumn also mixes melancholy into its days and death into its mood much as April mixes "memory and desire" in Eliot's The Waste Land.
Autumn speaks to the poets who speak to us of its sacramental nature, not solving its Mystery as much as revealing its Mystery in us and to us. We are not surprised to learn that, as the Titanic listed toward its last plunge into the deep a hundred years ago next April, its musicians did not play Nearer My God to Thee, as is often reported, but rather a melody called Autumn.
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The Titanic is, of course, a sacramental Mystery whose scattered wreckage lies in the Deep, the waters that symbolize the mysterious and the ineffable that are, in fact, aspects of the ordinary time of each of our lives. The final faint music from the dying vessel evokes Paul Verlaine's "long sobs of the violin of autumn" that "pierced" his "heart" -- and ours -- "with monotonous languor."
How right is that word "monotonous" for that catches the plainchant of ordinary time when we don't seem to be doing anything but looking backward at moments and places we can no longer enter and looking forward to the events, like weddings, baptisms, and graduations that transform the rowboat of routine days into vessels of expectation and fulfillment.
Languor is a good word for it is the inlay of this season in which we feel more deeply than at any other period of the year just how profoundly human we all are. Autumn is our liturgical season and the musicians on the Titanic -- can't you hear them now? -- are playing for us. This season may go unnamed by the Church but it is celebrated by all of us.
[Eugene Cullen Kennedy is emeritus professor of psychology at Loyola University, Chicago.]
Thanks for your reflections
Thanks for your reflections on Autumn. It is like drinking fresh Florida orange juice. Magnificent! You walk nobly among the great poets.
May God be with you unto Eternity!
Dear Professor Kennedy, Your
Dear Professor Kennedy,
Your column on Autumn took me to the old calendar that was in effect before Vatican II. As I looked over the September-November months' saints days, I was struck by the number of them who had some connection with the church's concern with the parousia: St. Hildegard of Bingen (September 17); St. Ursula and Companions (October 21) and St. Malachy (November 4).
This does not include the Solemnity of Christ the King, which, originally was celebrated on the last Sunday of October; All Saints and All Souls.
Christian death is only a window that looks into our languor as a step toward the Mystery of endless life.
ORANGE is not a liturgical
ORANGE is not a liturgical color!
Well, given the state of our
Well, given the state of our nation at this juncture in history, we ARE riding the Titanic.
Eugene Cullen Kennedy is
Eugene Cullen Kennedy is vibrant, living proof of the awful error of John Paul II and Benedict in claiming that marriage prevents orders as a priest. They are historically wrong and they are sacramentally wrong. Yes, Kennedy has taught and he has written, but I cannot help but wonder what wider health he could have provided to the "Mystery" of being if he had spent all his time among us spreading the mysterious words of the mysterious Jesus even more fully than he has. "You are a priest forever..." no matter how mistakenly and narrowly some popes wish to autocratically limit that. "Ad multos annos," Eugene!
Good heavens, Gene, I never
Good heavens, Gene, I never really thought of you as a poet before but there is no doubt at all that a poet's heart lies in you, sir!
I believe it was John Donne
I believe it was John Donne who once wrote of Autumn, " But God has made no decree to distinguish the seasons of His mercies;
In Paradise , the fruits were ripe, the first minute, and in Heaven
it is always Autumn, His mercies are ever in their maturity."
A Christmas Homily (1624)
Beautiful! Thank you! No
Beautiful! Thank you!
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
~John Donne
Oh, dear, there is a lot of
Oh, dear, there is a lot of controversy about the music played on the deck of the Titanic Some remembered Autumn, but some also rememberedAughton, whose words begin "He leadeth me". Very apt, for all seasons.
It's surprising how
It's surprising how eurocentric (and american-centric) all this is. What of the many millions of us in the southern hemisphere who are just going into Spring? Not only have our own idiomatic languages been taken from us and a nonsense latinised version imposed, but we have no alternative than to celebrate according to a calendar based upon an outmoced paradigm. At times we feel that we live in a world that matters very little to the church.
Isn't it time that this form of prejudice was addressed?
Oh for goodness sake! You
Oh for goodness sake! You find this writing prejudicial??? Do you not have autumn where you live or some version of the season? When you consider it, the liturgical year - no matter when it begins and ends in real calendar time - continues to reflect, as it always has, the passing through one season after another, one year to the next. I see no way to have it adjusted to fit all other sones and hemispheres at the same time. My suggestion: let's deal with the issues of disrimination and oppresion where they really matter. It sounds like, from what you wrote, you have a good handle on those, as well.
Good statement about autumn,
Good statement about autumn, season of mixed feelings. Makes me want to sing "September Song."
Beautiful article
Beautiful article Eugene.
Here are two additional Autumn meditations:
Elizabeth Spires - "In Heaven It Is Always Autumn"
In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven's path no longer feel the weight of hears upon them.
Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down, the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that's said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds
pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we're here, I think it must be heaven.
In heaven it is always autumn;
His mercies are ever in their maturity:
We ask our daily bread,
And God never says:
You should have come yesterday,
He never says,
You must ask again tomorrow:
But today, if you will hear His voice,
Today he he will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light:
He can bring thy summer out of winter,
Tho' though have no spring.
Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience
Thou have been benighted til now,
Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed
Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now:
Now God comes to thee,
Not as in the dawning of the day,
Not as in the bud of the spring
But as the sun at noon,
As the sheaves in harvest.
- John Donne, 1624
I couldn't agree more with
I couldn't agree more with Eugene Kelly. He makes a cogent argument for why we should be returning to the Extraordinary Form.
The old calendar does indeed bring out the season variations in nature to be in harmony with seasonal variations of the liturgy. The calendar of the saints in particular.
A wonderful article.
what a joy it is to read the
what a joy it is to read the sort of prose that so many of us found enlivening earlier on from gene kennedy .
he has been cranky for a while . some friend might serve him well by inviting him and his spouse for drinks and a meal with some young priests . things are not so grim as he thinks . the new guys have their weirdness but so did many of us in gene's cohort.
but boy it is really good to know that gene's talent and appreciation of life remains . stolat
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